It still pitifully calls itself a Catholic country, and tries to keep the forms of religion without instruction. It has been allowed to drift for nearly three hundred years and is not yet dead.

This country was evangelized in fifteen hundred, by the Franciscan Fathers. Father Ferrand sums up the situation that faces the Church: One of the most important themes of the novel is the relation between the Catholicism that Father Latour is trying to establish in New Mexico and the old Catholicism, originally established by Spanish missionaries and intermixed with native Mexican and Native American religions. Thus, the opening scene of the prologue serves to give the widest perspective on the world-historical moment through the convenient meeting of the bishop and cardinals, who are, in their various capacities related to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith ('the Propaganda'), necessarily cosmopolitan. Both of these wars would transform the political geography of their respective hemispheres and change certain longstanding balances of power after this prologue, though, we only hear of European affairs occasionally, since the story focuses in specifically on the hotbed of historical and social change in the New Mexico territory. the First Italian War of Independence, 1848-1849), the topic of which is tactfully avoided by the churchmen. This falls in the middle of 'the Lombard war' (i.e. The first line of the novel unambiguously establishes the historical context of this very historical novel: the summer of 1848 follows right after the end of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

The cardinals approve the request and express their hopes for Latour and the new apostolic vicariate. Bishop Ferrand, whose diocese is in the area of the Great Lakes, acts as a representative of the Provincial Council to recommend for the position Jean Marie Latour, a young priest from Auvergne serving as a parish priest in his diocese. The Provincial Council at Baltimore had made an appeal for this appointment not long after the New Mexico territory was annexed by the United States following the Mexican-American War. In the year 1848, four Catholic priests meet for dinner at a villa in Rome to discuss the appointment of a vicar for the new diocese of New Mexico.

Death comes to the archbishop review