PATTERNS
8.
Religious Professionals
Selective memory is no doubt essential to the human condition. The only way we can see ourselves as coherent is to revise history continually. Some clerical historians reorder the past by silencing the role of clergy in movements they judge unorthodox. In recent times this tendency has coincided with the search by lay historians of religion for truly nonclerical, "popular," or even "pagan" traditions. But except when the clergy is of a different caste or race, we are unlikely to find sharp divergence between their thinking and that of the laity. This is particularly so in Catholic areas like the rural north of Spain which produced their own clergy and even exported them. It is not surprising that some priests and religious abetted the seers of Ezkioga.
Vocations
In 1931 there were about 2,050 diocesan priests born in the diocese of Vitoria and by my estimate about 2,700 other male religious and 5,550 female religious born there. Some Basque families regularly produced
clergy and religious for generations. Consider, for instance, the family of David Esnal, a priest living in San Sebastián who in 1932 and 1933 was in guarded contact with Patxi Goicoechea. Esnal's brother was a Franciscan and his sister was a Franciscan Conceptionist in a convent in Villasana de Mena (Burgos). His brother Roque had married a woman who had a cousin who was a Franciscan Conceptionist in the same convent. Of Roque's eight children, two sons were diocesan priests and one a Franciscan and a daughter was a Franciscan Conceptionist known for her holiness. In two generations, Esnal's and the next, seven out of twelve persons became diocesan priests, nuns, and male religious.[1]
I extrapolated the number of religious vocations from the number of diocesan priest vocations using the ratio of 4 to 1 that holds for Ataun, Zeanuri, and Navarra as a whole. For the Franciscan Conceptionist: Urquizu, "Sor María Paz." Esnal (b. 1888) wrote Patxi from San Sebastián on 31 December 1932 to pray for him and come to see him but not to tell anyone (private collection).
Families with many vocations were at least moderately well-off, for prior to the end of the nineteenth century the regular orders required dowries and it could be expensive to educate a secular priest. Laypersons in these clans—the nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, or mothers and fathers of priests or religious—came to have an easy familiarity with the profession. Such persons were less easily cowed by their parish priest or bishop. They knew the inside gossip, the politics of appointments at the diocesan, national, and Vatican levels, and the currents of opinion within the church. They took full advantage of the alternatives in liturgy and moral theology which different priests and religious orders had to offer. Individuals like Carmen Medina, José María Boada, and Pilar Arratia who had the resources and the inclination to found orders and restore church buildings had direct social access to archbishops, cardinals, nuncios, and the Roman Curia.
Not only clans but entire towns became famous as nurseries for the clergy. Some places specialized in male or female religious of a given order, others were more diversified; some specialized in diocesan clergy. In 1935 Zeanuri, a mountain town in Bizkaia with 2,500 inhabitants, was proud to be the birthplace of 53 living priests and seminarians, 106 male religious, and 109 female religious.[2]
Zeanuri'ko abade (Priests from Zeanuri). I thank Ander Manterola for this reference. For 1923 see Gorostiaga, AEF, 1924, p. 124. For the specialization of Dima in Trinitarians see Irukoistar, Dima.
A survey of clergy in the diocese of Vitoria in 1960 (by then essentially the province of Alava) showed that some towns producing many religious did so irregularly. These vocations seem to have corresponded to the efforts of particular priests or recruiters. Members of religious orders have described to me friars who came to their village, gave talks at the school, and convinced whole sets of friends to join the order. The route to a vocation could also be through a parish preceptoría . This was a school, generally free, that often prepared children for the orders or seminaries favored by the particular priest who ran that school. From 1902 until his death in 1961 Bruno Lezaun of Abárzuza (Navarra) stimulated through his schools around a thousand vocations.[3]
Duocastella, Sociología y pastoral, chap. 6; Ricart, "Bruno Lezaun"; Cipriano Lezaun, Don Bruno; Pazos, Clero navarro.
But other towns, presumably those like Zeanuri in which vocations became a family matter, maintained their role over several generations. If we compare vocations by size of town of origin, the diocesan priests of Vitoria in 1931 came far less from the industrial areas around Bilbao, San Sebastián, Eibar, and Irun and the fishing towns along the coast and more from the agricultural and pastoral uplands.
When we look at the towns within the immediate zone of the Ezkioga visions which for their size produced the most priests, we find those towns that stayed faithful to the Virgin of Ezkioga the longest: Zegama (23 priests from a population of 2,119), Albiztur (8 priests from a population of 805), and Ataun as well as Itsaso, Ormaiztegi, Legorreta, and Ordizia.[4]
Controlling for size of town, the most vocations came from the adjoining Duranguesado and Villarreal sectors of Bizkaia and Alava, the mountainous band of Gipuzkoa from Zegama to Oiartzun, the southeastern corner of Alava, and the Campezo area of Alava. In the 1931 directory of the diocese of Vitoria I counted the diocesan priests born in each town, then calculated the number of inhabitants per priest for those towns that were the birthplaces of five or more priests. Conversely, for towns of six hundred inhabitants or more, I made a list of those towns producing the fewest diocesan priests. Since I measure vocations by all priests living in 1931, to some extent the results reflect population distributions prior to that year.
Ataun, the home of two prominent Ezkioga seers, had 2,424 inhabitants in 1931. Thanks to a careful count of its vocations we know that in that year it was the birthplace of 26 living diocesan priests, 60 nuns, and 37 male religious, that is, about four times as many male and female religious as secular priests. In 1931 Ataun had approximately four hundred households. About one in six had a living member who was a priest or religious, as follows:[5]
Derived from Arín, Clero de Atáun. For Zeanuri in 1935 the equivalent figures are 136 houses with one vocation, 23 houses with 2 (total = 46), 9 houses with 3 (27), 4 houses with 4 (16), 7 houses with 5 (35), and 1 house with 7 (7) (from Zeanuri'ko abade, 19).
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Vocations in Ataun often occurred in family clusters. One in three individuals with a vocation had a sibling with a vocation. About one in five had an uncle or aunt or niece or nephew on their father's side with a vocation. We do not know how many had relatives through mothers, but there were probably as many as through fathers. This would mean that a majority of Ataun's religious or clergy had a close family relative in religion.[6]
Out of 123 Ataun vocations in 1931, 47 had sibling clerics, 25 had near relatives on the father's side, and 20 had both kinds. Figures for the 13,000 vocations in Navarra in 1980 show similar proportions. Slightly more than one-third had siblings as religious or priests; see Imízcoz, Una Emigración particular, 462, citing figures from J. A. Marcellán Eigorri, Cierzo y bochorno: Fenómeno vocacional de la Iglesia en Navarra (1936 y 1986) (Pamplona: Ed. Verbo Divino, 1988). For vocations of secular priests see Pazos, Clero navarro.
