Much like the twentieth-century poets David Jones and T. S. Eliot@ — the former a Catholic and the latter an Anglican@ — Cather uses her art to convey the themes of preserving the religious traditions of the past in order to restore order to the present and thereby ensure the future. In his verse play Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot wrote:
Those who put their faith in worldly order
Not controlled by the order of God,
In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder
Make it fast, breed fatal disease,
Degrade what they exalt.
This, in short, encapsulates the major themes of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Note that the cardinals in Rome select Latour specifically for his talent to order:
Our Spanish fathers made good martyrs, but the French Jesuits accomplish more. They are the great organizers. . . . Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange! The French missionaries have a sense of proportion and rational adjustment. They are always trying to discover the logical relation of things. It is a passion with them.
It is these ordering capabilities that Latour brings with him to New Mexico; a territory that is untamed and consists of several different cultures. His first responsibility is to restore the precepts of the Catholic Church to a diocese that has backslid into such disorderly conduct as corrupt and promiscuous priests and such neglected Catholic sacraments as baptism, confirmation, and marriage. The situation is explained in the Prologue: "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 keeps the forms of religion without instruction."
