Death Comes for the Archbishop as a Catholic Novel

The Cliff’s Notes website has a nice little article on the subject of (Protestant) Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop as a very very Catholic novel. Here’s the introductory paragraph:

By depicting the mysteries of the Catholic faith as well as the everyday evidence of divine order and the order imposed by the hierarchical presence of the Catholic Church in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather seems to be advocating for Catholicism. Although she admitted that she “felt that the story of the Catholic Church in [the Southwest] was the most interesting of all its stories,” Cather also wrote, “Any story of the Church in the Southwest was certainly the business of some Catholic writer, and not mine at all.” She nevertheless created the definitive fictional narrative of the role of the Catholic Church in the American Southwest.