Blood in New Mexico

Prayers, wailing chants and the mournful notes of reed pipes sounded last week in many a dusty, sparsely settled district of New Mexico and southern Colorado. On Ash Wednesday swart, hot-eyed Mexicans and half-breeds ceased their labors, stole into the moradas which are the secret churches of Los Hermanos Penitentes--the Penitent Brothers. In each morada the Elder Brother of the community presided over ceremonies which were a prelude to the 40 days of Lent, spent by all Penitentes in bloody emulation of the sufferings of Christ. One by one the brothers bowed before a Sangrador who with a jagged piece of glass gouged crisscrosses on their backs. The penitents would keep their wounds open and raw until Easter, often by rubbing rock salt in them.

The Southwest's Penitentes number around 5,000, are supposedly an outgrowth of the Third Order of St. Francis whose Catholicism degenerated into a tortured identification of themselves with Christ through pain and penance. The Mother Church deplores the Penitentes, has been able to do little about them. Secretive, savage toward meddling outsiders, the blood brothers practiced their rites for hundreds of years without molestation. When near Albuquerque last month a writer named Carl Taylor was murdered by his house boy, it was suggested that the killing was in retribution for an article written by Taylor on the Penitentes and subsequently published in Today. Nevertheless, in recent years the Penitentes have been photographed, and on Good Friday many a tourist in New Mexico goes "Penitente-hunting," to be foiled only if the brothers conclude their Lenten observances in the dead of night or in the most remote districts.

Whipped to a frenzy during Holy Week, the brothers assemble on Good Friday, each band with a lucky one chosen to be the Cristo. To the thin wail of the pipe and the dull sound of whips, they proceed to a hill of Calvary. The Cristo carries a heavy cross to which, on the hill, he is lashed so tightly that he turns black and puffy. The cross is hoisted up. The Cristo cries: "For the love of God, not with a rope ! Nail me ! Not with a rope ! For the love of God, nail me!"

The Penitentes no longer use nails because too many Cristos have died that way. For 45 minutes the Cristo hangs on the cross while around him his brothers chant, wail, scourge themselves with whips and cactus. Then the victim is cut down, carried back to the morada where awaits an enfermero with brews and unguents.

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