The houses with the most vocations were on the whole the more prosperous farms. Several of their families, like Arín and Tellería, had produced religious and priests regularly in previous centuries. The rise of active orders and the endowment of scholarships at seminaries at the end of the nineteenth century opened up clerical careers to more people, and it was from the 1890s that the boom in vocations in Ataun occurred. The great revolution came not in the secular clergy but in the religious orders. Prior to this period, the religious from Ataun were concentrated more in contemplative orders, particularly Benedictine monks and Cistercian Bernarda nuns. As more orders returned to Spain at the end of the century, entrance became easier and vocations of religious jumped to a high level in 1890–1909 and increased 50 percent more in 1910–1929.[7]
Houses with most vocations: Larrazea, Lauspelz, Orlaza-aundia, Telleri-aundia, Arin-aundia, Arratibel-azpikoa, Geaziñe-zarra, and Itzate-berri.
There was now room in the secular and regular clergy for the wealthy and the humble, the intellectual and the worker. In 1931 Ataun natives were seminary professors, pastors of large and prosperous parishes, directors of schools, and mother superiors. Others were coadjutants, a Jesuit tailor, a Passionist convent cook, and Benedictine, Capuchin, and Franciscan lay brothers. Among the nuns there were teachers and nurses but also cooks, ironers, cleaning women, and other lifelong menials. The orders people chose were generally
Children of Gernika dressed as Native Americans for mission procession, 1930.
From Nuestro Misionero, January 1930. Courtesy Instituto Labayru, Derio
those with houses closest to Ataun. Youths often entered the same order as their aunts, uncles, or siblings (five brothers from Orlaza-aundia became Benedictines, four sisters from Lauspelz became Daughters of Charity and their brother joined the Vincentians), and there were families whose tradition was to provide secular priests.
The religious orders did not keep the youths of Ataun close to home. First, they sent them to a novitiate, the most distant of which were in Paris and Madrid. Then they assigned them according to their particular calling and the order's needs. In 1931 only those who had become secular priests or contemplative nuns or monks were likely to return to the diocese. The active male religious were often found working abroad, particularly in Latin America, and the active nuns mainly elsewhere in Spain. In all, half of Ataun's vocations were posted out of the diocese; one out of five was out of Spain.
If these figures hold for the diocese as a whole, they should give us pause. The period 1918–1930 was a golden age of missionary propaganda, particularly in the north. The heartland of conservative Catholic Spain was not a closed, ingrown society but one with intimate family links throughout the world. In
Children dressed as Chinese for mission pageant in Vitoria, 1932. From
Iluminare, 20 February 1932, p. 56. Courtesy Instituto Labayru, Derio
1931 there were natives of Ataun in China, Jerusalem, the United States, many countries in Latin America, and France in an ecclesiastical version of the great worldwide diaspora of European peasants at the opening of the century. Through letters and rare visits these religious kept in touch with their relatives at home.[8]
Imízcoz, Una Emigración particular, 470. For Durango's missionaries see Anitua, Nuestro misionero 1932. Perea, El Modelo, 2:881-1142, describes the organization of the mission effort.
We have seen that interest in missions extended even to children, who participated in the conversion of heathens through monthly magazines and dressed in elaborate costumes for annual mission pageants. In some of her visions Benita Aguirre heard the Virgin ask her to pray for the conversion of the Chinese. Some of the same families contributing alms and promises to the Ezkioga vision network had brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunts who were missionaries.[9]
See Benita's vision of 23 October 1932, in SC D 118. On the previous day she heard the Virgin ask for prayers for the Jews.
For women especially missionary work offered the possibility of holy adventure in wild contrast to life on the farm or in an urban apartment. Teresa de Avila dreamed as a child of becoming a missionary. From around 1910 Basque and Navarrese women could fulfill these age-old fantasies. María Recalde was from Berriz, where a new missionary order of nuns had been founded in her lifetime; the founder, Margarita María López de Maturana (d. 1934), was a
Women missionaries: masthead of magazine from Mercedarians
of Berriz, 1932. Courtesy Instituto Labayru, Derio
candidate for beatification. Some of the Mercedarian Sisters of Charity trained in Zumarraga went overseas, and there was a new house for female missionaries in Astigarraga as well. These orders depended on alms and new vocations to keep up their mission work, so they kept the Basque public well informed of their activities. The result was a region in which not just families—Esnals or Ayerbes—but entire towns had a proprietary interest in the church.[10]
Imízcoz, Una Emigración particular, 493-495; Ruíz de Gauna, Catálogo, includes fourteen different mission magazines published in Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia, Alava, and Navarra in the 1931-1936 period; other magazines, like La Milagrosa y Los Niños (Vincentians, Madrid) and El Siglo de las Misiones (Jesuits, Burgos), circulated in the area.
The importance of locally born clergy becomes obvious in towns that produced many religious. There virtually everyone was either related to or neighbor to the family of a priest or other religious. Resistance to diocesan policy on Ezkioga was strongest in towns like Zegama, Ataun, Itsaso, and Ormaiztegi precisely because in such an intensely devout rural society only priests or religious, or those who enjoyed their support, could resist the hierarchy. In the townships that produced many vocations, a kind of kin-based ecclesiastical culture was strong enough to allow some people to make up their own minds.
Sometimes more important than the village parish priest were the sons or daughters of the village who were priests or religious elsewhere but who returned to the village for visits to their families. Among both kinds of priests, those most friendly and open had the most influence in public opinion about the visions. José Domingo Campos, the pastor of Ormaiztegi, was a native of the village but never let on how he felt. "Nunca se supo [We never knew]," some of his most assiduous parishioners told me. When parishes were deeply divided, such priests found it
prudent not to express personal opinions or give sermons on the subject; they often limited themselves to reading diocesan decrees. Priests or religious who came from the village but practiced elsewhere might be less hesitant to speak their minds.
