So I get this email from a friend of mine.... about a mysterious stair case in a Catholic Church in New Mexico...... it was attached to a powerpoint show... showing the staircase and the church with a gothic type music........ very disturbingly powerful
---actual story on the staircase found on
http://www.lorettochapel.com/Two mysteries surround the spiral staircase in the Loretto Chapel: the identity of its builder and the physics of its construction.
When the Loretto Chapel was completed in 1898, there was no way to access the choir loft twenty-two feet above. Carpenters were called in to address the problem but they all concluded access to the loft would have to be via ladder as a staircase would interfere with the interior space of the small Chapel.
Legend says that to find a solution to the seating problem, the Sisters of the Chapel made a novena to St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpenters. On the ninth and final day of prayer, a man appeared at the Chapel with a donkey and a toolbox looking for work. Months later the elegant circular staircase was completed, and the carpenter disappeared without pay or thanks. After searching for the man (an ad even ran in the local newspaper) and finding no trace of him, some concluded that he was St. Joseph himself, who came in answer to the sisters' prayers.
The stairway's carpenter, whoever he was, built a magnificent structure. The design was innovative for the time and some of the design considerations still perplex experts today.
The staircase has two 360 degree turns and has no visible means of support. Also, it is said that the staircase was built without nails—only wooden pegs. Questions also surround the number of stair risers compared to the height of the choir loft and about the types of wood and other materials used in the stairway's construction.
Over the years many have flocked to the Loretto Chapel to see the Miraculous Staircase. The staircase has been the subject of many articles, TV specials, and movies including "Unsolved Mysteries" and the television movie titled "The Staircase."
this was on there site....So I did more research...... I get a kick out of doing this!!!!!!!.........................................................................
By KATE NELSON - SANTA FE, N.M. - Only here, in the City of Holy Faith, could the notion of a miracle wrought by a mysterious angel thrive against evidence to the contrary.
Talk of the supposed miracle didn't even start until decades after its purported occurrence. Since then, it has been nurtured and burnished into a hair-tingling tale of romantic excess.
And monetary benefit.
Pay the $2.50. Step inside the Loretto Chapel. Visit its gift shop.
Seven days a week, camera-toting tourists crowd into what is now a private museum. Chattering away, they nearly drown out the audio tape that tells - over and over, hour after hour - the saga of the miraculous staircase that became internationally famous in the 1930s by its mention in Ripley's Believe It or Not.
In 1852, Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy brought the Sisters of Loretto to Santa Fe to help tame the Wild West. By 1878 the sisters had opened a girls school and a little chapel, modeled after Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
Per the architectural custom of the day, no staircase led to the choir loft. Monks just climbed ladders. Nuns, however, needed a staircase. Installing one would block half the pews. What to do, what to do?
The nuns decided on a novena - nine days of prayer seeking a heavenly favor.
On the ninth day, a carpenter appeared. Silently, he created the spiral staircase using only a hammer, a saw and tubs of water to bend a type of wood found nowhere else in New Mexico.
When he finished, he disappeared, never to be paid, never to be seen again.
At this point on the endless audio tape, the voices of a choir rise to an Easter-morning level of rapture.
Was the mysterious man really St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters? That's the legend, the romance, the miracle.
But wait a minute, says historian Mary J. Straw Cook in the newly revised edition of her 1984 book, "Loretto: The Sisters and Their Santa Fe Chapel."
The carpenter, she says, was Francois-Jean Rochas, a member of "les compagnon," a French guild of celibate and secretive craftsmen. And he was far from saintly. Reclusive and irascible, he ended up dead in his Dog Canyon cabin, a victim of either suicide or assassination.
Cook reached her conclusion after seven years of research and seven trips to France, combing through archives, chancing upon relatives and piecing together scattered bits of history.
"You try everything to document everything," she said. "I have proved this to most historians. They're convinced this was, in fact, the man."
Her evidence includes an 1895 article in The New Mexican, in which the chapel's contractor, Quintus Monier, names Rochas as the staircase's builder. And a 1881 entry in the sisters' daybook indicates that a Mr. Rochas was paid $150 "for wood."
Cook has found a freight slip for wood delivered by ship from France and speculates that Rochas brought it over himself.
Upon his mysterious death in southern New Mexico, Rochas left three unmailed letters that mention Lamy, later the title character in Willa Cather's book, "Death Comes for the Archbishop," and another craftsman who worked on the chapel.
The book containing Cook's evidence was released last month to glowing reviews in various newspapers. The word was out. The legend was solved!
Despite all that, the audio tape plays on. Perhaps the story is too good to die.
"It was a miracle in any case," said the Rev. Jerome Martinez, rector of St. Francis, the cathedral built by Lamy. "It was an answer to prayer."
Cook isn't about to dispute that.
"A lot of people still believe that it was St. Joseph, and that's OK," she said. "The mystique will remain, according to your faith. In and of itself, that staircase is a work of art. It has to be inspired."
Miracles appear, after all, in every sunrise, every flower and every baby. Why not in the labor of a man, guided by the hand of God, here in the City of Holy Faith?
And here are some others.............................................The first documented French to enter New Mexico were the brothers Paul and Pierre Mallat, who arrived in 1739. They were picked up by the Spanish military and promptly sent back to New Orleans. Between 1749 and 1752, at least four other parties of Frenchmen, primarily trappers, were apprehended in New Mexico, but were not so lucky as to be simply deported. They served jail sentences in Chihuahua first. A Frenchman, Pedro Vial, was employed by the government in New Mexico in 1786-93 to explore possible trails between Santa Fe and San Antonio and Santa Fe and St. Louis; but did not remain in New Mexico. The first Frenchman documented as a New Mexican citizen was Baptiste La Lande, who was first captured and jailed in Santa Fe. He was later released and moved to Taos where he married at least three times and sired five known children. Another Frenchman, Jose Charvet, formally petitioned to become a New Mexican citizen in 1805, offering his services as a translator. He was granted his wish and served translating for the Pawnee.
