Loretto Chapel
Encyclopedia
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is the fourth-largest city in the state and is the seat of . Santa Fe had a population of 67,947 in the 2010 census...
, New Mexico
New Mexico
New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...
, USA is a former Roman Catholic church that is now used as a museum and wedding chapel
Chapel
A chapel is a building used by Christians as a place of fellowship and worship. It may be part of a larger structure or complex, such as a church, college, hospital, palace, prison or funeral home, located on board a military or commercial ship, or it may be an entirely free-standing building,...
. It is known for its unusual helix
Helix
A helix is a type of smooth space curve, i.e. a curve in three-dimensional space. It has the property that the tangent line at any point makes a constant angle with a fixed line called the axis. Examples of helixes are coil springs and the handrails of spiral staircases. A "filled-in" helix – for...
shaped spiral staircase (the "Miraculous Stair"), that may have been created by French carpenter Francois-Jean "Frenchy" Rochas, although the Sisters of Loretto credit St. Joseph with its construction.
It has been the subject of legend and rumor, and the circumstances surrounding its construction
Construction
In the fields of architecture and civil engineering, construction is a process that consists of the building or assembling of infrastructure. Far from being a single activity, large scale construction is a feat of human multitasking...
and its builder are considered miraculous
Miracle
A miracle often denotes an event attributed to divine intervention. Alternatively, it may be an event attributed to a miracle worker, saint, or religious leader. A miracle is sometimes thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature. Others suggest that a god may work with the laws...
by the Sisters of Loretto
Sisters of Loretto
Sisters of Loretto or the Loretto Community is a Catholic religious institution, which, according to their mission statement, "strive[s] to bring the healing Spirit of God into our world" and is committed "to improving the conditions of those who suffer from injustice, oppression, and deprivation...
and many visitors. The story was the subject of the 1998 movie The Staircase
The Staircase (1998 film)
The Staircase is a 1998 television film about the story of the spiral staircase, believed by some to be miraculously built, at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The film stars Barbara Hershey as Mother Madalyn in charge of the Chapel and William Petersen as Joad, the traveling carpenter...
, starring Barbara Hershey
Barbara Hershey
Barbara Hershey , also known as Barbara Seagull, is an American actress. In a career spanning nearly 50 years, she has played a variety of roles on television and in cinema, in several genres including westerns and comedies...
and William Petersen
William Petersen
William Louis Petersen is an American actor and producer, best known for playing Dr. Gilbert "Gil" Grissom on the hit CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He portrayed President John F...
.
History of the staircase construction
In 1872 Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the BishopBishop
A bishop is an ordained or consecrated member of the Christian clergy who is generally entrusted with a position of authority and oversight. Within the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the Assyrian Church of the East, in the Independent Catholic Churches, and in the...
of the Santa Fe Archdiocese
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe is an ecclesiastical territory or diocese of the southwestern region of the United States in the state of New Mexico. While the motherchurch, the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, is in the City of Santa Fe, its administrative center is in...
, commissioned the building of a convent
Convent
A convent is either a community of priests, religious brothers, religious sisters, or nuns, or the building used by the community, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Anglican Communion...
chapel to be named Our Lady of Light Chapel, which would be in the care of the Sisters of Loretto
Sisters of Loretto
Sisters of Loretto or the Loretto Community is a Catholic religious institution, which, according to their mission statement, "strive[s] to bring the healing Spirit of God into our world" and is committed "to improving the conditions of those who suffer from injustice, oppression, and deprivation...
. The chapel was designed by French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
Antoine Mouly in the Gothic Revival
Gothic Revival architecture
The Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the 1740s in England...
style, complete with spire
Spire
A spire is a tapering conical or pyramidal structure on the top of a building, particularly a church tower. Etymologically, the word is derived from the Old English word spir, meaning a sprout, shoot, or stalk of grass....
s, buttress
Buttress
A buttress is an architectural structure built against or projecting from a wall which serves to support or reinforce the wall...
es, and stained glass
Stained glass
The term stained glass can refer to coloured glass as a material or to works produced from it. Throughout its thousand-year history, the term has been applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings...
windows imported from France. Although it was built on a much smaller scale, the chapel bears an obvious resemblance to the Sainte-Chapelle
Sainte-Chapelle
La Sainte-Chapelle is the only surviving building of the Capetian royal palace on the Île de la Cité in the heart of Paris, France. It was commissioned by King Louis IX of France to house his collection of Passion Relics, including the Crown of Thorns - one of the most important relics in medieval...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
The architect died suddenly and it was only after much of the chapel was constructed that the builders realized it was lacking any type of stairway to the choir loft. Due to the chapel's small size, a standard staircase would have been too large. Historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
s have also noted that earlier churches of the period had ladders rather than stairs to the choir loft, but the Sisters obviously did not feel comfortable with that prospect because of the long habits
Religious habit
A religious habit is a distinctive set of garments worn by members of a religious order. Traditionally some plain garb recognisable as a religious habit has also been worn by those leading the religious eremitic and anachoritic life, although in their case without conformity to a particular uniform...
that they wore.
The Sisters of St. Loretto relate the story as follows:
Needing a way to get up to the choir loft the nuns prayedPrayerPrayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional rapport to a deity through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of...
for St. Joseph's intercession for nine straight days. On the day after their novenaNovenaIn the Catholic Church, a novena is a devotion consisting of a prayer repeated on nine successive days, asking to obtain special graces. The prayers may come from prayer books, or consist of the recitation of the Rosary , or of short prayers through the day...
ended a shabby looking stranger appeared at their door. He told the nuns he would build them a staircase but that he needed total privacy and locked himself in the chapel for three months. He used a small number of primitive tools including a square, a saw and some warm water and constructed a spiral staircase entirely of non-native woodWoodWood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
. The identity of the carpenterCarpenterA carpenter is a skilled craftsperson who works with timber to construct, install and maintain buildings, furniture, and other objects. The work, known as carpentry, may involve manual labor and work outdoors....
is not known for as soon as the staircase was finally finished he was gone. Many witnesses, upon seeing the staircase, feel it was constructed by St. Joseph himself, as a miraculous occurrence.
