Summary
Father Latour goes to Taos, the largest and richest parish in his diocese after Albuquerque. Taos is ruled in both spiritual and mundane terms by the priest, Antonio José Martinez, who not only commands the respect of the natives but also owns a great deal of land. Martinez introduces Father Latour to his student, Trinidad Lucero, the son of his friend, Father Lucero. During their conversations, Martinez rebuffs Father Latour's suggestions to reform the parish, telling the latter that he would not be successful in imposing a foreign, European Catholicism upon the people, and that the faith of his parish is far stronger than that of the Europeans.
Later, Father Latour brings a Spanish priest, Father Taladrid, to take Father Martinez's place at Taos. Martinez at first agrees to only celebrate some Masses, but, as a result of not getting along with Taladrid, he ends up forming a schismatic church of his own. However, he dies from an illness, and then Father Lucero, too, succumbs to an illness. A great miser, he has accumulated a substantial amount of money.
Analysis
Father Latour's encounter with the unconventional Padre Martinez represents the conflict between two dominant kinds of Christianity in New Mexico (by "Christianity" is assumed Catholicism, since there are far fewer Protestants there than there are to the east): the European Catholicism that remains in close connection with the Catholic Church in Rome, and a native Mexican or Indian Catholicism derived from a synthesis of early Spanish colonial Catholicism and local religions. Rather than just having Father Latour and Padre Martinez espouse the different religious positions, Cather makes each represent his respective religious ideology in his own person: Padre Martinez, with his charismatic personality and libertine disregard of limits to propriety and power, is at once a paradigm and thus (according to himself) most suitable leader for the much more earthly and passionate Mexicans.
A not insubstantial amount of the chapter is dedicated to allowing Padre Martinez to expound his religious views, while Father Latour, in a somewhat impotent frustration (though also with a certain sympathy), listens:
And you know nothing about Indians or Mexicans. If you try to introduce European civilization here and change our old ways, to interfere with the secret dances of the Indians, let us say, or abolish the bloody rites of the Penitentes, I foretell an early death for you. I advise you to study our native traditions before you begin your reforms. You are among barbarous people, my Frenchman, between two savage races. The dark things forbidden by your Church are a part of Indian religion. You cannot introduce French fashions here (148).
That said, Father Latour does not really need to give a direct reply to the Padre, since he already judges from the beginning that the tide of history will prove his case against the nativist priest: "Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure was to him already like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past" (141).
