Sisters of Loretto

The Sisters of Loretto are a Catholic religious community whose educational work and prayer give the novel both its institutional setting and the human context for its staircase legend. Brought to Santa Fe from Kentucky in 1852 by Jean Baptiste Lamy to run Our Lady of Light Academy, they appear as a community shaped not only by formal religious practice but also by the daily negotiations of schooling, care, and refuge.

Historical Identity and the Academy

The novel’s afterword identifies the Sisters of Loretto as the women who came to Santa Fe to run Our Lady of Light Academy, the girls’ school attached to the Chapel of Loretto. In the historical account presented there, the completed chapel had a choir loft but no staircase to reach it. The sisters consulted builders, carpenters, and architects; conventional solutions would either consume too much room, require an expensive reconstruction of the loft, or leave the choir accessible only by ladder. Their practical problem became the beginning of a religious appeal: the sisters undertook a novena to Saint Joseph.

That institutional history also sets the frame for the novel’s fictional story. The afterword recounts differing versions of the carpenter legend: some say the beggar built a spiral staircase, making two complete circles and containing thirty-three steps, in two weeks; others give the work months. When the sisters planned a feast in his honor, the carpenter had disappeared. He did not collect his pay and, in the account, was never seen again. The unresolved departure makes the order’s building story a legend of work completed without a known maker, rather than a settled record of who the carpenter was.

Prayer, School, and Daily Care

In the school episodes, religious life is presented through repeated practice. During a novena to Saint Joseph, the girls go to the chapel each evening for prayers, followed by the priest’s responses and prayers. For Lizzy Enders, still adjusting to school and grieving Mama, that time becomes a rare interval of quiet in which she can think and sort through her feelings. The ritual therefore has a communal purpose, but its effect is also personal: it offers a pause in the confusion of the school day.

The novel also distinguishes practical compassion from simple obedience. Sister Roberta puts Violate Lacey’s medicine in a basket beside coffee sweetened with milk and nutmeg. When Lizzy questions the arrangement, Sister Roberta explains that God forgives disobedience when it helps someone in need. The episode presents care as a lived religious judgment, enacted through medicine and an ordinary mug of coffee, rather than as an abstract rule. It is Sister Roberta’s individual practice, not a stated policy of the whole order, but it gives the school’s religious world a humane and flexible face.

The students, too, take part in the community’s debates about religious work. When a hungry carpenter is proposed for the chapel staircase, a group of girls plans to ask Jean Baptiste Lamy to stop him, believing their argument will persuade him. Their intervention shows that the academy is not merely a place where decisions are handed down: its pupils form opinions and attempt to influence what happens in the chapel that anchors their school life.

Refuge, Authority, and Institutional Limits

The convent’s responsibilities extend beyond education, but the novel makes clear that protection is contested. When Lizzy proposes bringing Delvina, a pregnant woman living at an abandoned fort, to the convent, Mother Magdalena refuses. She cites Delvina’s husband, Ramon Baca, as a violent criminal and warns that his discovery of Delvina could endanger the girls. She orders Lizzy to keep Delvina’s situation secret and threatens to bar Violate Lacey from visiting her son’s grave if Lizzy disobeys. The refusal makes institutional safety concrete: the risk falls not only on the woman seeking refuge but also on the school’s residents.

Jean Baptiste Lamy articulates a different obligation, describing the church, school, and convent as a safe house and a place of asylum. His response does not erase the danger Mother Magdalena has identified; it exposes a disagreement over what the institution’s religious responsibility requires when shelter itself may invite violence. The episode gives the convent’s claim to offer refuge real force, while showing that its leaders must weigh that claim against the safety of the girls in their care.

Local law and church authority further shape what care can mean. Lizzy learns that a midwife in Santa Fe must hold a municipal license and a certificate from a parish priest confirming knowledge of baptism. The rule helps explain why Delvina needs to be brought back to the convent for a proper midwife; it also places childbirth within a web of civic regulation and religious oversight. After Delvina dies, the requirement that bodies be buried within twenty-four hours, combined with the fact that the next day is Sunday, brings her funeral forward to that evening. At the same time, Jean Baptiste Lamy’s wish that the convent keep Elena is weighed against the danger posed by the child’s father.

That danger remains decisive after Ramon Baca attacks the school community. Mother Magdalena announces, after consulting Jean Baptiste Lamy, that Elena should be placed with a family outside Santa Fe because another attack could endanger everyone. Although Ramon Baca is in prison, Mother Magdalena fears that his influence will prevent him from remaining there for long. The convent’s protection thus changes form: it has kept Elena, but its leaders now judge that lasting safety may require finding her a home elsewhere.

Baptism and the Meaning of Religious Care

The Sisters’ religious authority also reaches into the question of baptism. While Violate Lacey is in a coma, the nuns baptize her Catholic, though she is Methodist and had not wanted that baptism. Lizzy later asks whether the Catholic rite can be undone with a bag of asafetida, following Violate Lacey’s request. The episode places a sacramental act beside the wishes and religious identity of a woman unable to speak for herself. It records the nuns’ action without resolving the conflict in their favor or treating Lizzy’s attempted remedy as an answer.

The wider conversation emphasizes how institutional rites can carry consequences beyond the moment in which they are performed. Lizzy fears that Violate Lacey’s baptism might affect her fate after death. The response she receives stresses a loving God rather than a punishing one, turning attention from a contest between religious labels toward care, affection, and the life a person has lived. In this strand of the novel, the Sisters’ action remains significant precisely because the meaning of a rite is questioned by those who love the person who received it.

The Staircase and the Sisters’ Legacy

The staircase joins the Sisters of Loretto’s practical need to a story of prayer and uncertain explanation. In the novel’s historical frame, the sisters begin a novena after ordinary building solutions prove unsatisfactory; the carpenter’s arrival and disappearance then become the material of a legend. Within the story, Sister Roberta interprets the staircase’s lack of a banister as a lesson in faith and demonstrates her own way down, descending backward on her hands and knees, one step at a time. Her reading is a character’s interpretation, not proof that the construction was miraculous.

The order’s significance therefore rests in two connected roles. The Sisters of Loretto are the historical community associated with the academy and the chapel, and, in the novel, their practices give shape to questions of faith, care, and institutional responsibility. Their novena belongs to a tradition of prayer; the school’s daily acts of care and its difficult decisions about refuge show how belief is tested in ordinary circumstances. The staircase legend endures in the gap between those forms of understanding: the need was real, the structure was built, and the carpenter’s identity and fate remain unexplained.