The Parish Clergy
I know of no diocesan priest who had visions at Ezkioga, but in the first months of the summer of 1931 many priests expressed pride in their seers, accompanied them to the vision site, stood with them as they saw what they saw, and debriefed them afterward. There were also those who held back from the start. Consider the six priests in Zumarraga. Two did not let their sympathies show. Antonio Amundarain and Andrés Olaechea were enthusiastic organizers and participants. Juan Bautista Otaegui sometimes led the rosary at the vision site in July 1931 and until the fiasco in October believed his cousin Ramona Olazábal. Miguel Lasa, the most approachable and best loved curate in Zumarraga, openly opposed the visions. He was the son of a charcoal-maker in Ataun, and it was to him that the Ezkioga milkmaid had taken the first girl seer. He spoke out against Patxi's theatrical trances: "The Virgin does not come to scare people." He warned at once that Ramona's wounds could have been faked. And in 1932 he instructed parishioners not to participate in the stations of the cross at Ezkioga.[11]
Based on extensive testimony 1982-1984 from Zumarraga residents, fellow priests, and religious. For Otaegui, ED and EZ, 11 July 1931; for Lasa quote, Pío Montoya, San Sebastián, 11 September 1983.
In March 1932 Juan Casares, the curate of Ezkioga in charge of Santa Lucía, sent a letter to Justo de Echeguren, the vicar general, who at that time was actively planning with Padre Laburu the talks that would discredit the visions. The letter is evidence of division among local priests. It seems that the curate of nearby Itsaso had been boasting that the vicar general had called him in and approved of his stance (in Casares's words a stance "of credulity and encouragement") toward the seers. In the Itsaso annex of Alegia down the road from Ezkioga seers and believers could be sure of a friendly ear in confession. Obviously peeved, Casares asked if the Ezkioga priests should change their policy:
Pray let us know if we ought to favor and promote these apparitions, in which case we will avoid the animosity of the people who, emboldened by this priest and a few others, have got to the point of making our lives almost impossible and our ministry unfruitful, and we will avoid as well letters complaining about us being sent to you, although in any case if my conduct has not been as it should be, you may shift me somewhere else, in which case you could count of course on my obedience.
Perhaps the vicar general was using the Itsaso priest as an unwitting informant or perhaps he was trying to provide some kind of church outlet for the pilgrims. In any case, his task as the head of a deeply divided and at times strong-headed
clergy was complicated, and one can understand why he let Laburu do the convincing.[12]
Casares to Echeguren, Santa Lucía, 18 March 1932, ADV, Ezkioga. The Itsaso priest claimed that Echeguren gave him "the express command to inform him of what was going on in this matter."
To understand fully how the clergy made up their minds about Ezkioga, we need to know about their internal, informal groupings. The clergy and seminarians were divided, largely along linguistic lines, between those who cultivated a Basque identity and those who cultivated a Spanish identity. Many of the more cultured younger priests with Basque leanings, inside and outside the seminary, looked to the teachers José Miguel de Barandiarán and Manuel Lecuona as their leaders. One of these younger priests was Sinforoso de Ibarguren, the pastor of Ezkioga, who participated in the Eusko-Folklore Society. From the vert start Barandiarán and Lecuona, as they told me separately, felt that despite their curiosity about the visions as a human phenomenon they as priests should not encourage or validate them by going to the site. In all the years of visions, they never did. A young member of their group did go and wrote one of the only negative articles published about the visions in the summer of 1931. Yet other priests with Basque Nationalist sympathies were swept up by the same hope for a divine sign in favor of the race which moved the Nationalist writer Engracio de Aranzadi and the newspapers Euzkadi, Argia , and El Día .[13]
Masmelene, EZ, 15 July 1931; José Miguel de Barandiarán, Ataun, 9 September 1983; Manuel Lecuona, Oiartzun, 29 March 1983; cf. for an enthusiastic Nationalist, Apezbat [a priest], Amayur, 24 July 1931.
But even in July Basque Nationalist clergymen were not the key actors. The organizers of the prayers seem to have been José Ramón Echezarreta, the brother of the owner of the field, who had been in Latin America, and above all, the Zumarraga parish priest Antonio Amundarain and the local directors of the Aliadas. Particularly enthusiastic in this respect was the assistant priest of Zumaia, Julián Azpiroz. But when the bishop forbade priests to go to the site, Amundarain and his group obeyed, regardless of their private sympathies. After Echeguren's verdict against Ramona, most of the Basque Nationalist clergy turned against the visions. Those who stuck with the seers were Carlists, especially Integrist Carlists. By 1934, except for one group of believers in Zaldibia, the Ezkioga visions, to the extent that they were politically defined, were an affair of the pro-Spanish right.[14]
In 1934 the Basque archbishop of Valladolid launched a drive to raise money to build the church of the Great Promise. The promise of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the Jesuit Bernardo de Hoyos—that Christ would reign in Spain with more devotion than in other nations—naturally raised the hackles of Basque Nationalists, who did not consider Spain their country. La Constancia collected contributions, and the printed lists of contributors were a way for the Carlists and Integrists to stand up and be counted on an issue that bore the approval of Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria himself. Juan Bautista Ayerbe was one of the first contributors, and Conchita Mateos, Tomás Imaz, Juana Usabiaga, and several priests who had been or continued to be sympathetic to the Ezkioga cause proclaimed their Spanishness in this way.
Zegama in particular was a stronghold of clerical sympathy for the visions. Of the twenty-three priests in the diocese native to Zegama, at least seven were at some point enthusiastic supporters. Foremost among them was the parish priest, José Andrés Oyarbide Berástegui (b. 1868), who worked with Padre Burguera, took down the Zegama vision messages, and forbade the seers there to tell the Ezkioga priest what they saw. His sister Romana often accompanied the child seer Martín Ayerbe to Ezkioga. In Zegama Oyarbide was assisted by a brother, and another curate was also a believer.[15]
On Oyarbide and sister, Rigné to Olaizola, Ormáiztegui, 4 September 1932; R 59; and B 624-628. The other curate was José Cruz Beldarrain (b. 1889, Oiartzun), Oiartzun, 29 March 1983.
From the same generation was José Antonio Larrea Ormazábal (b. 1869), Benita Aguirre's parish priest in Legazpi. At first he accompanied her to Ezkioga and took her statements; later he turned sharply against the visions. Francisco Aguirre Aguirre (b. 1873) was a curate in Irun. Like Juan Bautista Ayerbe, he
provided a link to the earlier visions at Limpias. He had been on a pilgrimage there in June 1919, and after his return to Irun he recovered from a chronic limp after praying to the Christ and putting its picture to his leg. In the summer of 1931 he and his sister went several times to Ezkioga from Irun by train. On 8 September 1931 while he was saying mass, the Virgin told him to tell the vicar general that it was she who was appearing at Ezkioga, that she wanted a church built there, and that a miracle would take place soon. Aguirre went to Vitoria the next day but was unable to see the vicar general. In May 1933 Evarista Galdós had visions in Aguirre's house which convinced him to take down her messages for Padre Burguera.[16]
On 3 August 1919 Francisco Aguirre led another pilgrimage to Limpias. Diario Montañés, 5 August 1919 and 11 October 1919; see also Leopoldo Trenor, ¿Qué Pasa en Limpias? (Valencia: Tipografía Moderna, 1920), 293-295; for Evarista, B 308-312, 726, 739-740.
