Loretto Chapel and the Miraculous Staircase

The Story

The Sisters of Loretto came to Santa Fe in 1852 to open a girls' school. Twenty years later they commissioned a chapel of their own, and Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy sent them the French builders Antoine and Projectus Mouly, who modeled it loosely on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Built of local sandstone on a narrow lot, with stained glass ordered from workshops in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, the chapel was completed in 1878.

The choir loft sits about twenty feet above the nave, and the chapel was finished without a stair to reach it. What was eventually built is a helix of thirty-three steps making two full turns, assembled with wooden pegs rather than nails, resting on its own stringers rather than a central pole. Visitors have been struck by it for nearly 150 years. The devotional tradition, told by the sisters themselves, is that they made a nine-day novena to St. Joseph, that an unknown gray-bearded carpenter arrived with a donkey and a few simple tools, worked quietly for months, and left without pay or a name.

That story is beloved, but it is a tradition rather than an established fact. The historian Mary Jean Straw Cook proposed that the builder was Francois-Jean Rochas, a French-born carpenter whose 1895 obituary in the Santa Fe New Mexican credited him with building the Loretto staircase and who appears in the sisters' ledgers. Structural engineers have explained the design as an inner stringer acting as a slender wooden column -- unusual craftsmanship rather than an impossibility. A claim that the wood matches no known species of spruce circulates widely but has never been independently confirmed.

Today a visitor walks into a quiet, jewel-box interior, sees the staircase roped off at its base, and reads the story on the panels around it.

Church Recognition

The Catholic Church has never investigated or declared the Loretto staircase a miracle. There is no diocesan inquiry, no decree from the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and no Vatican judgment attached to it. What exists is a devotional tradition preserved by the Sisters of Loretto and popularized in the twentieth century by books, magazine articles, and a 1998 television film. Catholics are free to find the story moving; no one is asked to believe it as a matter of faith.

The chapel's standing is also often misunderstood. Loretto Academy closed in 1968, the property was sold, and the chapel was deconsecrated. It is no longer a Catholic church. It is privately owned and operated as a museum and wedding venue beside the Inn and Spa at Loretto. Mass is not celebrated there as a parish church, the Blessed Sacrament is not reserved there, and admission is charged. Come expecting a historic building and a good story, not an active shrine.

Catholic Teaching

Loretto is a useful place to think about how the Church treats claims of the miraculous. Catholic teaching holds that God can and does act in the world, and it insists on careful investigation before anything is called a miracle -- precisely because devotion built on an unproven claim is fragile. The Church honors St. Joseph as the just man, the foster father of Jesus, patron of workers and of the universal Church, and a powerful intercessor, and none of that depends on whether he personally cut these stair treads. If the staircase was made by a skilled immigrant carpenter who answered a need and moved on, that is itself a picture of the hidden, patient labor the Church praises in St. Joseph.

Go Deeper

Mary Jean Straw Cook, Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel, is the standard documentary account and the source of the Rochas attribution.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, an active Catholic church and the seat of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, is a block away and worth pairing with a visit here. El Santuario de Chimayo, one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the United States, is about thirty miles north.