El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico

1. What El Santuario de Chimayo Is

El Santuario de Chimayo is a Catholic chapel of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, standing in the village of Chimayo in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, about twenty-five miles north of Santa Fe in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It was built of mud brick between 1813 and 1816 by a local landowner named Bernardo Abeyta, dedicated to Our Lord of Esquipulas, and it has been a place of pilgrimage without interruption since it was finished. The building is small: two bell towers, thick adobe walls, a walled forecourt with a cemetery, a single nave with painted wooden altar screens, and a pair of side rooms off the sanctuary.

What draws people from across the country is one of those side rooms. In its floor is a round pit about a foot and a half across, called el pocito, the little well. Pilgrims kneel at it, scoop earth out with a trowel or their hands, and carry it away in plastic bags, film canisters, jam jars and envelopes. That earth is called tierra bendita, blessed earth, or in English simply the holy dirt. People rub it on a knee or a shoulder, dissolve a little in water, tuck it into a wallet, tape it to the back of a photograph of somebody who is sick, or set it on a shelf beside a candle.

Two things need saying at the front of any honest account of the place, because both are commonly misunderstood. The first is that the Catholic Church has never taught that this earth heals anything. It is a devotional object connected with a place of prayer, in the same family as water carried home from Lourdes or oil from a lamp at a saint's tomb, and its whole value lies in the prayer that surrounds it. The second is that the hole is refilled. The sanctuary replenishes the pocito with soil from the grounds and the hillsides around the chapel, has said so publicly for decades, and has never claimed that the earth renews itself.

Beyond the dirt, Chimayo is the goal of a very large walking pilgrimage in Holy Week. Through Holy Thursday and Good Friday, people walk to the chapel along the highways and back roads of northern New Mexico, from Santa Fe, from Espanola, from Albuquerque and from villages in between, some of them carrying wooden crosses. That walk is treated below in its own section, along with what can and cannot be said about its size.

2. Where Chimayo Is

Chimayo sits in a narrow valley on the Santa Cruz river, in the high country between the Rio Grande and the Sangre de Cristo range, at roughly six thousand feet. The village is a scatter of adobe compounds, orchards, chile fields and small plazas rather than a town with a centre, and the oldest of its settlements is the Plaza del Cerro, a fortified square of houses built around a common enclosure in the eighteenth century. The Santuario stands a short distance from that plaza, at the end of a lane, behind a low adobe wall.

The village was settled by Spanish colonists in the early eighteenth century, on land granted after the reconquest of New Mexico following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Its neighbours were, and are, the Tewa pueblos of the Rio Grande valley, and the two communities have lived side by side for three centuries with all the closeness and all the friction that implies. Chimayo has its own weaving tradition, carried by families who have worked the same treadle looms for generations, and its own strain of chile, which is grown in the valley and is a serious matter locally.

Getting there is part of what people remember. The chapel lies on the road often called the High Road to Taos, which climbs from Espanola through Cordova, Truchas and Las Trampas, each of them a village with an old adobe church of its own. Anyone driving to Chimayo passes several churches older or stranger than the one they came to see, and the drive gives the visit its scale: this is a devotional landscape rather than a single monument, and the Santuario is the stop most outsiders come for.

The chapel was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970, and it is administered as a parish shrine of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. Mass is offered there, confessions are heard there, and the building is used for the ordinary sacramental life of a Catholic community as well as for pilgrims.

The designation of El Santuario de Chimayo as a National Historic Landmark in 1970 is recorded by the United States National Park Service, which administers the National Historic Landmarks programme and publishes the listing.

3. What Was There Before the Chapel

The ground had a reputation before the chapel was built on it. Tewa tradition associated the area with a hill called Tsi Mayoh, one of a set of hills marking the boundaries of the Tewa world, and with a pool or spring nearby whose mud was regarded as good for the sick. The name Chimayo itself derives from the Tewa word. Accounts collected by ethnographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries describe the site as a place where earth was taken for healing before any Spanish settlement existed in the valley.

