Summary
Father Latour's dreams of building a cathedral in Santa Fe for his diocese find their greatest supporter in Don Antonio Olivares, a rich and generous Mexican, and his wife, Doña Isabella. They celebrate a wonderful New Year's Day dinner, but not long after that, Don Olivares dies.
After the funeral, the money that Olivares has bequeathed to his wife, his daughter, and the church becomes jeopardized by Olivares' brothers, who raise a suit claiming that Doña Isabella is too young to really be her daughter's mother. Since Doña Isabella is notoriously unwilling to admit her age, it seems that Bishop Latour may lose his funds; however, he manages to convince her to say that she is fifty-two in court, which secures the money.
Analysis
The idea of the construction of a cathedral for Santa Fe represents the hoped-for capstone of Father Latour's efforts in his New Mexico diocese: it would be the decisive integration of his parish into the larger Catholic world, as well as the synthesis of his home of France (through its native Romanesque architectural style) with the New Mexican landscape (the particular kind of stone he finds):
Bishop Latour had one very keen worldly ambition; to build in Santa Fe a cathedral which would be worthy of a setting naturally beautiful. As he cherished this wish and meditated upon it, he came to feel that such a building might be a continuation of himself and his purpose, a physical body full of his aspirations after he had passed from the scene. Early in his administration he began setting aside something from his meagre resources for a cathedral fund (175).
This ambition for the concrete establishment of an extension of the Bishop's self into the outer world of his diocese arguably represents the first appearance of his death: it marks his transition from a living individual preoccupied with personal problems to an exemplary figure of a narrative that more properly belongs to the religious community he has fostered.
It is fitting, then, that the end of the chapter deals with the safeguarding of an inheritance (which, by the way, echoes the death and inheritance of Father Lucero in the previous chapter). However, as opposed to staging some melodramatic confrontation, Cather uses the rather humorous device of Doña Isabella's prideful insistence on not admitting her true age and the priests' attempts to dissuade her from this position to approach the larger issue of inheritance and the support of the people for their church -- especially for such a symbolically important issue as the construction of a cathedral.
