Perhaps more notable, however, is the miracle of religious faith in a land far-removed from the European culture of the Vatican and awash in prejudice, hardship, and cruelty. In Book Seven, Vaillant's unwavering faith and devotion to Mary is measured against Latour's brush with despair@ — in essence, the questioning of the very existence of God according to Catholic doctrine. The devotion to Mary in May conjures the rebirth of world in springtime. By contrast, Latour undergoes his moment of doubt in the winter month of December, when most natural life either dies, migrates or hibernates. As December is also the month in which the birth of Christ is celebrated, it is also the month in which Latour's faith is reborn upon meeting Sada, the old Mexican woman who maintains her religious faith against the brutality and irreverence of the Protestant family that enslaved her for nineteen years. Sada's devotion inspires Latour as a sign of God's mercy and presence in the everyday.
A lifelong Protestant, Cather joined the Episcopal Church in 1922. Critics and biographers have conjectured that she did not join the Catholic Church for reasons that may have been related to her Protestant upbringing, or because she was unable to reconcile what some scholars surmise was Cather's lesbian orientation with Catholic dogma expressly forbidding homosexual acts. Regardless of her own personal religious choices, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a quietly powerful document of the power of religious faith, when practiced properly, to transform lives, to civilize culture, and to serve as a reconciling agent between the physical and metaphysical realms.