Gregorio Aracama Aguirre (b. 1884), the pastor of Albiztur, was Francisco Aguirre's cousin. At the start of the visions Aracama's nephew, Juan José Aracama Ozcoidi (b. 1909), was a seminarian. In 1933 he became curate of Urrestilla, where he believed in and assisted the seer Rosario Gurruchaga. Two other believing priests from Zegama, Doroteo Irízar Garralda (b. 1875), director of the Ave María School in Bilbao, and Isidro Ormazábal Lasa (b. 1889), parish priest of Orendain, saw and were convinced by Ramona's bloodletting.[17]
J. J. Aracama spent a month with his uncle at the height of the Albiztur visions in the summer of 1932; A, 31 July 1932, p. 3. For Irízar: B 316; R 19, 74-75; Echeguren to Laburu, Vitoria, 20 January 1932; and López de Lerena to Echeguren, 21 December 1932, private collection. For Ormazábal: B 316; R 18, 71; Echeguren to Rigné, 22 December 1932, private collection.
Soledad de la Torre and the Priest-Children
Several of these priests from Zegama were prestigious older rectors. Some had had experience with a local mystic prior to the events at Ezkioga. For in the mountains bordering Navarra and Gipuzkoa an extraordinary woman held influence over diocesan priests. She was Soledad de la Torre Ricaurte (1885–1933), the founder in Betelu (Navarra) of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Eucharist and its ancillary movement, La Obra de los Sacerdotes Niños, the Society of Priests as Children. Like the visions at Ezkioga, La Madre Soledad has been expunged from history. Much like Magdalena Aulina, she encroached on male territory, extending the time-honored role of conventual mystic consultant to include overt tutelage of priests.
My first clue to her role was a Basque-baiting pamphlet by the priest Juan Tusquets. In February 1937, soon after San Sebastián had been taken by Franco's troops and Ezkioga believers imprisoned there, Tusquets delivered a lecture entitled "Freemasonry and Separatism." In his talk he referred in passing to "meetings of a spiritist nature in order to mislead and discredit the Catholic faith, like those of Ezquioga and Betelu, organized by the Basque Nationalists and visited by groups of Catalans." To him such meetings were part of a general decline in moral order, manifest as well in the Masons, the Rotary Club, and Jehovah's Witnesses.[18]
Tusquets, Masonería, 65-66 (thirty thousand copies were printed).
In Betelu and Pamplona I learned about Madre Soledad and why some clergy would have thought her subversive. Born in Colombia into a well-to-do family, at age thirty Soledad was moved to go to Spain, where she arrived in 1915 a kind
of missionary in reverse, from New World to Old and from women to men. She had been encouraged by her Jesuit confessor, and through him other Jesuits arranged for her to use a large house in Betelu. Betelu was a prosperous Navarrese village that like Ormaiztegi and Banyoles was a genteel summer resort. She eventually obtained permission from the Augustinian bishop of Pamplona, José López y Mendoza, to found her missionary order; the bishop in turn obtained Benedict XV's oral permission.[19]
See Soledad del Santísimo Sacramento [Soledad de la Torre], "Respuesta al Cuestionario [del Obispo de Pamplona]" (hereafter Cuestionario), Betelu, 15 December 1928, 8 pages, handwritten, ADP, Betelu. Antonio Matute of Durango ceded the house to her in 1922 on the condition that her order be canonically approved. For the papal permission see Presbítero, LC, 27 December 1933.
Madre Soledad brought two women from Bogotá and found others locally to be missionaries. She recruited other women as lay auxiliaries. Her aims were "to restore an evangelical life, glorify the humanity of Christ, and popularize the Eucharist that the Lord wants for the sanctification of souls" (in the house in Betelu the Eucharist was always exposed), but in particular she sought "to sanctify priests." Several associations to sanctify clergy had been founded from 1850 on, and in 1908 Pius X had specifically called for more such associations. Madre Soledad's innovation was to work toward this goal through an order of women.[20]
Torre, Constituciones, 3 (in ADP, Betelu); A. Brou, "Associations pour la sanctification du clergé," DS 1 (1937), cols. 1038-1045.
In Betelu she set up a school for the children of the rural elite and she offered adult literacy classes on Sundays for servants and country folk. According to women who attended her school, she was quick, good-hearted, and holy. "She had something special, a gift; she solved your problem as if she was a confessor." Betelu is in a Basque-speaking area, and although all the teaching was in Spanish, she diligently acquired Basque. Villagers remembered that she subsisted on fruit and milk.[21]
Lidia Salomé, María Salomé, and Juanita Lazcano, Betelu, 7 June 1984.
Madre Soledad gathered around her a number of priests who supported her order, and she created for them an association based on the concept of childlike innocence. She published its rules in 1920. At its head was an "Older Brother" and a governing council named by the bishop. The diocesan examiners who approved the rules remarked on the novelty of her idea, noting that the priests who joined would lead a kind of monastic life while in the world.[22]
Examination by Dr. Bienvenido Solabre and Lic. Nestor Zubeldia, Pamplona, 11 May 1920, in Torre, Constituciones, 46.
According to her manual, El Libro de las Casitas (The Book of the Playhouses, or Dollhouses), printed in 1921, the Sacerdotes Niños were supposed to be as open and as generous as very young boys. In the manual she uses diminutives in speaking to the priests and refers to supernatural beings or sentiments as if they were characters in children's books, like Da. Pánfaga (Mrs. Bread-eater). The Niños had to flagellate themselves six days a week and do other simple exercises:Stay five minutes in a little corner of your room, very still, without moving, and as if you have in your arms the baby Jesus, and kiss it five times….
Imagine that the Virgin arrives, takes the little boy by the hand, and takes him to a garden; there he enjoys seeing the most beautiful flowers (the virtues of the Virgin). Noticing that he wants them, she picks him some, makes him a bouquet, and gives them to him. Do this for five minutes.