The resulting staircase is an impressive work of carpentryCarpentryA carpenter is a skilled craftsperson who works with timber to construct, install and maintain buildings, furniture, and other objects. The work, known as carpentry, may involve manual labor and work outdoors....
. It ascends twenty feet, making two complete revolutions up to the choir loft without the use of nails or apparent center support. It has been surmised that the central spiral of the staircase is narrow enough to serve as a central beam. Nonetheless there was no attachment unto any wall or pole in the original stairway, although in 1887 -- 10 years after it was built -- a railing was added and the outer spiral was fastened to an adjacent pillar. Instead of metal nails, the staircase was constructed using dowels or wooden pegs.
The legend claims that the mystery had never been satisfactorily solved as to who the carpenter was or where he got his lumber
Lumber
Lumber or timber is wood in any of its stages from felling through readiness for use as structural material for construction, or wood pulp for paper production....
, and that there were no reports of anyone seeing lumber delivered or even seeing the man come and go while the construction was being done. Since he left before the Mother Superior
Abbess
An abbess is the female superior, or mother superior, of a community of nuns, often an abbey....
could pay him, the Sisters of Loretto offered a reward for the identity of the man, but it was never claimed.
Explanations for the mystery
The subject of rumor and legend for over a hundred years, the riddle of the carpenter's identity was claimed to have been solved in the late 1990s by Mary Jean Straw Cook, author of Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel (2002: Museum of New Mexico Press). The author claims the builder's name was Francois-Jean "Frenchy" Rochas, an expert woodworker who emigrated from France and arrived in Santa Fe around the time the staircase was built, and who may have known or at least met another French contractor who worked on the Chapel. However, at only 43 years of age, Rochas met with a violent death in December 1894. Unidentified attackers had shot him and left him to die alone in his small cottage and he was found dead in 1895. Cook found an 1895 death notice in The New Mexican which named Rochas as the builder of "the handsome staircase in the Loretto chapel". But since no sources were cited for this information, it remains unverified.Johann Hadwiger, a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
woodworker
Wood carving
Wood carving is a form of working wood by means of a cutting tool in one hand or a chisel by two hands or with one hand on a chisel and one hand on a mallet, resulting in a wooden figure or figurine, or in the sculptural ornamentation of a wooden object...
, was once credited with the design and construction of the stairs. The source of this claim, Johann's grandson Oscar Hadwiger, later admitted he had no proof.
Some more recent studies are critical of the supposed "miraculous" nature of the staircase. It has been claimed to be unsafe since its helix shape may make it oscillate just like a very large spring. As to its apparent ability to stand without a newel
Newel
A newel, also called a central pole, is an upright post that supports the handrail of a stair banister. In stairs having straight flights it is the principal post at the foot of the staircase, but it can also be used for the intermediate posts on landings and at the top of a staircase...
(central pole) support, this argument proceeds on a faulty premise that all spiral staircases need a central support. In fact, they do not, and lateral or outer supports can be effectively substituted for a central support. However, this staircase appears to have a concealed central support, an inner wood stringer of a very small radius that, because of its small size, functions effectively as a central pole. This technique is well known. The staircase also has an additional outer support to one of the columns that support the loft. This support was added later. The staircase may be made of spruce, but insufficient sampling makes it impossible to conclusively affirm (or deny) the source of this wood.
Unsolved Mysteries
The case was investigated and subsequently re-enacted in the Unsolved MysteriesUnsolved Mysteries
Unsolved Mysteries is an American television program, hosted by Robert Stack, from 1987 until 2002, and later by Dennis Farina, starting in 2008...
episode "The Staircase".
The legend says that St-Joseph himself made it.
Loretto Academy
Loretto Chapel was used on a daily basis by the female students of Loretto Academy as well as by its nuns until the Academy and Chapel closed as Catholic institutions. Born in Santa Fe in 1917 (1917–2005), Mary Frances Hill (néeNEE
NEE is a political protest group whose goal was to provide an alternative for voters who are unhappy with all political parties at hand in Belgium, where voting is compulsory.The NEE party was founded in 2005 in Antwerp...
Julian) attended the Loretto Academy from 1920 until 1935 and is considered to have attended the Academy longer than any other student and as having climbed the miraculous staircase more times than anyone else as a result of having been a member of the Academy's choir. In 1968, after the Academy closed, the all-male St. Michael's High School
St. Michael's High School
St. Michael's High School is a private Catholic junior/senior high school located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the state capital of New Mexico. It is privately run under the auspices of the international Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, better known as the De La Salle Christian...
turned co-ed to accommodate the Academy's female students.
The chapel today
The Loretto Chapel is now a museum and no longer functions as a church, but weddingWedding
A wedding is the ceremony in which two people are united in marriage or a similar institution. Wedding traditions and customs vary greatly between cultures, ethnic groups, religions, countries, and social classes...
s may be arranged, including a highlight of the couple being photographed while standing on the spiral staircase. There is an entrance fee for the chapel. It is owned by a private company.
External links
- Loretto Chapel home page
- Loretto Chapel Staircase; Investigative Files, Skeptical InquirerSkeptical InquirerThe Skeptical Inquirer is a bimonthly American magazine published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry with the subtitle: The magazine for science and reason....
November 1998 - Snopes.com article explaining the construction of the staircase
- Unusual color image of the staircase
- Augusta Chronicle Article