The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America's Miraculous Church by Brett Hendrickson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America's Miraculous Church by Brett Hendrickson Wendy M. Wright (bio) The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America's Miraculous Church. By Brett Hendrickson. NY: New York University Press, 2017. 245 pp. $30.00 Situated in the Española Valley of central New Mexico not far from the pueblo of the remaining indigenous Tewa-speaking people is El Santuario de Chimayó, one of Americas most visited pilgrimage sites. Although the modest chapel, constructed during 1813–16 and fabled for its miraculous "holy dirt," has attracted the attention of numerous persons -including ecclesial officials, art preservationists, local residents, devotional pilgrims and tourism boards -until the present study no one has attempted a scholarly study of the colorful site and its complex history. Brett [End Page 362] Hendrickson, from the Religious Studies department at Lafayette College with the support of the Young Scholar's in Religion Program at Indiana University, has done so. Hendrickson has structured his study around the themes of ownership of two types: legal ownership and what he terms "Belonging and Meaning Making." He has chronicled in detail the competing claims for both modes of ownership through the shifting history of New Mexico's varied populations and governing entities – Imperial Spain, Mexico, and the United States – as well as through the shifting religious and secular interests operative in the region over time. The author's intent is for the book to be significant for the study of American Catholicism more generally, rather than only a focused analysis of a particular local pilgrimage site. It does in fact shed significant light on an important and understudied dimension of the American Catholic imaginary expressed in Latinx religiosity. The narrative begins with the brutal Spanish conquest of "new Spain" and the ambiguous conversion of the native population by the Franciscan order. New Mexico was on the northern fringes of the Empire and church oversight was marginal. Thus, local lay leadership emerged in the form of the Penitentes who developed distinctive patterns of social organization and popular religious practice. The figure of one member of the brotherhood, Bernardo Abeyta, figures prominently as he is credited with building the little folk chapel. Hendrickson recounts various versions of the Santuario origin story that circulate, which include miraculous (a fabled appearance of a dark wooden crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipula in the dirt which, when moved translated itself back to its place of discovery), non-miraculous (Abeyta built the chapel as a thank offering) and scholarly (art historians trace images of Esquipula to santeros popular in the region, anthropologists look to sixteenth century trade routes connecting Guatemalan images and customs of venerating holy dirt to New Mexico, religious historians trace elements of the story to European tropes). What is clear is that these varied origin stories reflect the perspectives, needs and desires of the groups recounting them. What is also clear is that soon after the modest Santuario with its enshrined image of Our Lord of Esquipula was completed in 1816, Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 quickly changed both the religious and political context in which the chapel existed. Not long after, in 1847, the United States acquired the territory. French born and culturally Eurocentric Jean-Baptiste Lamy (famously the protagonist of Willa Cather's novel Death Comes to the Archbishop) exercised only marginal control over the region. In fact, for long periods any church oversight was marginal. Ownership of the Santuario passed from Abeyta to his daughter. For decades no permanent clergy or regularized liturgical celebrations were in place. The archdiocese of Santa Fe did not acquire legal ownership of the property until 1829. That occurred with the vigorous support of Spanish Colonial Arts Society, a mainly Anglo preservationist group desiring to preserve their idealized version of the Spanish and Indian New Mexico past in material form. They handed the property over to the Archdiocese. However, it was not until after the Second World War that the Holy Week pilgrimage for which the Santuario is now famous was initiated when a group of NuevoMexicanos (residents who trace their ancestry to colonial Spanish settlement), veterans who had survived the Bhutan Death March...