The Tewa name Tsi Mayoh, the association of the site with healing earth in Tewa tradition, and the derivation of the place name are reported in the ethnographic literature on the Tewa of the Rio Grande, notably the studies published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in the early twentieth century.

How much weight that evidence carries is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the pre-Spanish history of the exact spot is thinly documented and partly reconstructed from oral tradition recorded long afterwards. What is clear is that the Catholic chapel was not built on empty ground in the imagination of the region, and that the practice of taking earth away from the place is older than the building that now shelters it.

Whether continuity is a problem

Catholic theology has never treated the prior sanctity of a place as an objection. Churches across the world stand where somebody else prayed first, and the Church's habit has been to claim such ground and consecrate it. The Catechism lists pilgrimages among the expressions of popular piety that extend the liturgical life of the Church (CCC 1674, 1675), and it says that pastoral discernment is needed to sustain such piety and, where necessary, to purify and correct the religious sense underlying it (CCC 1676). The purification is the operative word. A devotion at such a site is healthy when it terminates in Christ and unhealthy when it terminates in the site.

That is the test to apply at Chimayo, and it is the test the shrine's own clergy have applied there for two hundred years. The earth in the pocito sits a few feet from a crucifix, in a room off a sanctuary where the Mass is offered. Anyone who takes the dirt and skips the Mass has taken the smaller thing.

4. Bernardo Abeyta and the Founding

Bernardo Abeyta was a landowner of the Chimayo valley and a member of the lay penitential brotherhood of northern New Mexico, the Cofradia de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, commonly called the Penitentes. In 1813 he petitioned the Franciscan custos of the province for permission to build a chapel on his land in honour of Our Lord of Esquipulas. Permission was granted, and the building was finished in 1816. Abeyta and his family maintained it, and he was buried within the chapel after his death in 1856.

The petition of Bernardo Abeyta in 1813 for licence to build a chapel in honour of Our Lord of Esquipulas, and the completion of the building in 1816, are documented in the Spanish colonial and Franciscan records of New Mexico held in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and published in scholarly editions of those archives.

The Penitente brotherhoods matter for understanding the place. In the late colonial and Mexican periods, northern New Mexico had very few priests spread over enormous distances, and the brotherhoods carried much of the region's religious life: they kept the Holy Week observances, prayed the alabados, buried the dead, looked after widows and orphans, and maintained the moradas, their meeting houses. Their Holy Week practices included severe bodily penance, which drew hostility from later bishops and a good deal of sensational outside attention. The Archdiocese of Santa Fe regularised the brotherhoods in the twentieth century, and they continue today under ecclesiastical recognition.

Their devotional centre was the Passion. That is the key to Chimayo. The chapel Abeyta built was a shrine of the crucified Christ, raised by a man whose brotherhood spent Holy Week on the sufferings of Christ, in a valley where Good Friday was the high point of the year. The Holy Week pilgrimage that now fills those roads grew out of the reason the chapel exists in the first place.

The founding story

The account handed down in Chimayo is that Abeyta, while at prayer or at penance, saw a light coming from the earth near the Santa Cruz river, dug at the spot, and uncovered a crucifix. The crucifix was carried in procession to the parish church at Santa Cruz, and it returned to the hole in the ground, twice or three times depending on who is telling it, until the people understood that a chapel was to be built where it had been found. The crucifix is identified as the image of Our Lord of Esquipulas that stands on the main altar screen today, and the hole where it was found is identified with the pocito.

The Church has issued no judgment on that story. No decree declares it historically established, and no decree condemns it. Catholics are free to hold it or to regard it as a pious local legend, and nothing in the faith depends on the answer. The chapel is licit and the devotion is permitted because a bishop's authority stands behind the shrine, which is a different thing from a ruling that the founding narrative happened as told.

