Summary
Bishop Latour recalls Father Vaillant to Santa Fe to show him a hill he wants to use to build his cathedral. He tells him that he plans to have the church built in the Romanesque style of their native France, and that he will bring over a French architect and builders to accomplish the task.
Later, he receives a letter from the Bishop of Leavenworth (in Kansas) that brings news of the gold rush in Colorado and asks him to send a priest to tend to the spiritual lives of the many people in the gold rush camps who live without proper moral guidance. The Bishop naturally recommends this mission to Father Vaillant, though he is sorely sad to see his friend depart for what he realizes will be a permanent trip away. The two have a carriage built for the travels, and then Father Vaillant leaves Santa Fe, saying "Auspice, Maria" ("Under the protection of Mary"). He occasionally returns to raise money or to recover from injury -- a fall leaves him lame in one leg -- but always must leave again.
Analysis
This penultimate chapter prepares for the ending -- the death of Bishop Latour -- by both establishing the construction of his church and loosening his years-long bond with Father Vaillant, whose enterprising and generous personality takes him on his most difficult and meaningful missionary journey: to Colorado.
Bishop Latour's interest in the stone of a "strong golden ochre" (241) color and his insistence on French architecture for his cathedral stand as the symbol for a final synthesis of his own native French sense and the familiarity he has accumulated over his twenty-plus years as Bishop of New Mexico, his last work as a bishop that is also meant to crown his own life:
I should like to complete it before I die — if God so wills. I wish to leave nothing to chance, or to the mercy of American builders. I had rather keep the old adobe church we have now than help to build one of those horrible structures they are putting up in the Ohio cities. I want a plain church, but I want a good one. I shall certainly never lift my hand to build a clumsy affair of red brick, like an English coach-house. Our own Midi Romanesque is the right style for this country (243).
In a sense, Bishop Latour has so become a part of the country whose desert environment he had found so bewildering and seemingly incomprehensible on his first journey west that he is able to make the judgment for his cathedral from within his own person, as opposed to consulting people from his diocese to draw from their opinions. One could imagine that Padre Martinez, were he to be in a position and have the interest to build a cathedral, would do so in a very different style and with a very different relationship to his flock.
