• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It turned out that the Loretto Chapel had been decommissioned – it’s now a business that charges an entrance fee. But anyone can still get married there, if they hire a priest, which seems kind of odd to me. Anyway, it’s a very pretty place, built in the 1870s in the Gothic revival style for an order of nuns called the Sisters of Loretto. At the top of the church is a choir loft, a very nice and large one. But when the building was finished and the nuns looked up at the loft, they noticed a quite serious problem with it: there was no staircase, so they had no way to get up there. Apparently, the architect had died suddenly when drafting the blueprint for the building, and then the builders hadn’t noticed that the staircase was missing from the plans.

Faced with a bit of a dilemma, the nuns prayed day and night for nine days. On the tenth day, a guy showed up at the chapel. Riding a donkey, he had long hair and a beard, and he offered to do the job for them. In what seemed a ridiculously short amount of time – just three months – he built a spiral staircase that led up to the choir loft. He then promptly disappeared before anyone could determine his identity or even pay him for his work. Mysterious, eh?

The staircase is certainly very beautiful. I had a close look and couldn’t see a single nail mark or any trace of glue. And I found it difficult even to find any joints (that is, the carpentry kind of joint: I don’t want to suggest that the carpenter was smoking dope while he was making the staircase). Apparently it’s all held together with dowels, but it’s still a remarkable feat of construction. Unlike most spiral staircases, it has no central support and it isn’t attached to a wall. That said, the owners of the church very rarely let anyone use it, so I had to wonder if it was as strong and stable as it looked.

The Catholic Church eventually declared that the creation of this staircase was a miracle, purely because some people reckoned the bearded guy was St Joseph. It was also claimed that he used only a small number of primitive tools, such as a square, a saw and some warm water – although how anyone knew that when he supposedly worked entirely alone and behind closed doors might be a miracle in itself. It’s also alleged that the staircase is constructed entirely from non-native wood, yet no one saw any lumber delivered during the three months that the carpenter was in the chapel. These mysteries had kept 250,000 pilgrims a year guessing, and the entrance-fee dollars pouring into the tills. The church was so geared up for tourists it was almost silly.

As with many ‘miracles’, there are rational explanations for several of the staircase’s apparent mysteries. For instance, experts have pointed out that plenty of other spiral staircases don’t have a central support; and anyway, the Loretto Chapel’s staircase seems to have a concealed support that acts like a central pole. Also, its double-helix shape, like a DNA molecule, will lend it some strength – although this design probably makes it bounce like a giant spring, which might explain why the owners don’t let people walk up and down it.

Even supposing that the legend is true and St Joseph did build the spiral staircase, I still have one big unanswered question: how did the builders construct the choir loft? It’s a big, high platform, so how did they build it without a staircase to get up there? Did they hang upside down from the roof? That’s what I wanted to know.

Seeing the crowds inside the church made me think that some people seem to be desperate for miracles. They really long for them to be true. Personally, I like Thomas Jefferson’s attitude that miracles spoil religion because they are obviously tosh and go against nature. Jefferson even went to the trouble of writing an alternative Bible with no miracles or other supernatural events in it.

I left Santa Fe and headed even further away from Route 66, northwest into the mountains, through a landscape that looked like it had been built by