5. Our Lord of Esquipulas and Blessed Earth

Esquipulas is a town in eastern Guatemala with a famous shrine of the crucified Christ, where a dark-toned cedar crucifix carved in the sixteenth century has been venerated for over four hundred years and where pilgrims still arrive from across Central America. The image is popularly called the Black Christ, and the shrine has drawn pilgrims from across Central America for centuries. Its devotion travelled north along the colonial trade and mission routes, and the name reached New Mexico with it.

The link that explains Chimayo is what pilgrims at Esquipulas do with earth. Around the Guatemalan shrine there is a long-established practice of making small tablets of white clay, stamped with religious images, which pilgrims buy, carry home, and in many cases eat, dissolved in water or broken into food. The tablets are called benditos, blessed things, or tierra del santo. Geophagy, the eating of earth, is an ancient practice in Mesoamerica and elsewhere, and the shrine's devotion absorbed it.

The devotion to the Cristo Negro at the Basilica of Esquipulas in Guatemala and the associated practice of blessed clay tablets carried and consumed by pilgrims are described in published anthropological and historical studies of the Esquipulas cult and its diffusion through Mesoamerica and into the Spanish southwest.

So Chimayo did not invent the idea of carrying sacred earth away from a shrine. Abeyta dedicated his chapel to the devotion in which that practice was already normal, at a spot in his own valley that already had a local reputation for healing earth, and the two things fused. That history explains why some pilgrims at Chimayo consume the dirt rather than only applying it. It is a genuine inheritance of the Esquipulas devotion.

Two cautions belong here. The first is medical and this page is not the place to give medical advice: soil is soil, it is not sterile, and anyone thinking about eating it should take that up with a doctor and with common sense. The second is theological. Nothing in Catholic teaching asks anyone to swallow anything at a shrine. The Church's one commanded eating is the Eucharist, which is Christ himself, and a pilgrim who receives Communion at Chimayo has received infinitely more than the pocito can offer. Our guide to the Eucharist and the Real Presence sets out why.

6. The Building, the Reredos and the Santeros

The chapel is a plain New Mexican mission church in miniature. Adobe walls several feet thick carry a pitched roof, two squat bell towers flank the entrance, and a wooden gate opens through an adobe wall into a forecourt with graves in it. The doors are carved, the floor is board, and the whole nave would fit inside a side chapel of a European basilica. The interior is dark, because it was built with small windows in a country of hard light, and the effect on entering from a New Mexico afternoon is immediate.

The nave leads to a sanctuary dominated by a painted altar screen, a reredos, with a large crucifix at its centre: the image of Our Lord of Esquipulas. Five further painted screens stand along the walls, carrying images of saints in flat frontal style with bold outlines and earth pigments. These are the work of New Mexican santeros, the folk image makers of the region, and the main screen is attributed to the painter known as Molleno, who worked in the first decades of the nineteenth century and is sometimes called the Chile Painter for the shape of his brushwork. The art is provincial, confident and entirely unlike anything in a European church, and it is a substantial part of why the building is a National Historic Landmark.

The attribution of the principal altar screen at El Santuario de Chimayo to the santero known as Molleno, active in New Mexico in the early nineteenth century, follows the published scholarship on New Mexican santero painting held and catalogued by museums in New Mexico, including the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe.

The two side rooms

A low door to the left of the sanctuary leads into a small room known as the sacristy or the prayer room, and from that room another opening leads into the still smaller room that holds the pocito. The doorways are low enough that most adults duck. The sequence is deliberate and it is worth noticing as you walk it: the church, then the room of thanksgivings, then the hole in the ground. Each room is smaller and darker than the last, and the last one has room for two or three people at a time.

Because the rooms are tiny and the crowds are not, the traffic through them at busy times is continuous and slow. Nobody gets long at the pocito. On Good Friday the line to reach it can stretch out of the building and across the courtyard.

