Summary
In the year 1848, four Catholic priests meet for dinner at a villa in Rome to discuss the appointment of a vicar for the new diocese of New Mexico. The Provincial Council at Baltimore had made an appeal for this appointment not long after the New Mexico territory was annexed by the United States following the Mexican-American War. Bishop Ferrand, whose diocese is in the area of the Great Lakes, acts as a representative of the Provincial Council to recommend for the position Jean Marie Latour, a young priest from Auvergne serving as a parish priest in his diocese. The cardinals approve the request and express their hopes for Latour and the new apostolic vicariate.
Analysis
The first line of the novel unambiguously establishes the historical context of this very historical novel: the summer of 1848 follows right after the end of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). This falls in the middle of "the Lombard war" (i.e. the First Italian War of Independence, 1848-1849), the topic of which is tactfully avoided by the churchmen. Both of these wars would transform the political geography of their respective hemispheres and change certain longstanding balances of power; after this prologue, though, we only hear of European affairs occasionally, since the story focuses in specifically on the hotbed of historical and social change in the New Mexico territory. Thus, the opening scene of the prologue serves to give the widest perspective on the world-historical moment through the convenient meeting of the bishop and cardinals, who are, in their various capacities related to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith ("the Propaganda"), necessarily cosmopolitan.
One of the most important themes of the novel is the relation between the Catholicism that Father Latour is trying to establish in New Mexico and the old Catholicism, originally established by Spanish missionaries and intermixed with native Mexican and Native American religions. Father Ferrand sums up the situation that faces the Church:
This country was evangelized in fifteen hundred, by the Franciscan Fathers. It has been allowed to drift for nearly three hundred years and is not yet dead. It still pitifully calls itself a Catholic country, and tries to keep the forms of religion without instruction. The old mission churches are in ruins. The few priests are without guidance or discipline. They are lax in religious observance, and some of them live in open concubinage. If this Augean stable is not cleansed, now that the territory has been taken over by a progressive government, it will prejudice the interests of the Church in the whole of North America (5).
The Catholic Church sees itself engaged in a worldwide struggle for the propagation and discipline of its faith; in contrast to Protestant Churches, which especially in America were less centralized and fervent about proselytization, the Catholic Church regards it as highly important that all Catholic parishes and dioceses keep to a program approved by Rome.
