The Penitente Brotherhood

The Catholic Church withdrew its priests from Northern New Mexico in the early eighteen hundreds. The institutional church had priorities elsewhere in its vast empire. The remote Hispanic villages of the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountain valleys were not among them.

The villages organized themselves.

The Hermanos Penitentes, the Brotherhood of Penitents, is a lay Catholic religious organization that had existed in some form in Northern New Mexico since the Spanish colonial period. Without priests, it became the central institution of spiritual and community life for many Hispanic mountain communities. The brotherhood maintained the moradas, the small adobe chapter houses that still dot the Northern New Mexico landscape. Members organized baptisms, weddings, and burials. They cared for the sick and the dying. They fed the poor.

And during Lent, they practiced mortification.

The specific penitential practices of the brotherhood have been documented by New Mexico cultural historians with varying degrees of directness. Members carried heavy wooden crosses up hillsides on their shoulders. Men practiced flagellation. The brotherhood re-enacted the Passion of Christ in village ceremonies that blended Spanish Catholic theology with pre-Christian Iberian ritual traditions, and, some scholars argue, with ceremonial elements absorbed from generations of proximity to Pueblo religious practice.

The Catholic Church disapproved. For decades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutional Catholicism in New Mexico attempted to suppress or reform the brotherhood. The brotherhood persisted anyway.

The Penitentes are not a historical artifact. The brotherhood is still active in Northern New Mexico. The moradas are still used. The Lenten ceremonies still occur in certain villages, away from public view. What was once the primary religious institution of isolated mountain communities has survived the return of institutional Catholicism, the arrival of American Protestant denominations, and decades of scholarly and journalistic attention.

The brotherhood kept faith when the Church did not come.