For special penances she prescribed praying with arms outstretched, lying prostrate on the floor, eating only half a dessert and offering the rest to the child Jesus, contemplating the stations of the cross, writing the Lord a letter about one's dominant passion and then burning it, "speaking for three minutes with the Virgin in child talk," offering a bouquet of "posies" to Jesus, or visiting for five minutes the Lord in his playhouse and speaking to him in child talk.[23]
Torre, Libro de las casitas, 274-276.
In all Madre Soledad's work she applied the spirituality of female contemplatives to adult males living in the world. But implicit in this program was the priests' personal belief in her spirituality, since in the role of little boys they accepted her as a kind of mother. A prerequisite for joining the association was "to destroy oneself, renouncing in a certain way one's own personality and abandoning oneself totally in the hands of God." A discipline of puerility may have been particularly attractive for rural Basque and Navarrese clergy as a kind of relief from their inordinate social and political power. We glimpse this power in the rare republican newspaper reports from these villages, which refer obliquely to the excessive influence of the jauntxos (literally señoritos, but figuratively "honchos") in all aspects of daily life. Humility in Madre Soledad's association balanced a heavy diet of daily authority.[24]
Torre, Constituciones, 6; for priest-sons and spiritual mothers, Ciammitti, "One Saint Less"; for jauntxos, "Lecumberri" in VG 1932 on 15 and 31 January, 11 February, 23 and 31 March, 15 April, 19 July, and 17 November; see also complaints about Betelu's priest, Fermín Lasarte, answered in "Desde Betelu," PV, 1 July 1933, p. 8.
What bishop approved such a constitution? At the end of a long career, at the age of seventy-two López y Mendoza was just then firmly suppressing all public reference to the miraculous Christ of Piedramillera. But by the same token he very much had a mind of his own. Like other bishops of his time, he took refuge in convents when he needed a break, in particular with the Augustinian nuns of Aldaz, ten kilometers from Betelu. He was also interested in the theme of holy childhood. In 1919 he exhorted each parish to take up collections and enroll children in the missionary club, Obra de la Santa Infancia. Madre Soledad's school and literacy program would have appealed to his sympathies for Catholic social action as well.[25]
Rodríguez de Prada, Visiones; BOEP, 1919, pp. 68-71. For the Obra in the diocese of Vitoria: Perea, El Modelo, 2:1005-1008.
From the diocese of Navarra Madre Soledad's most important recruits were two cathedral canons, Bienvenido Solabre and Nestor Zubeldia; they served as the diocesan examiners for the rules. From 1922 to 1924 Zubeldia was rector of the diocesan seminary. There he hung maxims of Madre Soledad on the walls, exposing entire cohorts of priests to the Niño idea. Other adherents included priests in the neighboring villages of Almándoz, Errazkin, Betelu, and Gaintza and a few from as far away as Tudela, Granada, and La Coruña.[26]
For Zubeldia: Pazos, Clero navarro, 314 n. 40; Goñi, DHEE, 4:2813-2814, and Z. M., Don Nestor Zubeldia.
Betelu is just five kilometers from the border of Gipuzkoa, and some Gipuzkoan priests became Niños. They included Gregorio Aracama of Albiztur, possibly some priests from Zegama, and Juan Sesé of Tolosa. Manuel Aranzabe y Ormachea, a wealthy priest from Lizartza, was a strong supporter; the nuns cared for his sister, who was mentally ill.
The priest-children considered that Madre Soledad had the gift of reading their consciences, and she gave them sermonlike lectures. In the mid-1920s, when
the Gipuzkoan priest Pío Montoya was a seminarian, Juan Sesé took him, his sister, and their father to see her. They were favorably impressed and remember her as a small woman, very modest, who spoke much and brilliantly and referred to human pride as "Señora Chatarra [Mrs. Junk]." The townspeople of Betelu understood that Francis Xavier appeared to her in ecstasy and recall that the village was sometimes crowded with visitors.[27]
Pío and Angeles Montoya, San Sebastín, 9 February 1986; Salomé et al., Betelu, see n. 21 above.
By 1919 her fame as a "saint" had spread widely, for several bishops had inquired about her to the nuncio, and he wrote López y Mendoza. It may have been then that she and the bishop of Pamplona decided that the wisest course was to institute her order for nuns and her association for priests as diocesan congregations. This the bishop did on 5 March 1920, pending Vatican approval. López y Mendoza protected her until he died in 1923. His successor in Pamplona, Mateo Múgica, did not like what he heard. The unusual submission of male priests to a female had led to unfounded rumors of sexual license.[28]
Torre, Constituciones, 45, 48; Carlos Juaristi, Pamplona, 17 June 1984.
The same rumors later circulated about the group of Magdalena Aulina, which also associated males and females.The Holy Office condemned the Book of the Playhouses and the rules of the institute and dissolved the association of priests as children altogether. On 23 February 1925, following the orders of the Vatican Congregation of Religious, Múgica severely restricted the freedom and power of the women in Betelu. The erstwhile Misionarias were to be strictly contemplative Adoratrices who renewed their vows annually. They could found no more houses. Their goals could have nothing to do with clergy, "only the sanctification of souls in general," and the Niños could visit them no longer. The auxiliary laywomen could continue provisionally, but only if they had no contact with the priests and were not members of the convent.[29]
Mateo Múgica y Urrestarazu, "Nos el Dr....cumpliendo rendida y literalmente ...," Pamplona, 23 February 1925, 3 pages, handwritten, ADP, Betelu. The decree of the Congregation of Religious seems to have been on 4 February 1923. BOEP, 13 June 1925, p. 328, carries condemnation of the movement by the Holy Office dated 20 February 1924 in a letter sent by Card. Merry del Val to Múgica, 1 June 1925; see Pazos, Clero navarro, 314.
Madre Soledad immediately went to Rome. There, accompanied by the superior general of the Augustinian order, Eustasio Esteban, she appealed to Cardinal Laurenti, the prefect of the Congregation of Religious. She protested that "if the Holy Church does not permit us to have as our object the greater sanctification of priests, we humbly request our secularization." She told him she would appeal to the pope if necessary to avoid being cloistered. According to her, Cardinal Laurenti allowed her to continue "the practices of the past"—I assume she meant her contact with priests—as long as the rules nowhere mentioned the sanctification of clergy.
Not surprisingly, when Madre Soledad returned to Navarra Mateo Múgica rejected this Mediterranean solution of doing one thing and saying another, so the entire community petitioned the Congregation of Religious to return to secular life. By 1928, when Múgica was transferred to Vitoria, Rome had not replied and the community remained in a kind of limbo. In her explanation of the situation to the new bishop, Tomás Muniz y Pablos, Madre Soledad listed nine professed nuns, two novices, and a postulant.[30]
Cuestionario, 4-6. Postulant: Felicitas Aranzabe y Ormaechea, age 30, Lizartza (Gipuzkoa).
