Priest and Legend Dies

The Rev. Casimiro Roca, a Northern New Mexican legend known for his great faith, his enduring age and his blessing of holy dirt, died this week after having just celebrated his 97th birthday a few weeks earlier.

Fabiola Valdez, the parish administrator for the Holy Family Parish in Chimayó, tells SFR late Thursday that the Spanish-born priest, also known for his wit and his small stature, probably died in his sleep.

At least that's what Valdez would like to think when Roca hadn't been seen for a couple of days, then was discovered Tuesday morning in his bed inside his dwelling at the Holy Family Parish in Chimayó.

She said he had just celebrated his birthday on July 24.

"He chuckled with us and he seemed to be happy, but you could tell that old age was creeping in, which happens when you're 97," says Valdez, who has known the priest since she was a young girl. "He was ready, and very peaceful."

He was born in 1918 in a small town outside of Barcelona and came to the United States as a member of the Sons of the Holy Family to start a new life.

He had worked as a parish priest in Colorado before he was assigned to Northern New Mexico's Santa Cruz de la Canada Parish, which included the Santuario in 1954.

Known affectionately over the years as el curita loco de Chimayó ("the little crazy priest"), Roca spent the last few years of his life at Holy Family,  just  two miles away from the Santuario de Chimayo. But it was at the santuario where he said over thousands of Masses in the last five decades, cementing his popularity among the parish there.

In fact, the priest was so popular that a wood figurine has been carved in his image, fetching for $100 at the gift shop off the Santuario. It is inside the gift shop that Roca had wished to be buried, and a six-foot hole has already been dug, in fact. He said he wanted that to be his final resting place because he feels so close to the Santuario.

It was Roca, in fact, who saved the great and historic Santuario from ruin by adding flagstone to the floor in the late 1970s to shore up the foundation, which had been sinking as a result of too many people scooping up dirt from it, thinking it contained healing powers when rubbed on themselves.

For decades, the dirt, whose popularity has so grown that it's mailed out of state and country to the dying, has lured thousands of people from around New Mexico during Easter. And part of  the dirt's very lore started with Roca, who seized on the dirt's long reputation as miraculous, then promoted it through the years, blessing the stuff in bulk.

The result was a massive wave of pilgrims every Easter, starting Good Friday and ending Easter Sunday.

But the crowds, Roca had admitted, eventually got out of hand, and in an interview in the mid-1990s by this reporter, he was clearly having a hard time controlling his anger over the issue, which was rare; for anyone who knew Roca knew him to be a patient man.  When asked what he thought about the masses making the trek for the sake of the dirt, he told me: "It's the faith that heals, not the dirt!"

And if anybody knows Father Roca, you know that he probably believed that up to the very end. He was one of a kind and will go down in Chimayo history as one of the greatest priests in New Mexico, if not the country and world.

Rest in peace, Father.

Services will be held Tuesday, Aug. 11,from 11 am to 7 pm, at Holy Family Church in Chimayó.

Santa Fe Reporter