Arguably the most important Catholic pilgrimage destination in the United States — sometimes called “the Lourdes of America” — sits slightly less than 30 miles directly north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
El Santuario de Chimayó, the “Sanctuary of Chimayo,” is an official National Historic Landmark and is included in the National Register of Historic Places. More importantly, it receives nearly 300,000 visitors each year, fully 30,000 of them during Holy Week (the days leading up to Easter) alone. The busiest days are Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Many of the pilgrims walk — some of them from Albuquerque, roughly 90 miles away — and the pilgrimage road to Chimayó is marked with hilltop crosses.
Tradition says that the Tewa Indians venerated a hot spring at the site even before the Spaniards arrived. If this is true, it’s far from the first time in history that a place sacred to one religion has become sacred to another.
In the early 19th century, this area belonged to Don Bernardo Abeyta, one of the first members of the “Penitentes,” a New Mexico order of Catholic laymen called, in English translation, the “Brothers of the Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene," which is famous for its rituals of self-flagellation during Lent and its re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday. Obviously very pious, he appears to have been personally devoted to the Christ of Esquipulas, a pilgrimage site in Guatemala whose clay is believed to carry miraculous healing benefits.
Accounts differ slightly regarding how the sanctuary came to be. One says that, on the night of Good Friday, Don Bernardo (or, perhaps, a friar) saw a light shining on the hillside and, Moses-like, approached it. He knelt down and dug up a crucifix with his bare hands. That crucifix, a parallel account explains, had belonged to a martyred priest from Guatemala who had been killed by Indians and buried there.
Don Bernardo turned the crucifix over to a local priest, who took it to the appropriately named nearby chapel of Santa Cruz (“Holy Cross”), near Española. But the crucifix mysteriously returned to the place of its discovery — not once, but three times. Plainly, they reasoned, that was where El Señor de Esquipulas, the Savior depicted hanging upon the cross, intended to remain.
Accordingly, in roughly 1810, Don Bernardo built a tiny chapel on the site, dedicated to the Christ of Esquipulas, in order to house the crucifix. Shortly thereafter, in 1816, the present larger church replaced it, remaining in the Abeyta family’s hands until 1929, when it was donated to the Catholic archdiocese of Santa Fe.
Strictly speaking, this still-small church is the Santuario. The crucifix that was found in the early 1800s is now embedded in the decorations behind its main altar, and the chapel is extensively decorated with colorful and obviously devout folk art, some of it approximately two centuries old.
But the complex also includes fairly extensive grounds, gardens and other structures, including a relatively new section venerated by devout Vietnamese Catholics. Directly adjacent to the chapel, for example, is a small room called “el pocito” (“the little well”) featuring a round pit in the center of its floor. This is believed to mark the exact spot where Don Bernardo found the crucifix. Acting either for themselves or for others unable to come to the site, pilgrims can take “holy dirt” (“tierra bendita”) from this pit in hopes of receiving blessings or obtaining cures.
Literature available at Chimayó stresses that the dirt from the little pit — regularly replenished from the surrounding grounds and then blessed by a priest — has no special intrinsic power in itself and that healing comes through faith and divine grace. However, the testimonials of grateful pilgrims don’t always make that fine distinction. In the past, at least, some pilgrims actually ate the dirt, just as the sacred clay of the shrine of Esquipulas is eaten in Guatemala.
A room directly connected to “el pocito” contains votive offerings and photographs of those believed to have been healed — indeed, such items can be found all about the grounds of Chimayó, attached to walls, on trees, placed before statues — as well as discarded crutches.
Such things may be foreign to many readers, but the deep faith, yearning and human need reflected at Chimayó cross denominational boundaries.
“Life is a journey,” says one of the booklets available at Chimayó, “and you choose to be a pilgrim or a tourist.”
Daniel Peterson founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.