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The Loretto Chapel is a former Roman Catholic church in historic downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s now used as a wedding chapel and museum.
Visiting
The chapel is open daily except Christmas Day from 9:30am to 4:30pm. It may, however, close during normal business hours when weddings are scheduled. Adult admission is US$5 (as of May 2024).
History
The Loretto Chapel was commissioned in 1873 by the Sisters of Loretto for the Loretto Academy, a Catholic girls’ school. It was built by French architect Projectus Mouly (d. 1879) and consecrated in 1878. The design was based on Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The spires, buttresses, and stained glass windows were imported to Santa Fe from France.
The students and nuns of the Loretto Academy used the chapel daily until the school closed in 1968. The rest of the academy’s buildings were demolished, and the chapel was converted to a privately owned museum and wedding venue.
Miraculous Staircase
The most famous feature of the Loretto Chapel is the “miraculous spiral staircase”. It rises 20 feet to the choir loft without the support of a central pole. It was built mostly of wood and is held together by wooden pegs and glue rather than nails or other fasteners. The staircase was most likely built in 1881 and has 33 steps, representing each year of Jesus’ life.
Legend Behind the Staircase
According to legend, even after the church was complete, the Sisters of Loretto had no access to the choir loft. With the unexpected death of the architect, they had to find a solution on their own. Several carpenters were consulted, but none were able to find a solution due to the confined work area.
The nuns prayed to St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters, for nine straight days. On the ninth day, a stranger appeared and offered to build the staircase. He worked alone using simple tools and disappeared before the nuns could pay him or learn his identity.
The nuns were impressed by the craftsmanship of the staircase and began to attribute the work as a miracle, and that the carpenter must have been St. Joseph himself. Depending on the version of the story, it took just one night or between six to eight months to build it.
Because descending the staircase was frightening, handrails were added in 1887 by another carpenter, Phillip August Hesch. They have been mostly closed to the public since the chapel became a private museum.
Identity of the Builder
The builder of the staircase was most likely François-Jean Rochas (1843-1895), a French rancher and carpenter who arrived in New Mexico in the 1870s. His name appeared in a logbook stating that the Sisters of Loretto had paid him US$150 for wood in 1881. Also, the Santa Fe New Mexican wrote an article on his death by murder in 1895:
“He was a Frenchman, and was favorably known in Santa Fe as an expert worker in wood. He build [sic] the handsome stair-case in the Loretto chapel and at St. Vincent sanitarium.”