Under Spanish rule, almost all illegal French and American trappers and explorers caught in New Mexico were imprisoned in Chihuahua. This changed soon after Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821. By 1924 French trappers had ensconced themselves in and around Taos. The most famous of these French trappers were the Robideaux brothers, Antoine, Louis, Joseph, Isadore, and Francois. Antoine Robideoux was a Taos fixture for over twenty years. Another famous Frenchman in Northern New Mexico at that time was Ceran St. Vrain.
One of the most controversial Frenchmen in New Mexico arrived in Santa Fe in 1850. His name was Jean Baptiste Lamy and he went on to become Archbishop. When the Sisters of Loretto needed a staircase built for their new Chapel in 1872, they brought in a French carpenter by the name of Francois-Jean Rochas, a member of les compagnon, a French guild of celibate and secretive craftsmen. After building a "miraculous" staircase for the Loretto Sisters, Rochas moved to southern New Mexico and settled in Dog Canyon, where he was murdered in 1895 by cattlemen after his water rights.
Located thirteen miles south of Alamogordo off highway 54 at the entrance of Dog Canyon, the Park is a repository of some of the most dramatic history in New Mexico–land disputes and murders, Apaches on the warpath and U.S. Cavalry, wagon trains and pioneer ranchers. The Park is named after Oliver Lee, a one-time Dog Canyon rancher, one-time politician, and, some even say, one-time murderer and land-grabber, who rose to become one of the most influential men in the wild west history of New Mexico.
Although Park life now is rather less dramatic than in the bigger-than-life Lee’s day, one can still come and hear the famous stories of Lee and tour his restored ranch house on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Here one can also visit the ruins of "Frenchy’s" (Francois-Jean Rochas) cabin, where this original Dog Canyon pioneer was found dead with a bullet in his chest around Christmas in 1894, a year after Lee arrived at the Canyon. Most historians believe Frenchy met his end in a dispute over land or water rights. Sometime later, Lee was implicated in a case involving the disappearance of a prominent lawyer, Albert Fountain, and his eight-year old son, Henry, neither of whose bodies were ever found. Lee later became a primary investor in ranch holdings that covered over one million acres, stretching nearly to the Arizona border.
In the mid-1880s, a Frenchman named Francois-Jean "Frenchy" Rochas started homesteading at the mouth of Dog Canyon. He built a rock cabin, raised cattle and grew grapes, apples, cherries, plums, peaches, figs, and even olives. He also worked with a newcomer, Texas rancher Oliver Lee, to channel water from Dog Canyon to Lee's ranch, about a mile to the soutb. Frenchy mysteriously met his end just after Christmas in 1894, when he was found dead in his cabin, a bullet in his chest. Although the local authorities determined it was suicide, historians believe it was more likely that someone murdered him in a dispute.
Recent findings to this story have caused controversy. After learning that a "hermit rancher," known as Francois-Jean Rochas, had died, leaving behind an array of sophisticated carpentry tools, Mary Jean Cook, an amateur historian, began digging around for his death notice.
She found it in the January 6, 1896 issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican.
The notice said that Rochas murdered body had been found in a remote cabin, and that he had been favorably known in Santa Fe as "an expert in wood" and had "built the handsome staircase in the Loretto Chapel. . ."
We know little of Frank Rochas’ journey, save its origin and end. Francois Jean Rochas was born September 22, 1843 at Vif, Isere, France, just south of the provincial capital of Grenoble along the Isere River, a tributary of the Rhone. The eldest of four children, he grew up in Uriol in the Alps of south-eastern France. Beyond his genealogy, nothing is known of Frank’s early life, or his reasons for emigrating. Motives both romantic and sinister have been suggested, but no explicit record remains until Frank Rochas appears in the 1886 Territorial Tax Rolls, in the county of Dona Ana. Frank probably spent several years in and around the territorial capital of Santa Fe, where he became acquainted with several fellow countrymen, including Etienne Lacassagne, Quintus Monier, and Jean Baptiste Lamy, Archbishop of Santa Fe.
Recent research by Mary Jean Cook attributes the construction of the miraculous staircase in Santa Fe’s Loretto Chapel, and two other staircases, to Frank. He probably arrived on the railroad which had reached Las Vegas in 1879 (the year after the Chapel, itself, was completed) and Santa Fe in February 1880, via an 18 mile branch line from Lamy. Cook has established that Frank arrived in Santa Fe during September 1880, and commenced work on the Loretto staircase the following month, completing construction in April the following year. Cook believes Frank had been hired in France through contacts in the emigre community specifically to build the staircase for the Sisters of Loretto. Presumably, Frank continued his carpentry trade for several years in the Territorial capital before venturing south to settle his Dog Cañon homestead and try his hand at cattle raising.
By 1886, Frank’s Dog Cañon property was valued at $2,680.00, suggesting he had been making improvements for several years. Unfortunately, the tax assessment was not itemized until two years later. At that time, Frank owned 6 horses and 400 head of cattle, valued at $20 and $10 per head, respectively.
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I do not mean any harm by my research... I am in a period of my life Where I must question mysteries brought upon by religious factions....
It is a shame how certain religions have to Lie and make up false miracles to keep peoples faith....................................................................
All the world's religions are speaking of the same Reality. They have different words, different concepts and ideas, but there's really only one Reality, and there's only one Spirit moving through all life. There might be different techniques to get there, but there's only that is real, and when you're there you know it. Whatever you want to call it — you can give it different names — it's all the same thing.
drunvalo melchizedek
