In addition, she is willing to see this educated product of the white world of Europe and the East Coast from the point of view of someone from a group of people often dismissed by that world as not worthy of attention. Jacinto thought this remarkable.Ĭather exhibits a keen sense of human nature here. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. There were many kinds of false faces…The Bishop had none at all. In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop’s way of meeting people: thought he had the right tone with Padre Gallegos, the right tone with Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians.
Here’s how she described the Bishop from the point of view of one of his Mexican-American guides: We can still believe today in the good of heart, can’t we?Ĭather did. Flawed, like all of us are, but good at heart. I’m sure there have been such priests in the history of the mission fields, but I’m also certain that a lot more of those who went out to share their faith with people who knew little or nothing of Jesus were like Latour and Vaillant.Ĭather presents them as strong, committed men, willing to put up with great hardships in doing what they saw as God’s work.
Missionaries are generally depicted in books and movies today as aggressive, vindictive, dictatorial and stone-hearted.
It’s been 90 years since Willa Cather published Death Comes for the Archbishop, and what’s particularly striking about the novel is how it seems to exist outside the fashions and prejudices of a particular era and, yet, tells a universal story about human beings and the earth on which they live.Īt the center of the novel are two French Jesuits - Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend Father Joseph Vaillant - two celibate men who, in the mid-19 th century, devote their lives to bring religious faith and comfort to Mexican-Americans in the newly acquired U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