Novices who had professed in private: Juana Arocena y Iturralde, age 29, Almándoz (Navarra); Juana María Ezcurdia Marticorena, 36, Errazkin (Navarra).
Professed nuns: María Solabre y Lazcano, age 27, Los Arcos (Navarra); Rosa Arrizubieta y Otamendi, 32, Uztegi (Navarra); Lorenza Pellejero y Goicoechea, 33, Gaintza (Navarra); Juana Balda y Ezcurdia, 35, Gaintza (Navarra); Beatriz Celaya y Gurruchaga, 38, Zarautz (Gipuzkoa); Juana Agorreta y Ibarrola, 40, Zilbeti (Navarra); María Luisa Cediel y Angulo, 42, Bogotá; Angelina Rozo y Alarcón, 60, Bogotá; Soledad de la Torre y Ricaurte, 43, Bogotá.
Gaintza, Errazkin, and Uztegi are small villages next to Betelu and Lizartza is the first town in Gipuzkoa on the road from Betelu. Almándoz is also in the same zone. The other places are within a sixty-kilometer radius.
In spite of Muniz y Pablos's visit in 1929, neither he nor the Vatican acted; the nuns remained contemplative. Theoretically at least, their priest followers could not maintain any contact with them, although the auxiliaries continued to operate the school. In fact, given Cardinal Laurenti's verbal consent to Soledad's mission, she continued to have contact, direct or indirect, with the priests. Women who lived near the convent and who attended the school remembered that even after the nuns were cloistered, Soledad de la Torre addressed the priests from behind bars on Thursdays. We may assume that contact with laywomen was even easier.[31]
Madre Soledad did not convey her enthusiasm for the Ezkioga visions to the villagers. The Betelu women I spoke to had been to Ezkioga only once, when a woman from Pamplona, a summer resident, hired two buses for the townspeople: Lidia Salomé, María Salomé, and Juanita Lazcano, Betelu, p. 4. I know of no visions around Betelu.
In July 1931 Madre Soledad and the nuns were living under this ambiguous, provisional regime. Gregorio Aracama of Albiztur sent two of his sisters to ask if he should go to Ezkioga. Her response was, "Go to Ezkioga and pray a lot." This attitude confirmed his interest, that of his parishioners, and, we may presume, that of other Niños with whom he was in contact. And the fervor and mystical enthusiasm of the first years of her movement must have made other people in the area receptive to the Ezkioga visions.[32]
Juan Celaya, Albiztur, 6 June 1984, pp. 29, 43. Some Navarrese followers took an interest in the visions in the Barranca. The Iraneta group learned about Madre Soledad from her last confessor, Fermín Lasarte, whose brother and sister-in-law often went to watch Luis Irurzun. Other priests who had been followers of Madre Soledad also took an interest in Luis (Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, pp. 3-4).
Soledad de la Torre died on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1933. Her believers considered the date a portent, but thereafter the convent gradually disintegrated.[33]
I verified the date of death in the parish register as December 8, for some villagers claimed that she died on Good Friday at 3 P.M. Some nuns chose to leave the convent, for in November 1935 only five were left, two of them infirm (letter from Sor María Luisa de la Cruz, Beatriz de Jesús María y José, and Rosa de Santa Ana to the bishop of Pamplona, Betelu, 24 November 1935, typewritten, 2 pages, ADP, Betelu).
La Constancia published a front-page obituary signed "A Priest," and three weeks after Madre Soledad died, two women from Segura presented the article to Conchita Mateos in vision. Conchita murmured, "Now you are better off, but your daughters must be sad," and said she saw the nun with a white habit and a crown of stars next to the Virgin.[34]Presbítero, LC, 27 December 1933; J. B. Ayerbe, "Visión de Conchita Mateos, en su casa de Beasain, el 30 de Dicbre, 1933," 3 pages, typewritten, signed by Conchita Mateos and J. B. Ayerbe, AC 302.
Similarly, Esperanza Aranda claimed that when she held up a picture of Madre Soledad during a vision in 1949, Our Lady said the nun was then a saint in the choir of virgins. Esperanza had experienced more than her share of ostracism and ridicule and asked the Virgin how Madre Soledad could have been so slandered in her lifetime. Aranda said the Virgin replied, "Do not place your trust in men; they are like a hollow reed that even the wind can break." Juan Bautista Ayerbe, who recorded the vision, noted that Soledad de la Torre's "marvelous writings have now been collected to be sent to Rome."[35]J. B. Ayerbe, "Interesantes revelaciones sobre varias almas, 8 Abril 1949, Festividad de los Dolores," 2 pages, typewritten, AC 74.
Female Religious
Madre Soledad's attempt to assume formal authority over parish priests was daring and ultimately fatal for her order, but the authority itself was ancient. Priestly consulting with female mystics has a long history in Mediterranean Catholicism, and indeed in pre-Christian times, as at Delphi and Dodona.[36]
For Catholic examples, Selke, El Santo Oficio; Kagan, Lucrecia's Dreams; Zarri, Finzione; Zarri, Le Sante Vive, 103; and Bilinkoff, "Confessors and Penitents."
When the Ezkioga visions began, it was natural to compare what the lay seers were saying with what the "professional" nun seers like Madre Soledad said, for convents were by design platforms for contact with God.It was easy to pin divine rumors on anonymous nuns, like the one who on her deathbed predicted prodigious events for 12 July 1931. On July 24 La Constancia cited another unnamed nun in support of Ezkioga:
An illustrious religious who occupies a high post in his order told us that a nun who leads an extraordinary life whom he knows and talks to has announced for this year great appearances of María Santísima. Would she be referring to Ezquioga?
A mimeographed letter that circulated among believers in 1933 referred to a nun "directed by one of the highest eminences of the church" as "a very holy soul with a very elevated spiritual life" and "a fervent devotee of the Holy Christ of Limpias and his prodigies; she is very old and burdened with crosses." In spite of the verdict against Ezkioga by the bishop of Vitoria she counseled patience and happiness, saying, "All God's works need persecution; otherwise they would not be true, and by it they gain strength."[37]
Egurza, LC, 24 July 1931; Salvador Cardús to Ayerbe, 11 October 1933; letter from nun to Cardús, 21 September 1933.
