(#8) The Perplexing Staircase
An architecturally magnificent staircase was built in the late 19th century. Many insist it was St. Joseph himself who constructed it.
"It's a magnificent work of art that humbles me as a master carpenter. To create a staircase like this using modern tools would be a feat. It's mind-boggling to think about constructing such a marvel with crude hand tools, no electricity and minimal resources." - Tim Carter
The staircase at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Via lorettochapel.com.
One of my favorite aspects of church architecture is the choir loft. While most modern churches have abandoned its use, some that were built prior to the 1970s still feature their choirs singing aloft, projecting their voices from above the narthex all the way to the sanctuary.
Admittedly, I’ve always wanted to walk up the choir loft stairs to get a glimpse of that bird’s eye view of the church. When I was in college, our chapel had an expansive loft, and on occasion, if I was in there alone, I would impishly try to get up there. To my dismay, the loft doors were always locked. The world ain’t too kind to us church explorers.
I can’t help but wince on the inside when I think about how choir lofts have fallen into obscurity and disuse. The acoustics of a floating choir singing under a vaulted ceiling are nothing short of glorious. Once you have such a unique musical experience, there’s no going back.
I see why church architects took great care in ensuring optimized sound in their buildings. This was no different for Projectus Mouly, the French architect brought all the way to New Mexico to build the Loretto Chapel in 1873.
The construction of the chapel proceeded in an ordinary fashion…until the end.
The strange thing is no one really knows how the staircase to the choir loft got there. It wasn’t designed by Projectus. Neither was it built by his crew.
All we know is that an anonymous man who refused to take any payment built it, then promptly vanished.
However, this isn’t the only weird aspect of the staircase. Exactly how such an architectural wonder was built by a single man without any modern tools remains a mystery to this day.
This is the story of the miraculous staircase of the Loretto Chapel. Who built it? What is so special about it? Why do some insist that St. Joseph himself constructed it? That is what we’ll be exploring in this week’s newsletter.
“Drake, where’s the [staircase]?”
In 1850, in the immediate years following the Mexican-American War and its geographical consequences, American Catholic bishops called for missionaries to evangelize the newly acquired territory of the United States.
Archbishop Jean-Baptise Lamy of Lempdes, France was one such missionary sent to the United States. He eventually found himself in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he led the local Church. Seeing the need to give the local faithful an education, Archbishop Lamy called for the construction of a school for girls and requested that the Sisters of Loretto serve as its teachers.
The Loretto Academy was thus born, and in 1873, the sisters commissioned the construction of the Loretto Chapel to allow for religious services on campus. Projectus Mouly, one of the architects brought from France to build the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe, served as the project’s lead architect.
The Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Via Wikipedia.
The chapel took five years to build and was officially consecrated in 1878. It was designed in the Gothic Revival fashion and was based on the Parisian Sainte-Chappelle. However, this doesn’t mean construction was over at that point. One of the tasks that hadn’t been completed was the installation of a staircase or ladder to the choir loft. Apparently, this had not been planned in advance, for when Projectus died suddenly in 1879, his crew was left with no direction on how to proceed.
And this is where things get interesting.
While installing a ladder would have been the most straightforward option (and a common solution for the day), the sisters objected and wanted a staircase instead. According to the sisters, different builders were consulted on how they would install a staircase in such confined space without taking up too much real estate in the chapel’s nave. Apparently, no one had an answer. Because of the height of the loft, any staircase would have had to take up a ton of room and become somewhat of an eyesore for those inside.
Unless they relented on their request for a staircase rather than a ladder, the sisters would need a miracle.
Ask and It Will Be Given to You
In need of a complex solution to an equally complex problem, the sisters turned to prayer. They prayed a novena — a nine-day devotion — to St. Joseph, who himself was a carpenter when he walked the earth. According to the sisters, on the final day of the novena, a man approached them and offered to construct a staircase to the choir loft.
Naturally, the sisters were relieved but perhaps a bit skeptical. They accepted his offer but were met with an unusual reaction. Rather than negotiate for pay or discuss how he would proceed, the man simply requested that be allowed to work in complete solitude. He never revealed his identity and didn’t ask for compensation.
