Under the cool shade of the poplar trees behind El Santuario de Chimayó, a few hundred parishioners of Holy Family Parish gather for a Sunday Mass before their annual fiesta. Some lean against a tree or lounge on a low wall. Others are seated on stone benches. Some are still searching for a place to sit or stand. They whisper to one another, shake hands and hug.

But when they see the Rev. Casimiro Roca, the associate pastor, come down from the santuario, they hush and rise.

This year, they are holding the Santiago, Santa Ana y San Joaquin Fiesta to honor Roca. The tiny priest is 90. They threw a party for him a few days earlier, on July 24, the day he has chosen to celebrate his birthday, but no one is quite sure what day he was born.

Roca walks slowly toward the altar, under the canopy of trees, with the Rev. Julio Gonzalez, the parish's pastor. Gonzalez towers over him. So do the trees. They have grown since Roca first set foot here more than a half-century ago. Their trunks are massive now.

The congregation, too, took root after he arrived, a young priest from a small village near Barcelona, Spain. There was no parish in Chimayó then, only chapels scattered through the hills. Roca brought the families together. He joined a score of communities from Santa Cruz to Peñasco and beyond.

"God takes us to unknown people," says Gonzalez, as he celebrates Mass with Roca at his side. "Unknown places ... unknown challenges."

Gonzalez tells Roca his life is not the sum of his memories, preserved "like objects collected in a museum." It is a springboard to the "true life."

Roca is rich with memories. The dates are no longer clear; names of people and places are difficult to recall. He keeps important names close by, on a desk in a small office in the santuario.

The room used to belong to the burros, he says with a chuckle the next morning. He is preparing to preside over Mass at 11 a.m. But he spares a moment to share a few memories.

"I was assigned first pastor of Truchas," he says. His Barcelona accent is still heavy after all these years. He cups his palm around his ear to indicate his hearing is weak. But he continues telling the story of how he came to Santa Cruz in 1954 and spent the following decades building a faith community. "The people, to me, was my life."

Roca's first mission was to make a new parish in Truchas. He served more than 20 towns. He gathered parishioners.

One of them, Cecilia Romero, was just 11 when Roca came to Truchas. Even as a child, she recognized the new priest as an inspiring missionary. "He had a lot of followers, and we outgrew the church."

"I started to build new churches," Roca says. First in Truchas and later in Chimayó, the site of the region's new Holy Family Parish.

He shakes his head. "Now I am good for nothing because I am 90 years old ... 90, 90, 90."

He recalls the celebration Sunday, and he laughs, remembering they had dressed him as Santo Niño de Atocha. There were mariachi musicians, he says. It was a big celebration. "But I told them it will be the last time I celebrate my birthday. Because I will die. ... And I am ready to die now."

The parishioners are not alarmed by this sort of talk. He's always saying goodbye, Romero says. She's seen many priests come and go, but it seems Roca will always be around. He still celebrates Mass every day at the santuario. To stop serving, she says, "would be the death of him."

"I am good for nothing now, at my age, 90 years old." Roca shakes his head.

Then suddenly, he stands. "But I saved this building," he declares. "Because it was lost."

Romero says Roca is well-known for saving the santuario from ruin when he moved to Chimayó from Truchas in 1959. The foundation of the santuario was washing away, toward the Santa Cruz River. The shrine risked collapse, and Roca didn't have a penny to spend on the sacred building's preservation.

"But if you have faith," he says, "you can make a mountain move."

He begins to explain how two men from the area agreed to help him move a mountain of earth to rebuild the foundation — when the office door bursts open. Joe Martin and his mother-in-law, Catherine Macan of Kansas City, want to know everything about the shrine.

Roca laughs. He has been to Kansas City. He has been all over Nebraska and Kansas, preaching in Spanish to the workers of the fields. "I loved it," he says.

The visitors have heard that Roca saved the santuario. He nods. "When I arrived here, I start crying. The church was completely abandoned."

"But if you have faith," he says again, "you can make a mountain move."

So with these two men, he says, as if the story were continuing uninterrupted, he moved 150,000 tons of dirt. And the men didn't charge him for their work. They did it for the Lord.

He tells Martin and Macan the New Mexico governor came to see the santuario several years after it was restored, and he chastised the governor. "I told him — shame, shame, shame, on all the governors in New Mexico" for allowing the shrine to perish.

Gov. David Cargo returned to Santa Fe and promptly wrote to the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and not much later, "they sent me this thing," Roca says. He leads his guests to a plaque on the wall near the shrine's entrance, designating the site as a National Historic Landmark. It is dated 1970.

"Last week, this governor called me by telephone. He remembered what happened at the santuario. ... I think he is very old now, but he was a good man."

Martin and Macan want to know the story of the crucifix on the altar.

Roca tells them the legend of the crucifix of Our Lord of Esquipulas, the "Black Christ." It was Good Friday in 1810, he says, and a light was coming from the ground near the Santa Cruz River. The landowner, Don Bernardo Abeyta, saw the light and began to dig, until he found the crucifix. Three times, the men, women and children formed a procession and carried the crucifix to the church at Santa Cruz, Roca says. Three times, it reappeared in Chimayó, and finally the people decided to build a church at the site where it was discovered.

"I changed nothing of the church," Roca tells the visitors. "This is original."

"There are no nails," he says. "They had no nails to put in." The doors, too, are original, he says as he reads an inscription from 1813.

The visitors have heard the dirt from the shrine is holy, that it performs miracles. It heals.

"I have no faith," says Roca. He shrugs.

"What?" They are stunned.

"I have no faith in the dirt. I have faith in the Lord." Newspapers print nonsense, he says. "They say the dirt makes cures." He slaps his forehead. "Ai, ai, ai."

In the back of the shrine is the hole where the crucifix was unearthed. He has filled the hole with fresh dirt every day for 55 years, he says. He would know if it was holy.

Roca smiles. The dirt is symbolic, he explains. It is a keepsake to remind people of the faith that brought them to the shrine. It is not miraculous.

The visitors ask where he is from. He turns and shuffles back to his office. It's a village near Barcelona, he says. He searches the desk for the name of the town. Here it is, on a postcard: Mura. He was there five years ago to celebrate his 60th anniversary as a priest. It was his last visit, he says. Most of his relatives are gone. He had a twin, but the boy lived only 11 months. As a child, the priest was weak, too, he says, and couldn't walk until he was 4. His brothers, Pablo and Pedro, carried him on their shoulders.

In the late 1930s, when Pablo and Pedro were young men, they were captured by Communists. They were tortured and murdered, he says. "I wanted to die, too. And they wanted to kill me. ... I went up into the mountains one year and a half and lived with the animals."

Well, that's all, he says. "I can present nothing special because I am old."

Macan says she hopes to see him again.

"Last night I celebrated my last birthday," Roca says, referring to the fiesta. "And now I am going to die."

But he'll have to wait a little longer. Five people from out of town have made a pilgrimage to the santuario, and they would like him to hear their confessions.