Chimayó Shrine

A valley in the Sangre de Cristos

The shrine occupies a fold of ground called El Potrero ("the pasture"), in the village of Chimayó, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southern end of the Rockies.^[6] The village, perched at about 1,850 metres above sea level (6,067 feet), straddles Rio Arriba and Santa Fe counties, some forty kilometres north of the state capital.^[7] It is reached by NM 76, the picturesque High Road to Taos, which follows old Spanish colonial tracks.^[8]

The listed site covers only 6.4 acres (2.6 hectares), a little over a kilometre north-west of the Santa Cruz Reservoir dam.^[9] It is a village shrine, with no monumental esplanade: its strength lies in being rooted in a landscape of high farming valleys, irrigated since colonial times by the network of acequias.

"Tsi-Mayoh": a healing land for the Pueblos

Long before the Spaniards arrived, the valley was held sacred by the Tewa-speaking Pueblo Indians. The place name Chimayó derives from the Tewa "Tsi-Mayoh," the name of one of the four hills overlooking the valley and regarded as holy.^[10] The area was frequented for healing from at least the 12th century: tradition reports ancient hot springs famed for their therapeutic virtues, whose drying-up is said to have later transferred the devotion onto the earth of the place.^[11]

This Indian anteriority is no folkloric detail: it places Chimayó in a long continuity in which the same soil is held to carry healing, from the Pueblos to the Catholic pilgrims. When the Spanish settlers established themselves in the valley at the end of the 17th century, they found a place already laden with this reputation.

The Santa Cruz river and the name of the place

The little church was built on a rise overlooking the Santa Cruz River, near the spot where, according to tradition, the founding crucifix was discovered.^[12] El Potrero de Chimayó — "the pasture of Chimayó" — denotes precisely Abeyta's land on which the first chapel rose: it is this micro-place-name, and not the village name alone, that recurs in the old documents.^[13]

The Good Friday 1810 discovery

The history of the place begins with don Bernardo Abeyta, a farmer of El Potrero and member of the local penitential brotherhood.^[14] According to the handed-down account, during Holy Week 1810, Abeyta saw a light shining from a hillside near the river; digging the soil with his hands, he unearthed a crucifix depicting Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas, the "Christ of Esquipulas."^[15]

"During Holy Week, Abeyta saw a light shining from the hillside and dug the crucifix up with his bare hands." — Traditional account of the discovery, as reported by the shrine's historical notices^[16]

The Good Friday date is no accident: it places the place from the outset under the sign of the Cross and the Passion, in the spirit of the penitential piety that then marked colonial New Mexico.

The crucifix that "wanted to remain" at Chimayó

Tradition reports that the crucifix was carried in procession to the parish church of Santa Cruz, several kilometres away, by the parish priest Fray Sebastián Álvarez — but that it vanished, only to reappear in the hole at El Potrero. The wonder is said to have repeated itself twice more.^[17]

"As the same thing happened twice more, it became apparent that Our Lord of Esquipulas wanted to reside in El Potrero de Chimayó." — Historical notice of the shrine^[18]

This motif of the miraculous returns — the image that refuses to be moved and designates its own shrine — is a classic pattern in the founding of holy places. Here it founds the legitimacy of the site: it was not man who chose the place, but Christ who is said to have imposed it.

The Guatemalan heritage: the Black Christ of Esquipulas

The title of the crucifix points to a great Central American shrine: that of Esquipulas, in eastern Guatemala, where a Black Christ (El Cristo Negro) is venerated, sculpted in 1594 by Quirio Cataño and installed the following year.^[19] Having become one of the continent's greatest pilgrimage centres, Esquipulas is associated, likewise, with "blessed earths": pilgrims carry away tablets of white clay, the benditos, which they dissolve in water or apply to the body.^[20]

Chimayó thus appears as a northern transplant of the Guatemalan cult: the same Esquipulas title, the same crucifix, the same use of a curative earth. This link explains why a remote New Mexican village shares with a Central American shrine so singular a practice as the consumption of a holy earth.

The Penitentes and the first chapel

Abeyta was no isolated devotee: he belonged to the Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus of Nazareth (Los Hermanos Penitentes), a lay brotherhood widespread in northern New Mexico, devoted to penance and meditation on the Passion.^[21] It was in this milieu of intense popular piety, structured by the moradas (brotherhood oratories), that the Chimayó devotion was born. A modest first chapel was raised on Abeyta's land around 1810, to serve the few families of El Potrero.^[22]

The 1813 petition to the bishop of Durango

The influx of pilgrims and the reported cures soon made the little chapel too small. On 15 November 1813, Bernardo Abeyta sent a petition asking for permission to build a larger church; the request was forwarded, through Fr. Sebastián Álvarez, to the distant diocese of Durango, on which New Mexico then depended.^[23]

At that date, New Mexico was still part of the viceroyalty of New Spain: the smallest church building had to receive the approval of an episcopal authority more than a thousand kilometres to the south — which explains the administrative procedure whose trace the archives have kept.