Variations of the story exist, as is to be expected with any kind of oral tradition. Some claim that the man only needed one night to build the staircase, but the consensus seems to be that the task took several months to finish. Regardless, the man worked diligently with crude tools and no help to create an astonishing work of art that has modern carpenters scratching their heads.
After the staircase was completed, the mystery carpenter vanished, never to return again. No one learned his name or where he came from. Eager to find out who built their staircase, the sisters visited several local lumber suppliers to inquire of the identity of anyone who had procured wood for a project at the Loretto Chapel. None of the suppliers had any record of such purchases.
At a loss as to who helped them, the sisters began to wonder if St. Joseph himself had personally built their choir loft staircase.
Perhaps their speculations seem fantastical. However, when we consider the engineering of the staircase and the fact that it was built by one person with crude tools, they don’t sound too far-fetched.
A Wonder of the Modern World
The Loretto Chapel staircase is a sight to behold, both for its visual appeal and its architectural sophistication. The staircase makes two 360 degree turns on its helical trip up to the 22-foot-high choir loft. Despite its lack of a central support column, the staircase is stable. The tightness of its spiral makes up for the omitted support pole.
Originally, the staircase stood on its own and did not have any handrails. In later years, a metal support bracket was attached to a nearby column and handrails were included by a different carpenter. Go back to the picture of the staircase that I included at the top of this newsletter and imagine what it would look like without those rails. Isn’t that something?
Furthermore, the staircase was constructed without any nails or glue. Wooden pegs were used to fasten the structure together, although this was a common practice for the time period.
While this is impressive on its own, it becomes even more so when we consider that, as far as we know, the anonymous carpenter designed and built the staircase on his own. And all this was done without the help of modern power tools and computer modeling!
While the engineering and physics of the staircase itself may not be all that mysterious, the circumstances surrounding its construction most certainly are. As I have stated in previous newsletters, I do not think that oral traditions are simply made up. Every single one reflects some semblance of reality.
That being said, I don’t see any reason for the Sisters of Loretto to start an elaborate hoax about the construction of their academy’s chapel. It was meant to be neither a tourist site nor a for-profit destination. There was no financial incentive in hoaxing. I believe the core of the sisters’ story, that an anonymous man built their magnificent staircase with minimal resources and no pay.
However, was it just some man living in the area that built the staircase? Or could it really have been St. Joseph? Let’s find out.
Was It Just an Enthusiastic Hobbyist?
The main details we have to keep in mind about this explanation are that of the anonymity of the carpenter and the fact that he did not accept any pay. Both of these taken together reveal that this must have been a man of means who could spare the time and resources to build a complex staircase for the nuns.
I don’t know too much about life in late 1800s Santa Fe, but I don’t think that the side hustle gig economy was a thing. You had your primary occupation and you either had enough to get by or you didn’t. For anyone to have a well-developed skill in something outside their field of work means that they had enough money to buy all the free time it took to learn that skill. Think a landowner or someone else who could more easily collect the 1800s version of what we call “passive income” today.
While the Sisters of Loretto claim to have never discovered the identity of the mystery carpenter, one researcher insists that she has done so after many years of investigating.
Amateur historian Mary Jean Cook theorizes that a rancher named Francois-Jean Rochas was the builder responsible for the staircase. She points to two pieces of evidence to back up her claim. One is an 1895 article from the Santa Fe New Mexican that describes Rochas’ death by murder:
"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." — Santa Fe New Mexican.
Cook also notes that the Sisters of Loretto’s logbook indicates that they paid one Francois Rochas the equivalent of $4,412 for “wood” in 1881. It’s a rather nonspecific entry and doesn’t tell us much, but when compared to the article in the Santa Fe New Mexican, it starts to make more sense.
What we know from two primary sources is that a newspaper described Francois Rochas as having built the staircase and that he had done some type of carpentry work for the sisters or at least sold them some wood. While these are compelling pieces of evidence, I still have some hesitations about identifying Rochas as the builder of the staircase.
