The Miraculous Loretto Chapel Staircase

Published by Atlas Obscura September 30, 2025

Dylan Thuras: If you’re a nun and you’re facing a problem you don’t know how to solve, you might pray on it. If you’re a nun and facing a really big problem that you really don’t know how to solve and you’ve exhausted all the other options, maybe you really, really pray on it. I don’t mean just regular prayers here. I mean you go nuclear. Something called the novena. Nine full days of prayer and meditation.

This is exactly what was going on with the Sisters of Loretto, a community of nuns in Santa Fe, New Mexico, all the way back in 1873. They had a real problem on their hands. So they settled into their pews and got ready to focus all of their attention for the next nine days, hoping that on the other side there would be some kind of answer.

This was their conundrum: The sisters had been trying to build a chapel. They had an architect who had been brought over from France and he had all these beautiful grand plans. The architect, named Projectus Mouly, really went all out. Just a side note, I feel like the name Projectus should come back. What a name. Anyway, Projectus Mouly had these giant stones cut from a nearby quarry. He had stained glass brought over from France, which meant it had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and survive a covered wagon journey to New Mexico. And then construction got underway.

For five years, it was going really well. But just as they were about to cross the finish line, Projectus dropped dead. The sisters went into the chapel to take stock of the situation. It was, in fact, very beautiful. It was almost done. Everything seemed to be in place. The stone, the stained glass, the choir loft in the back of the chapel floating 20 feet above the ground.

And that was the big problem. This choir loft, it was just floating there. Projectus had not yet put in any stairs.

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