7. The Pocito and What the Dirt Is

El pocito is a round hole in the earth floor of the innermost room, ringed with a low kerb, with a small trowel or scoop usually left in it. Pilgrims kneel, take a handful or a spoonful of dry reddish-brown soil, and put it into whatever container they brought. Many say a prayer over it, some pray aloud for a named person, and some touch it to a part of the body that hurts before they go. Then they stand, duck back through the low door, and let the next person in.

Catholic theology has an ordinary category for this, and it is worth naming precisely because it dissolves most of the confusion. Objects and gestures set apart by the Church to prepare people to receive grace and to sanctify the circumstances of life are called sacramentals. The Catechism teaches that sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way the sacraments do, and that they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it (CCC 1667, 1670). Holy water, blessed candles, blessed salt, medals, scapulars and the water at Lourdes all sit in that family. Their effect depends on the prayer of the Church and the disposition of the person using them.

The earth of Chimayo sits at the informal edge of that family. It is not a blessed object in the technical sense of having a rite in the Roman Ritual attached to it, and there is no liturgical blessing of soil for pilgrims to carry away. It is earth from the floor of a chapel that people have prayed in for two centuries, and its meaning is the meaning they bring to it and the prayers they say with it.

Where the earth comes from

The pocito is refilled. This is the fact most often missed and the one the sanctuary has been most consistent about. Pilgrims remove a very large quantity of soil every year, far more than any hole in a floor could yield, and the shrine replenishes it with earth taken from the property and from the hillsides nearby. Reports of the annual quantity vary considerably between sources, so this page gives no figure. The refilling has never been hidden, and the shrine has never claimed the earth renews itself.

Statements that the pocito is replenished with soil from the surrounding grounds have been made publicly by the staff and clergy of El Santuario de Chimayo and reported in New Mexico press coverage over many years. Published estimates of the annual quantity removed vary widely and are not repeated here.

Some pilgrims find the refilling deflating. It should do the opposite. A devotion resting on the earth being magically inexhaustible would be resting on a claim about dirt, and it would collapse the day somebody proved the claim false. A devotion resting on the prayer of the sick, the intercession of the Church and the freedom of God to answer is resting on something that does not depend on soil chemistry at all.

Christ used mud. He also healed with a word, at a distance, and by the touch of a hem. The point of the mud in John 9 is that God is free to attach his action to a physical sign when he chooses, and the point of the other healings is that he owes nobody a sign at all. Both halves have to be held together to think straight about the pocito.

8. What the Holy Dirt Is Not

The holy dirt of Chimayo is not a medicine, not a sacrament, not a relic, and not a substance with power of its own. Each of those four denials answers a real misunderstanding that pilgrims arrive with, and each of them is Catholic teaching rather than the private caution of this page.

It is not a medicine

No competent authority claims that Chimayo soil treats disease, and no study establishes it. Anyone who is ill should be under the care of a doctor, and Catholic teaching has always regarded medicine as a good that God gives through human skill. The Church's own rite for the sick, the anointing described in the letter of James, is administered alongside medical treatment and never in place of it.

It is not a sacrament

The seven sacraments were instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, and they act by the power of Christ himself. A sacramental, by contrast, is instituted by the Church, and it works through the prayer of the Church and the disposition of the person using it (CCC 1667, 1670). No amount of devotion turns a bag of soil into a sacrament. A pilgrim who wants the thing that acts with Christ's own power should go to confession and receive Communion, both of which are available at Chimayo and at every parish in the world.

It is not a relic

A relic is the body of a saint or something closely associated with a saint or with Christ. The earth of Chimayo has no such association. It is soil from the grounds of a chapel. Calling it a relic inflates it into a category it does not belong to, and the shrine does not use the word.

It has no power of its own

This is the load-bearing one. The Catechism defines superstition as attributing a magical importance to certain practices, or ascribing the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance apart from the interior dispositions they demand (CCC 2111). It goes further and condemns the attempt to tame occult powers and put them at one's service, even when done to restore someone's health (CCC 2117). The plain application at Chimayo: a person who takes the dirt believing that the substance itself works, independent of God and of prayer, has crossed from devotion into superstition, and the Church calls it by that name.