It’s worth noting that Rochas could have done some type of work on the staircase after it was completed. I’m not saying he was never involved with it. What I am saying is that there are some discrepancies between Cook’s assertion and the account passed down by the sisters.
If the sisters knew the name of the builder after having recorded it in their logbook, then why make up the tale about not knowing his identity? What is the discernible point in doing that? Again, while the Loretto Chapel has become a tourist attraction in the present, it wasn’t intended to be one at first. Beautiful church architecture was standard fare in those days, and all the sisters wanted was a chapel for their school, not a major shrine to attract pilgrims. Like I said earlier, money was not a motivation here, especially for nuns living out Gospel poverty.
Could the newspaper have been wrong about Rochas’ involvement with the staircase? That’s definitely possible. Perhaps Rochas did some repairs on the staircase or altered something that the sisters didn’t like about the original product, in addition to doing work on other parts of the chapel. As is evident with the installation of the handrails and the metal bracket, the sisters weren’t shy about modifying the original staircase. It’s reasonable to think that Rochas had some involvement with the staircase without having been its original builder.
So, if it wasn’t Rochas, then who could it have been? Aliens? Someone else? St. Joseph?
Depending on how familiar you are with my writing on historical mysteries, my answer may or may not surprise you.
It Was Aliens!
No.
So far, aliens have displayed little to no interest in helping humanity solve its problems, no matter their size and scope. Next explanation.
Could It Have Been the Man Who Raised Christ?
While That Did(n’t) Happen is not advertised as a faith-based platform, this does not mean that I exclude any mention of God, faith, and the supernatural. As a Catholic writing these newsletters, I incorporate my view of the cosmos into my reasoning on any given mystery. Part of this is my belief that the reality in which we live is made up of the visible and the invisible.
For these reasons, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to believe that St. Joseph himself built the Loretto Chapel staircase. I say this not to exclude the possibility that Mr. Rochas or anyone else built the staircase. Instead, I wish to include all reasonable explanations given the circumstances surrounding this mystery.
Let’s just assume for a second that Joseph built the staircase. His desire to remain anonymous definitely fits the description given to him in the New Testament. Joseph doesn’t say anything in the Bible. He is accurately portrayed as a humble, diligent, and courageous man completely open to obeying the will of God. The fact that he showed up on the last day of the sisters’ novena also supports the “Joseph hypothesis.” Furthermore, his willingness to work for free makes sense, as money as not needed in Heaven.
I am not saying that you must believe that St. Joseph built the Loretto Chapel staircase, but coming from a faith standpoint, believing that he did is not at all unreasonable. Part of believing in an omnipotent God is the understanding that He can bend the laws of nature to work miracles. Could God have done so in this instance to assist the nuns in need of a way to reach their choir loft so that they may sing praise to Him? I think so.
So, What Really Happened in Santa Fe All Those Years Ago?
For as popularized as the Loretto Chapel staircase has been, there is still much we don’t know about it.
For starters, we don’t know when it was built. Some say it was as early as 1879, while others claim that it was as late as 1881. We also don’t know exactly how long it took to build. Furthermore, it remains a mystery as to why Projectus Mouly didn’t design a choir loft staircase ahead of time.
While Mary Jean Cook presents a compelling argument to demonstrate that Francois Rochas built the staircase, I am still unconvinced given that her conclusion doesn’t align with the fact that the sisters never discovered the identity of the builder.
That leaves us with two options. Either someone else built the staircase or St. Joseph miraculously appeared and lent the sisters a hand.
Part of being open-minded, especially when considering the mysterious aspects of our past, is an openness to the possibility of the existence of God and the interaction of the supernatural world with the observable universe. While there is no “direct” evidence that St. Joseph himself appeared in Santa Fe all those years ago, I think it is entirely reasonable for people of faith to contend that he did.
The Loretto Chapel staircase will look different depending on your religious perspective. This is the case for many other mysteries. I do not believe that the application of religious thinking belies objective analysis. If anything, it broadens our creativity and calls us to see beyond what meets the eye.