In many convents there were nuns thought to be especially spiritual. One nun in Zarautz was thought to predict deaths accurately; she was also called in when houses were bewitched. In Aldaz there was a visionary Augustinian nun who could see a picture of the Christ of Limpias respond to her prayers or feelings.[38]
For Zarautz, Petra de la Maza, 14 December 1983; for Aldaz, Rodríguez de Prada, Visiones, 27-29, 81-82, 104-106, about María de los Dolores de Jesús y Urquía, who began to record her visions in May 1932 and likely had them previously; she died 26 February 1934. See also Vergel Augustinano, October 1934 and 1935, p. 478.
In female orders male religious already had mystical guides when they needed them. The tradition of consulting holy people governed the response of male and female religious to the visions at Ezkioga. They did not question whether such visions were possible but rather how well the visions fit the criteria with which they judged their own mystics.The census of December 1930 found 5,450 female and 2,251 male religious in the Basque Country, about half of them in Gipuzkoa. The number in the province had increased greatly when religious took refuge there after the separation of church and state in France in 1905. The number of nuns continued to increase between 1910 and 1930. Since the beginning of the century Gipuzkoa, Alava, and Navarra had been first, second, and third among Spanish provinces in the number of religious as a percentage of total inhabitants.[39]
From Anuario estadístico de España, 1933, p. 664. Religious living in the Basque Country on 31 December 1930:
|
Total religious per 10,000 inhabitants and nationwide rank:
|
About one in four houses of female religious in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia were contemplative. This proportion declined as the active orders, particularly in San Sebastián and Bilbao, took on more tasks in hospitals, social services, and schools.[40]
Anuario estadístico de España, 1933, p. 667; Guía diocesana, 1931; and Anuario eclesiastico, 1919.
Male and female religious helped to ease the dislocation caused by an economy that was shifting from agriculture to industry. Since many of the active orders were French, they kept the Basques abreast of the latest developments in French piety, including the great apparitions.Religious orders establish a rule, a way of life, and a set of devotions that make each order an extended family different from other orders. Some orders, like the Capuchins, regularly transferred members from house to house, creating a certain homogeneity within the order in each province. Cloistered religious
might spend all their adult lives in the same small group; these houses, rather than the orders they belonged to, were the group that determined belief or disbelief in the visions. Orders varied widely in the source of their members, whether rural or urban, wealthy or peasant; these factors could predispose them in favor of or against the messages of the largely peasant seers. All of the orders in July 1931 were uneasy in a nation that had turned against its religious.
The orders most active in the vicinity of Ezkioga had propagated many of the devotions that showed up in the apparitions, thereby laying the groundwork for the public's acceptance of the messages. Ezkioga seers saw religious in their visions and attempted to win over religious houses to the cause. The laity watched closely for the reactions of the religious to the apparitions.
Cloistered religious were a major, long-term constituency for the visionaries, especially the female seers. In 1930 there were at least thirty convents of contemplative nuns in the Basque Country, particularly of Franciscans of various types, Augustinians, and Carmelites. And Basque women entered convents in the rest of Spain as well. These little societies developed their own criteria on matters supernatural; at times they felt little bound by the church hierarchy. Nuns might be enclosed, but they could write the seers with questions and requests for the divine. Convents of believers transmitted news of Ezkioga to their clerical and lay friends and benefactors. Some houses in Pamplona were intensely interested; Tomás Imaz, the San Sebastián broker, took seers to the Cistercian convent at Narvaja in Alava for visions, and in Oñati "those inside the convent knew more about the visions than those outside."[41]
For Oñati: Petra de la Maza, Zarautz, 14 December 1983, p. 1.
Maria Maddalena Marcucci
Passionist nuns shared the key devotions of the visions. According to their rule, the Sorrowing Mother was the heavenly superior of all their convents. At Ezkioga the Passion as experienced by the Virgin was the dominant visual metaphor.
The most prominent Passionist nun in Spain was the Italian Maria Giuseppina Teresa Marcucci, in religion known as Maria Maddalena de Gesú Sacramentato. From 1928 to 1935 she was superior of the house in Bilbao-Deusto. She had known Gemma Galgani of Lucca by sight, as she herself was from a village near Lucca. Many thought Maria Maddalena was a holy woman, and she herself had revelations and visions. Starting in 1928 her writings were published by her director, Juan González Arintero, the Dominican expert on spirituality, and his successors in the magazines Vida Sobrenatural . In her letters and autobiography we see a woman in close, obedient contact with Dominican guides.
In a letter dated 15 October 1931 Maria Maddalena referred to the visions at Ezkioga: "The apparitions of the Most Holy Virgin of the Sorrows seem intended to show us the sufferings and anguish of the Heart of Jesus. Some souls
believe they have seen him as the Nazarene, carrying the cross." Marcucci attributed Christ's anguish to Spain's rejection of him and worried about what she could do to protect her community.[42]
Marcucci (1888-1960), En la cima, 186.
Marcucci met Evarista Galdós in early 1932 and afterward wrote her from Deusto with requests to the Virgin to intensify the Passionist vocations of the community, to cure a sick nun, and to take Marcucci herself directly to heaven when she died. Her initial contact with Evarista may have come through male Passionists in Gabiria or Irun. But it could also have come by way of Magdalena Aulina. In February of 1933 Salvador Cardús understood that Aulina was directing Marcucci spiritually. Marcucci came from the same pious environment as Gemma Galgani and knew about the surprising supernatural events that Gemma described. It was fitting that she should believe both the visions of Ezkioga and Magdalena Aulina.[43]
Marcucci to Evarista Galdós, Bilbao-Deusto, 20 March 1932, private collection (text in appendix). For Cardús, SC E 534. Aulina told Cardús on 6 February 1933 that Marcucci was a saint who had had a vision of Gabriele dell'Addolorata in which the saint introduced her to Gemma Galgani.
This independent abbess was accustomed to receiving spiritual help from other women as well as from male guides, just as she gave such help to women in her convents and readers of her writings. In her letters Marcucci refers to holy women in the different convents in which she lives and others in her order whose inspirations, revelations, or visions guided her and others in the order. Women and men who felt as she did that they received particular communications from the divine formed a community of mutual support. A permanent, hidden, conventual mystical network thus underlay the more spectacular lay visions known as apparitions.[44]
See, for instance, Marcucci, En la cima, 288, 335, 348.
