By Larry Torres, Associate Professor UNM-Taos

One afternoon in 1997, some men were clearing away the rotted boards from the sanctuary of the old church of La Santísima Trinidad in the valley of Arroyo Seco in Taos County. As they budged the square column away from the right side of the sanctuary they unearthed a metallic object buried just below the mud surface.
 
As they inspected the object they found that it was a medallion of sorts bearing the image of what they supposed was a saint. Just then the local priest came into the venerable church in ruins. The men gave him the medallion and told the priest that the piece had been buried face-down in the mud. He immediately recognized the image stamped on it as the face of Pope Pius IX. The Latin inscription also bore this out.

The priest walked with the medallion back to the parish rectory where he inspected the relic. It turned out to be a copper, gold-plated piece. Such artifacts were minted only during the reign of a particular Pope. He began to piece the history of this Pope and his relationship to New Mexico, but he was more interested in the relationship between the Pope and Arroyo Seco.
 
The mid 1850s had been a turbulent time in the history of the papacy in Rome. The Apostolic See in Baltimore Maryland had just chosen a French priest named Jean Baptiste Lamy to be the first bishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1851. In his ad limina visit to Rome as few years later, this first Bishop of New Mexico had reported to Pope Pius IX and to Cardinal Barnabo that there was a renegade group of religious zealots known as Los Hermanos Penitentes who thought they were the Church of New Mexico. Pope Pius quietly told Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy to get rid of the Brotherhood.

Pope Pius IX dismissed the matter as he was soon preoccupied with reports that a half-demented girl named Bernadette Soubirous was seeing an apparition in a cave located near a dump in Lourdes, France. Bernadette had claimed that the apparition seemed to be a lady clad in a white gown held by a blue girdle. She said she was “The Immaculate Conception.” Pope Pius was soon caught up in trying to make a ruling on the validity of her claim. The belief in “The Immaculate Conception” had been an interesting theological notion but as of yet it had not been proclaimed dogma nor doctrine.

Meanwhile, Bishop Lamy had returned to New Mexico and had confided the conversation he had had with Pope Pius IX to Padre Antonio José Martínez of Taos. Padre Martínez was outraged since he considered himself to be the spiritual head of the Penitente Brotherhood.

The parish priest began to frame the local events within an historical context. He surmised that the parish priest of Taos had come to Arroyo Seco where La Santísima Trinidad was his mission church. Arroyo Seco had been a cornerstone of the Penitente movement. He supposed that Padre Martínez had given the medallion a requiem Mass and had buried Pope Pius IX in effigy face-down in the mud.
 
A cedar-lined shadow box was crafted by a local parishioner. The papal medallion was encased within in and mounted on the eastern wall of the church sacristy. It is one of the treasures that many visitors to Holy Trinity can see whenever they visit this semi-functioning church in Taos County.