God heals. He heals through doctors, through the sacraments, through the prayer of the Church, through time, and sometimes through nothing anyone can trace. He is free to give a cure to somebody kneeling at the pocito, and he owes nobody a cure for kneeling there. Holding both halves of that is the whole discipline of praying at a healing shrine.

The definitions of superstition and of magic used here are those of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2111 and 2117, and the teaching on sacramentals is at paragraphs 1667 and 1670.

9. The Prayer Room and the Crutches

The room between the sanctuary and the pocito is the emotional centre of the shrine, and many visitors find it harder to walk through than the hole in the floor. Crutches hang on the walls and lean in the corners, left by people who said they no longer needed them. Around them are photographs, hundreds of them: babies in incubators, soldiers in dress uniform, graduation portraits, wedding pictures, snapshots of people who are dying and people who have died. Rosaries hang from nails. Handwritten letters and notes are pinned and taped to every surface, in Spanish and English, addressed to God, to the Santo Nino, to a dead mother.

These are ex-votos, offerings made in thanksgiving for a favour asked or received, and the practice is as old as the Church and older. A wall like this exists at most healing shrines in the Catholic world, in painted panels at Guadalupe, in silver limbs and eyes in Italy, in wax figures in Bavaria. The crutches at Chimayo are the New Mexican version of the same instinct: leave the sign of the trouble at the shrine, and take nothing away but the prayer.

What the wall proves is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to overread and easy to dismiss. It proves that a very large number of people believe they received something at Chimayo and wanted to say so publicly. It does not establish any individual cure as medically inexplicable, and nobody at the shrine claims that it does. A crutch on a wall is a testimony, and a testimony is a real thing, distinct from a verified miracle and not a substitute for one.

Read the letters if the room is quiet. They are the most instructive text at Chimayo, because most of them ask for endurance rather than for a cure: for a son to come off drugs, for a marriage to hold, for a deployment to end, for a father to die without pain. That is what the shrine is actually used for by the people who live near it, and it is the correct use.

10. The Santo Nino Chapel and the Shoes

A short walk from the Santuario stands a second, smaller chapel dedicated to the Santo Nino de Atocha, the Holy Child of Atocha, built in the middle of the nineteenth century by a neighbour of the Abeytas named Severiano Medina. The Santo Nino devotion arrived in New Mexico from Mexico, and specifically from the shrine at Plateros in Zacatecas, where the image of a child pilgrim seated with a staff, a gourd of water, a basket and a broad hat is venerated. The devotion itself traces back to Atocha in Spain.

The construction of the Santo Nino chapel at Chimayo by Severiano Medina in the 1850s and the transmission of the Santo Nino de Atocha devotion from the shrine at Plateros in Zacatecas are recorded in the historical literature on New Mexican religious art and popular devotion and in the archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

The story attached to the Santo Nino is that the child goes out at night to help people in trouble, and wears out his shoes doing it. So pilgrims bring shoes. Small ones, for a child, are left at the chapel and at the Santuario in great numbers, and they accumulate around the images. Parents whose children are sick leave a pair. The custom looks odd for about ten seconds and then becomes very difficult to look at, once you understand that each pair stands for a specific frightened family.

Two related devotions therefore share the same village: Our Lord of Esquipulas, the crucified Christ, at the Santuario, and the Santo Nino at his own chapel. In practice pilgrims visit both, and the images of the Santo Nino inside the Santuario have absorbed a good deal of the traffic. The doubling is a normal feature of Hispanic Catholic devotional life, where a locality accumulates advocations over time rather than choosing between them.

11. How the Chapel Passed to the Archdiocese

El Santuario was private property for its first hundred and thirteen years. Bernardo Abeyta built it on his own land, his descendants inherited it, and the family maintained the building and collected the offerings of pilgrims. By the 1920s the chapel was in poor condition and the family was preparing to sell it, and the risk was real that the building and its santero altar screens would be broken up and sold off, or that the chapel would pass into the hands of somebody with no interest in what it was for.

