Bishop Jean Marie Latour

Character Analysis

The Thoughtful One

Father Latour might sometimes come across as a little shy, but he's no dweeby wallflower: he's a thoughtful fellow. For example, he's more than willing to give credit to other cultures and peoples, even if they don't follow the ways of the Catholic Church. When discussing a silver church bell with Father Vaillant, he's quick to remind Vaillant:

"The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors." (1.4.11)

Vaillant doesn't like to think that anything in his beautiful bell could be connected to African "infidels," but Latour's intellect makes him more open-minded about other cultures.

On top of his open-mindedness, Father Latour is an honest man. One of the first people to recognize this is his guide, Jacinto. In Jacinto's experience, most white men are two-faced and dishonest when dealing with Mexicans or Native Americans. But when he sees Latour talk to people, he realizes:

"There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant's, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The Bishop put on none at all." (3.2.28)

Father Latour is never trying to trick anyone or to play a certain role in a certain situation. He's always himself, no matter who he's talking to.

The Tower

Father Latour is from France, and in French, "La Tour" means "The Tower." This is actually a pretty good description of Father Latour's personality, especially when it's compared to Father Vaillant's. Father Joseph Vaillant is an energetic, working-in-the-trenches kind of priest. Latour, as the narrator tells us, is "much cooler and more critical in temper; hard to please, and often a little grey in mood" (7.3.19).

So if you picture father Vaillant running around and trying to bring people into Catholicism, Latour is the dude who stands up in his high castle tower and supervises the work of people like Vaillant. He's also not quite as happy.

But this doesn't mean that Latour is a bad guy. Many of the people in New Mexico love and respect him, and he's also smart enough to see the difference between himself and Vaillant. As he tells Vaillant at one point, "You have been a great harvester of souls, without pride and without shame—and I am always a little cold—un pedant, as you used to say" (8.3.36). "Un pedant," in this case, means that Father Latour is really intellectual and book-smart, while Father Vaillant has what it takes to get right up in people's faces and get them thinking about God. In the end, both of them serve their purpose.

The Legacy

Father Latour is a humble priest, but he often wonders what the world will remember about him after he dies. It's toward the end of the book especially that he starts thinking about the fact that he'll one day die. As the narrator tells us:

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. (9.3.6)

In other words, Latour always feels young when he first wakes up. But once he gets out of bed and feels his creaky joints, he realizes that someday, death will come for him.

Realizing his own mortality always gets Latour thinking about what legacy he'll leave as the first Archbishop of New Mexico. Eventually, he decides that the best thing to do is to build the first Roman-style cathedral in the entire state:

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. (6.1.1).

The second part of this quote tells us that Latour specifically wants to build this church so that some part of himself will carry on after he's dead. So yes, the man is modest and good, but he still has that tinge of pride that even the best of us tend to have somewhere deep inside us.