The Chapel of Loretto is the central sacred space of the novel’s staircase story: a place where an architectural problem becomes a test of belief, and where the same vanished carpenter can be understood as an ordinary man or Saint Joseph. The novel’s chapel draws on the real Santa Fe landmark and its famous staircase legend, but leaves the supernatural explanation unsettled through Lizzy Enders’s perspective.

Setting and historical background

The real Chapel of Loretto is associated with the Sisters of Loretto, who came from Kentucky to Santa Fe in 1852 with Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy. They ran the Academy of Our Lady of Light, the girls’ school attached to the chapel. As the author’s note explains, the chapel’s completion in 1878 revealed a practical omission: although it had a choir loft, it had no staircase by which the choir could reach it.

The sisters consulted builders, carpenters, and architects. A conventional staircase, they were told, would take up too much space. The proposed alternatives were costly reconstruction of the choir loft or using a ladder. The building’s story therefore begins not with a miracle but with a concrete architectural constraint: the choir loft existed, yet access to it had not been resolved.

The chapel in the novel

In the novel, the chapel’s missing staircase is an ongoing concern for the nuns. They have prayed a novena to Saint Joseph, while Bishop Lamy says that they look to him for miracles he cannot perform. He gives Lizzy’s suggestion a practical hearing: the hungry carpenter she has brought back from the road may be able to inspect the problem and do the work. The chapel’s need brings the stranger into the convent’s life, joining a building project to questions of charity, labor, and trust.

The chapel also frames intimate episodes that give its architecture a human scale. While Mrs. Lacey awaits burial under Santa Fe’s twenty-four-hour rule, Lizzy and Sister Roberta keep watch beside her coffin there between eight and ten at night. Wind shakes the shutters, candlelight flickers, and the shadows of José’s unfinished staircase stretch across the wall. The building is at once a place of religious observance and a setting in which grief and the unfinished work become physically present together.

When Ramona discovers that the carpenter has completed the staircase and gone, the girls and nuns gather at the back of the church to look up at it. The staircase rises in a polished circular arch from the ground to the choir loft. Its thirty-three carefully trimmed steps glow in the candlelight, but it has no railing. The carpenter’s abrupt disappearance and the finished structure prompt Mother Magdalena to declare that the man was Saint Joseph. The nuns kneel in prayer; Lizzy, who knew the carpenter as a person with sorrows and ordinary kindnesses, does not accept their explanation.

The staircase legend

The author’s note distinguishes the historical legend from the novel built upon it. In the account described there, a beggar-man carpenter arrived with a mule and only three tools: a hammer, a T-square, and a saw. Some versions say he built a staircase making two complete circles, with thirty-three steps, in two weeks; others give the work a duration of months. When the sisters planned a feast to thank him, he could not be found. The lumberyard where Bishop Lamy had an account for him reportedly had never seen him, and he never collected his pay or appeared again. The sisters concluded that the carpenter had been Saint Joseph.

The novel’s staircase echoes the legend’s distinctive form and mystery without resolving its meaning for Lizzy. In the historical account, the staircase still stands in the chapel. It was made with wooden pegs rather than nails, and architectural experts, according to the author’s note, could not account for the wood or find it in New Mexico. The staircase has a banister today, added in 1883; the novel’s newly completed staircase, by contrast, is explicitly seen without a railing.

Faith, doubt, and the chapel’s significance

The chapel gathers different interpretations around a single visible object. For the nuns, the absent carpenter’s work confirms the intervention of Saint Joseph. Lizzy rejects that conclusion because the carpenter had spoken with her, held her kitten, advised her about her father, and told her of his own sadness at leaving his family. Her knowledge of him as a vulnerable human being makes the nuns’ confident identification harder for her to accept. The disagreement is not simply over whether the staircase is remarkable; it is over what kind of explanation the chapel permits.

The author’s note preserves that uncertainty as part of the novel’s design. Lizzy must stand apart from the convent’s general acceptance that the carpenter was a saint, yet one small possibility of belief remains open to her: the blind cat is no longer blind after the carpenter holds her. The Chapel of Loretto thus serves both as the site of a local legend and as the setting for a more personal hesitation between faith and doubt. Its staircase gives the characters something solid to see, while the meaning of its making—and the identity of its maker—remains open.