In 1929 a group of Santa Fe artists and preservationists intervened. The writer Mary Austin and the artist Frank Applegate, who were involved in the movement to preserve New Mexican Spanish colonial art, raised the purchase money from the Denver philanthropist Anne Evans, bought the chapel from the Chavez family heirs of Abeyta, and gave it to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. It has belonged to the Archdiocese ever since, and has been staffed for much of the modern period by priests of a religious congregation serving the shrine alongside the local clergy.

The purchase of El Santuario de Chimayo in 1929 with funds provided by Anne Evans, arranged by Mary Austin and Frank Applegate, and its transfer to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, are recorded in the histories of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society and in the archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

That transaction is why the building still exists in its original form, and it also explains a tension that runs through the site. Chimayo was preserved partly by people who valued it as art and as regional heritage, and it is used by people for whom it is a place to beg God for a sick child. Both constituencies are present in the courtyard on any given day, and the shrine belongs to the second.

A note on visitors who are not Catholic

Nobody is turned away. Protestant, Orthodox and unbelieving visitors come to Chimayo in large numbers, and the shrine is open to them. Protestant Christians often find the pocito difficult, and the objection they raise is a serious one with a long history: that the practice risks putting a physical object where trust in Christ alone belongs. Catholics should hear the objection in its own terms rather than dismissing it, and answer it the way the Church answers it, which is by insisting that the sign has no power apart from God and that anyone who thinks otherwise has fallen into superstition. Our guide to the Catholic and Protestant differences takes the wider argument at length.

12. The Holy Week Walking Pilgrimage

Through Holy Week, and above all on Holy Thursday night and Good Friday, people walk to Chimayo on foot. They come up the highway from Santa Fe, about a marathon's distance, from Espanola, a shorter walk of some nine miles, and from Albuquerque, which takes several days. They walk in families, in parish groups, in ones and twos. Some carry wooden crosses, plain and heavy, and hand them off to each other along the way. Some walk overnight and arrive at dawn. Volunteers set out water and coffee at the roadside, the state highway and police agencies manage traffic and post patrols along the pilgrim routes, and by Good Friday the shoulders of the roads into the valley carry a continuous line of people.

The pilgrimage is regularly described as the largest Holy Week walking pilgrimage in the United States, and the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and New Mexico news outlets publish annual crowd estimates that run into the tens of thousands. Those figures are estimates of an unticketed crowd spread across many roads over several days, they vary between sources and from year to year, and this page reports the description and its publishers rather than asserting the ranking on its own authority.

The characterisation of the Chimayo Holy Week walk as the largest pilgrimage of its kind in the United States, and the crowd estimates given for it, are published by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and reported in New Mexico news coverage each year. They are estimates of an uncounted crowd and are not independently verified here.

Where the modern walk came from

The Holy Week walk in something like its present scale is a twentieth-century development, and the account given locally traces it to the return of New Mexican soldiers after the Second World War. The New Mexico National Guard supplied a large part of the American force captured on Bataan in 1942, and the survivors endured the death march and years of captivity. Men from the northern villages vowed that if they came home they would walk to Chimayo, and after the war they did, and the walk grew from there.

The role of New Mexico National Guard units in the defence and surrender of Bataan in 1942 is a matter of public military record, and the association of returning Bataan survivors with the growth of the postwar Chimayo walking pilgrimage is a local tradition reported in New Mexico historical and press accounts.

That origin sets the tone of the thing. The walk is penitential, it is made in the days when the Church is keeping the Passion, and it is undertaken by people who owe a promise. The Spanish word is promesa or manda, a vow made in a crisis and paid in effort afterwards. A great many people on that road are paying one.