The authorisation of 8 February 1814

The answer came on 8 February 1814: Francisco Fernández Valentín, vicar general of the diocese of Durango, granted permission to build.^[24] The relative speed of the authorisation, in a troubled period — the Mexican wars of independence had just begun — testifies to the seriousness with which the diocesan authority took the request.

The church completed in 1816

Construction of the present church, in adobe, began in 1814 and was finished around 1816, on the very site of the first chapel.^[25] It is this 1816 shrine, little altered in its structure, that pilgrims still enter today: one of the rare great holy places of the Western world whose main building was never rebuilt in stone nor enlarged into a basilica.

An adobe fortress-church

The Santuario is a single-nave church, built of sun-dried earth bricks (adobe) in the Spanish colonial tradition of New Mexico. It measures about 18 metres long by 7.3 metres wide (60 × 24 feet), with walls more than a metre thick that give it the look of a small earthen fortress.^[26] The façade is framed by two bell towers, one on each side; the pointed caps crowning them and the sloping metal roof were only added after 1917, probably in the 1920s.^[27] The whole is girded by a walled enclosure pierced by an arched portal topped with a cross, enclosing a small forecourt.

The doors of Pedro Domínguez and the five reredoses

The interior is one of the finest ensembles of Hispanic folk art preserved in situ in the United States. The finely carved doors are the work of the 19th-century carpenter Pedro Domínguez.^[28] The nave is punctuated by five painted reredoses (retables), veritable walls of holy images that turn the space into a picture book of New Mexican devotion.^[29]

The santeros: Molleno and the Aragóns

To adorn his shrine, Abeyta called on the great regional santeros — painters and sculptors of saints. The main reredos and the crucifix of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas, about 1.80 metres tall, are attributed to the santero known as Molleno (active around 1800–1850), recognisable by his blazing reds, yellows and blacks; other reredoses are assigned to José Aragón and José Rafael Aragón.^[30] Two genres can be distinguished in this art: the retablos (flat paintings on wooden panels) and the bultos (statues in the round), among them a figure of Saint James the Greater.^[31] This ensemble makes the Santuario a living museum of New Mexican popular statuary, still serving worship.

The little well in the sacristy

To the left of the altar, a small room holds the most singular object of the place: a round hole dug in the floor, el pocito ("the little well"), held to mark the exact spot where the crucifix was unearthed.^[32] From it pilgrims take, by hand, the blessed earth — tierra bendita — which they carry away in small containers. The founding crucifix itself now rests on the high altar, above Molleno's reredos.

A unique custom: pilgrimage "geophagy"

The use of this earth is threefold, inherited from Esquipulas: it is rubbed on sick parts of the body, dissolved in water and drunk, or kept as a contact relic.^[33] This practice of devotional geophagy is so rare that one scholar could write:

"The custom of geophagy in connection with pilgrimage to a Catholic shrine is found only in the New Mexican town of Chimayó, which also has a shrine dedicated to Our Lord of Esquipulas." — Editorial: Holy matter, academic study of sacred earths^[34]

The Church frames this popular devotion without ever claiming the earth to be, in itself, a remedy: it is held as a sacramental, a tangible support of prayer and trust in God, not as a magical substance.

25 to 30 tons a year: where does the earth really come from?

The hole never empties: it is refilled regularly, sometimes more than once a day, amounting to 25 to 30 tons of earth a year.^[35] Tradition likes to say the earth renews itself:

"No matter how much dirt is removed, the hole stays completely full." — Report on the shrine^[36]

The reality, honestly acknowledged by the shrine itself, is more prosaic: it is the custodians who bring earth from the neighbouring hillsides to fill the well.^[37] Sceptical writers, such as Joe Nickell and Benjamin Radford, point out that this earth is ordinary and that the cures are not scientifically established.^[38] This transparency takes nothing away from the devotion: the value of the pocito never rested on some alleged self-regeneration of the soil, but on the faith of the pilgrims and on the discovery site it marks.

Severiano Medina and the Child of Atocha

A few hundred metres from the Santuario stands a second chapel, dedicated to the Santo Niño de Atocha (the Christ Child of Atocha). It was built around 1856–1857 by Severiano Medina: having fallen gravely ill, he is said to have been cured after praying to the Santo Niño, then to have gone on pilgrimage to the Mexican shrine of Fresnillo before raising, on his return, his own chapel at Chimayó.^[39] The Child of Atocha is the patron of travellers, prisoners, miners and the abandoned.

The little worn-out shoes

Local devotion relates that the statue of the Christ Child walks by night to rescue those in need, thus wearing out his shoes. That is why pilgrims leave countless bootees and little children's shoes in the chapel as ex-votos — shoes that are afterwards distributed to the poor.^[40] This touching detail makes the Santo Niño chapel a popular complement to the Santuario, especially dear to families and to the sick who pray for their children.

