En Divina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico

by Michael Wallis, Craig Varjabedian (Photographer)

The Penitente Brotherhood, formally known as La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, is a lay Catholic organization unique to New Mexico and southern Colorado. This book documents moradas, the buildings in which the Brothers meet and pray, and offers an intimate and respectful account of their religious observances.
The Penitente Brothers have been objects of intense curiosity ever since New Mexico became a tourist attraction, and they have guarded their privacy fiercely. This book respects the privacy of all members of the brotherhood. Quotations are anonymous; building locations are unidentified. But unlike previous melodramatic or scholarly accounts, Michael Wallis's straightforward text and Craig Varjabedian's unadorned photos capture the deep piety of the brothers and their complex relationship with their history and the modern world. These are ordinary people, many of whom have moved away from the mountain villages in order to earn their livings in city jobs. For these hermanos, keeping their tie to the morada is to keep alive their history, their culture, as well as to express a deep piety. It is impossible to see Craig Varjabedian's luminous photos of their moradas or to hear the voices of the hermanos captured in Michael Wallis's intimate text without being moved by this glimpse into a religious experience absent from the lives of most Americans.

130 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

Michael Wallis is the bestselling author of Route 66, Billy the Kid, Pretty Boy, and David Crockett. He hosts the PBS series American Roads. He voiced The Sheriff in the animated Pixar feature Cars. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Reviews

[R.L.S.D · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

My primary exposure to the Penitentes - a lay organization formed because of the dearth of priests in rural New Mexico - has been Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I've had little notion how much credence to give its infamous reputation for flagellant practices, or how to understand its relationship to the established Catholic Church. Bishop Lamy, (who you might know because of Willa Cather's book, Death Comes For the Archbishop) famously worked to stamp out local Hispanic expressions of the faith, including this movement. Anglo settlers were very uncomfortable with their intense tennebrae services, which included cacophanous evocations of the earthquake that struck at the moment of Christ's death.

At the beginning of this book, I was a little put off by what I took to be the breathless tone of an outsider fascinated by obscure spirituality. I actually ended up being pretty compelled by the author's efforts to de-sensationalize the movement and show it as a body of Christians laboring to preserve their heritage of faith in a place where there are few shepherds. Much of text is direct speech from the brothers (there are also sisters) themselves. I think I expected them to sound slightly like a cult - but at least in 90s, they just sound like practicing followers of Christ. A great deal of Scripture is included - Genesis, John, Romans, and Galatians. Most Penitentes are married and many live their life in cities, reuniting only for festivals and holy days. A couple of hermanos make the claim that the more grotesque stories about Penitente practice - actually nailing themselves to crosses for example - were invented by the hermanos themselves in an effort to get people to stop bothering them about their private penitential practices. (It backfired.) There is a strangely Protestant quality to this group - in the midst of high church forms and images, they reject dependence on authority for their Church life. It is truly a frontier Catholicism.

The photographs are a little one-note, but who could get tired of looking at adobe buildings in the mountains, beneath New Mexican sky-scapes?