What it is like

Hot in the sun, cold at night, hard on the feet, and long. Northern New Mexico in early spring can give a walker sunburn in the afternoon and freezing wind after dark in the same twenty-four hours, at an altitude that leaves visitors from sea level short of breath. The roads have shoulders of varying quality and the traffic is heavy. People walk it in trainers with blistered feet and in wheelchairs pushed by relatives. Children walk it. Very old people walk short sections of it.

Nobody should attempt the long routes without preparation, water, warm layers, reflective clothing for the dark, and a realistic assessment of their own health. The penitential value of a pilgrimage lies in the offering, and there is no merit in a walk that ends in an ambulance and a hospital bill borne by a family that cannot afford it. Walk the section you can walk.

13. Reported Cures and the Standard for a Miracle

People report cures at Chimayo, and they have reported them since the chapel was built. Those reports are personal testimony. No cure at Chimayo has been declared a miracle by the Catholic Church, no medical bureau operates at the shrine of the kind that examines claims at Lourdes, and the sanctuary itself does not publish cures as verified. Anyone who tells you the Church has authenticated healings at Chimayo has told you something that is not true.

The Church's own standard for calling something a miracle is deliberately severe, and it is worth knowing before evaluating any healing story. In a canonisation cause, an alleged cure is examined by physicians who assess whether the recovery is complete, lasting and beyond the explanation of medicine given the state of the science, and only after that medical judgment does a theological commission consider whether it can be attributed to the intercession sought. The overwhelming majority of claims presented never survive that process. Our page on what the Church means by a miracle and how it tests one sets out the whole procedure, and it is the standard by which any Chimayo story should be measured.

Applying that standard to Chimayo produces an honest and unglamorous result. There is a great deal of testimony, there is no verified miracle on the record, and the absence of a verified miracle is not evidence that God has done nothing there. Most of what God does for people is invisible to any tribunal. A man who walked thirty miles on Good Friday and made his confession for the first time in twenty years received something no medical board could measure.

Why the shrine does not press the claim

Pressing healing claims would damage the shrine and the people who come to it. Selling a cure to a desperate parent is a cruelty, and a shrine that traded on unverified healings would draw exactly the kind of person who exploits the sick. The restraint the sanctuary keeps on this point is a mark of its seriousness.

It also protects the sick from a second injury. When a healing shrine implies that the cure depends on the strength of the pilgrim's faith, the person who is not cured is handed the conclusion that they failed. That is a false teaching and a cruel one. Christ was not cured of the cross. The sick who go home from Chimayo still sick have been given the same thing every Christian is given, which is a share in the Passion and the promise of the resurrection of the body.

Paul asked for a cure, asked repeatedly, and was refused, and the refusal is in Scripture because it is a normal Christian experience. Our guide to what the Church teaches about suffering takes that further.

14. Making a Good Pilgrimage to Chimayo

Schedules, road conditions, parking arrangements and Mass times change from year to year, and any page that pins them will be wrong shortly. What follows is the durable part.

Preparing spiritually

A pilgrimage is a prayer made with the body, and it works when an intention is attached to it before you leave home. Name the person you are carrying. Go to confession, at home or at the shrine. Fast in some small way on the road. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries on the way in, since this is a shrine of the crucified Christ. Give something away on the trip. Receive Communion at the shrine if you are able to, and let the dirt be the last and least thing you do there.

Our page on what a pilgrimage is and how to make one covers the practice in full. If Chimayo is one stop on a longer route through North America, the Catholic shrines of the United States and Canada sets out the others, and the wider list of Catholic destinations is at our guide to Catholic pilgrimage sites worldwide.

One clarification for anyone arriving with the wrong expectation: Chimayo is not an apparition shrine. Nobody claims that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in this valley, and the site belongs to a different category from Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe. Our page on Marian apparition sites and what the Church actually approves explains the six possible conclusions the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith set out in its norms of 17 May 2024, none of which has ever been applied to Chimayo, because there is no apparition here to judge.

15. Frequently Asked Questions