A chapel that entered the archdiocese in 1992

Long the property of the Medina family, the Santo Niño chapel was sold to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in 1992 and attached to Chimayó's Holy Family parish.^[41] The two shrines now form a single pilgrimage ensemble, under the same Church administration.

The 1929 rescue

For more than a century, the shrine remained the private property of Bernardo Abeyta's descendants.^[42] At the start of the 20th century, the family, in difficulty, considered selling — at the risk of seeing the reredoses and the crucifix scattered on the art market. In 1929, members of the fledgling Spanish Colonial Arts Society of Santa Fe — centred on the writer Mary Austin, the artist Frank Applegate and the architect John Gaw Meem — bought the property and gave it to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.^[43] This act of heritage preservation saved the place and moved it from private hands to the Church.

The Sons of the Holy Family since 1959

In 1959, the shrine received its first resident priest, Fr. Casimiro Roca, a Spaniard, member of the congregation of the Sons of the Holy Family, founded in 1864 by Saint Joseph Manyanet.^[44] That same year the Holy Family parish of Chimayó was erected, of which the Santuario became a mission.^[45] Fr. Roca, who stayed on site for more than half a century, is credited with lifting the chapel out of neglect and ruin to make it a leading pilgrimage centre. The Sons of the Holy Family are still its custodians today.^[46]

The Santuario has been recognised by the American authorities as a heritage property of the very first rank. The table below summarises its listings:

The National Historic Landmark status, granted the same day as the National Register listing, places Chimayó among the few thousand places judged of exceptional national importance for the history of the United States.^[47] Notably, this official distinction recognises both the architectural value (a masterpiece of colonial adobe) and the cultural value (a living hearth of the Hispanic faith of the South-West).

The foremost Catholic pilgrimage centre in the United States

With nearly 300,000 visitors a year, Chimayó is, according to several sources, the most important Catholic pilgrimage centre in the United States.^[48]

"No doubt the most important Catholic pilgrimage center in the United States." — El Santuario de Chimayó, encyclopaedic notice^[49]

The nickname "America's Lourdes" took hold precisely because of the curative reputation of the place and the influx of the sick.^[50] One honest nuance should be noted: some sources, notably Spanish-speaking ones, rank Chimayó second, behind the shrine of Nuestra Señora de la Monserrate in Puerto Rico — a counting debate that takes nothing away from its continental influence.^[51]

The great Holy Week walking pilgrimage

The high point of the year is the Holy Week walking pilgrimage. On Good Friday, up to 30,000 people converge on Chimayó; taken together over the week, some estimates run higher still.^[52] The walkers come from all over the region: some cover the ~150 kilometres from Albuquerque, others a dozen kilometres from Española or from Santa Fe, carrying wooden crosses along the desert roads.^[53] It is one of the greatest manifestations of popular piety in North America.

The Bataan veterans' pilgrimage (1946)

The modern pilgrimage was revived after the Second World War by the New Mexican survivors of the terrible Bataan Death March (Philippines, 1942).^[54] In 1946, these veterans organised a thanksgiving march in memory of their comrades who died in captivity — an observance which, year after year, became the great pilgrimage we know today. This grafting of military memory onto a colonial devotion partly explains the fervour so peculiar to the place.

The room of crutches

The most striking testimony of the place is no archive document, but a room adjoining the pocito, whose adobe walls are lined with ex-votos: abandoned crutches, canes and braces, but also photographs, handwritten letters, crocheted baby bootees, military dog tags and holy pictures, left by those who say they were healed.^[55]

"Lining the smooth adobe surfaces of an adjoining room are abandoned crutches and walking canes — crocheted baby booties, handwritten notes and photographs — physical testimony deemed evidence of the revelations of El Santuario and the holy dirt." — Report on the shrine^[56]

This accumulation forms a kind of popular archive of graces, comparable to the ex-voto rooms of Lourdes or Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré.

The prudence of the Church

The Catholic Church, for its part, does not rule on the supernatural reality of these cures:

"The Church takes no position on whether miracles have occurred at the Santuario." — El Santuario de Chimayó, encyclopaedic notice^[57]

This reserve is exemplary of Catholic wisdom in matters of popular devotion: the cult is authorised and supervised, the faith of the pilgrims is respected, without turning a custom into dogma or an earth into a talisman. The place is worth, first of all, for what it inspires: prayer, conversion, trust in God's mercy.

• Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré — another great North American healing shrine, likewise famous for its ex-voto crutches
• La Vang Shrine — Vietnamese Marian shrine, a replica of whose statue was erected behind the Santuario de Chimayó
• Notre-Dame-du-Cap Shrine — another great pilgrimage centre of the American continent
• Akita Shrine — another discreet modern Marian place become a worldwide pilgrimage centre
• Walsingham Shrine — shrine restored in the 20th century, as Chimayó was rescued from neglect