When I was young like most boys of my age cowboy films were my favourite films, and I cannot tell how many were acted out on the trail to Santa Fe. You can imagine my excitement when many years later I found myself in Santa Fe City. I was a little disappointed that no cowboys drove a herd of cattle down the main street, no horses were hitched to posts outside the local bar, and no shoot-out occurred during my stay. It was the same as any old modern city except for its historic name.
Detecting my disappointment my hosts took me to see the Loretto Chapel, which stands at the end of the Santa Fe Trail. The Loretto Sisters arrived only six years after New Mexico became part of the United States. They built a school but dreamt of building a church patterned after Louis 1X’s Saint Chapelle in their native Paris. It was, and is, a beautiful Gothic building but inexplicably there was no staircase to the organ loft and no one could build one without ruining the lovely Church building. According to the story the Nuns prayed to St. Joseph for help and on the last day of the novena, a stranger, a carpenter he said, arrived and offered to build a staircase. He worked alone and in a short space of time had built a circular stair, without support of any kind and without nail or screw. When the work was finished the carpenter disappeared.
It quickly became known as the Miraculous Staircase and some thought it was St. Joseph himself who built it. Certainly there are some extraordinary things about the staircase. As already said, it was not clear how it could stand by itself without a central support. Originally no one could identify the wood used to construct it. The identity of the carpenter was a great puzzle and he was never heard of again. Maybe even more astonishing, he left without receiving any payment.
My hosts were surprised that I was less impressed by the ‘miraculous staircase’ and more taken with the story of the seven Sisters of Loretto who in 1852 travelled by covered wagon through bad weather and Indian country, an arduous trip through St. Louis, and then up the river to Independence, Mo. They were beset by a cholera epidemic. The Mother Superior died. Even when they arrived they had to contend with smallpox, tuberculosis and leaky roofs. But these valiant women brought Christ to the children of the 6000 Catholics of Mexican, Indian and Spanish descent in their school. And my cowboys would have taken their hats off to them.
John Looby, SJ. Editor