The Franciscan nuns of Santa Isabel in Mondragón were firm believers in Ezkioga. Magdalena Aulina was said to have served as spiritual director to their superior, who had in the house a saintly lay sister. The priest Baudilio Sedano de la Peña encouraged belief in the visions among the same nuns in Valladolid and brought Cruz Lete to speak to them. One nun had visions of her own, and the house was divided for decades between those who believed in her and Ezkioga and those who did not. She warned the latter that they would go to hell.[45]
For Mondragón, SC E 534 (6 February 1933). Aulina visited the Mondragón convent 15 October 1932, SC E 481/22; in December 1933 the nuns still believed, ARB 177-178. For Valladolid: Sedano de la Peña, Barcelona, 5 August 1969, p. 15.
The seers Pilar Ciordia, Gloria Viñals, and others attempted to sway houses by having visions inside them, a kind of home delivery of grace. One young woman reported that the Virgin told her, "I want you to be the tutelary angels of the religious communities. Get them to pray, because many, not all, need it." But it was not always easy to convince those whose chaplains or spiritual guides did not believe. Evarista Galdós is said to have converted one convent when she discovered in a vision that one of the sisters had a bad foot. And Benita Aguirre said she had private messages from the Virgin for certain cloistered religious.
about internal practices that made them marvel, such as that [the Virgin] was very happy with a rosary that they prayed secretly as it is prayed at Ezkioga, or that they should not stop praying the three Hail Marys before
the Litany, or that, as in former times, they leave the keys with an image of the Virgin, for she would protect them.
In Pamplona a girl from Izurdiaga saw the Virgin threaten a community of nuns for not believing. When the tide turned against the visions, clergy made every effort to "deconvert" believing houses. Padre Burguera complained of "instances of communities where a Father cast the spiritual exercises he was leading so that when he finished, the religious ended up not believing anything [about Ezkioga]."[46]
For tutelary angels, the servant María Nieves Mayoral, 13 October 1932, in J. B. Ayerbe, "Mensajes divinos," n.p., dittoed, ca. 1935, 14 pages, p. 9, AC 6; for Evarista, 21 October 1932, but order, convent, and place are unidentified in B 721; for Viñals, R 50-51; for Benita, J. B. Ayerbe, "Maravillosas apariciones," AC 1, p. 2; Izurdiaga girl, 11 September 1932, in a private house, B 167-168; for deconversion, B 479.
Several Ezkioga seers eventually became cloistered nuns. One of the small dramas in the vision dialogues was whether and when the seers, including the girl from Ataun, Ramona Olazábal, and Benita Aguirre, would enter convents. In January 1942 Conchita Mateos claimed she received her vocation after seeing a nun who had recently died in a Franciscan convent in a town of Castile. The spirit nun dictated a letter for Conchita to send to the mother superior saying that Conchita had her same playful nature and would take her place. This unusual reference letter was successful, and Conchita and twelve other girls from five families of believers entered the convent, where she continued to have visions.[47]
For Conchita see J. B. Ayerbe, "18 Enero, 1942, Aparición de la gloriosa religiosa María Angeles, muerta en octubre de 1941 en el convento de ...," half-page, typewritten, AC 353; believers were there from Urnieta, Bergara, Anoeta, and Azkoitia (ARB 171). Of the 9 girls who were seers in Mendigorría in 1931, 4 became nuns—2 of them Daughters of Charity, 1 a Dominican, and 1 a Redemptorist Oblate. María Recalde wanted to be a Carmelite nun when she was nineteen (B 598 and L. Jayo). The Izurdiaga girls wanted to be nuns and the boy a priest. Of the 21 girls and 21 boys in the Santa Lucía school in 1932, 1 girl became a Mercedarian, 1 boy a Franciscan and another a parish priest, an overall rate of 1 in 14, not unusual for the Goiherri and lower than for parts of Navarra. Given such rates, 8 of the 120 children and youths who were seers would have taken vows in any case.
The order of active female religious with the most communities in the diocese, over sixty houses in 1930, was the first female active institute, the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Its members, who took temporary vows renewed every three years, were in charge of the old-age home and the parish schools in Urretxu as well as hospitals in Tolosa and Beasain. In the province of Gipuzkoa alone they staffed at least thirty institutions.[48]
The first woman from Ataun joined the Daughters of Charity in 1852. In 1931 seventeen from the town were in the order, but only one joined after 1915: Arín, Clero de Atáun, 226-237. Their associated male order, the Vincentians, had no houses in Gipuzkoa or Bizkaia. Mercedarian Sisters of Charity attracted to their novitiate in Zumarraga the kind of girls who had earlier joined the Daughters of Charity. The Mercedarian Sisters had eight houses in Gipuzkoa, but despite their close relation with Antonio Amundarain I do not know of any involvement in the Ezkioga visions. Amundarain, Vida congregación mercedarias, 187-199, 317-332; Arín, Clero de Atáun, 238-243.
Given the large number of active women religious in the region, they seem remarkably little involved in the visions. Their activity and freedom to circulate, however, gave them access to moments and places where the supernatural and the "world" coincided. In the fall of 1931 a Daughter of Charity who was a nurse in the Tolosa hospital was present when doctors diagnosed Marcelina Eraso's sister as having an incurable cancer. The nurse asked Marcelina to ask the Virgin to intercede and later signed a document describing the cure. One seer, Esperanza Aranda, worked in San Sebastián in La Gota de Leche, an establishment run by the Daughters of Charity which provided milk for babies and pregnant mothers. Aranda held some of her visions with nuns present and once pointed out in a vision a Daughter of Charity who had just died in Urretxu.[49]
Photos in Degrelle, Soirées, 21 September 1933; cure dated Tolosa, 22 July 1933, signed by, among others, María Recalde's sister-in-law, Victoria Jayo (B 736-737), who was at Ezkioga with another nun in May 1932 (ARB 143). Aranda vision, B 710, apparently 8 December 1932. A children's magazine distributed by the institute printed the fullest report of the visions in Mendigorría: Orzanco, "Nuevas apariciones." And in May 1932 these Sisters of Charity in Madrid were among the first to witness what seemed to be a bleeding statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The news reached Ezkioga believers through the letters of a "Sor Benigna." See J. B. Ayerbe's circular "Cartas de las H. H. de la Caridad del paseo del Cisne en Madrid" (AC 402), which includes letters sent in May and June 1932 about an image in the house of Mercedes Ruíz that the sisters went to see in pairs; see also Rivera, "Sagrado Corazón."
The women in the Daughters of Charity led lives of a certain independence. An example is Sor Antonia Garayalde Mendizábal, who died at age seventy-eight in Beasain in 1932. Born in nearby Altzo, she entered the order in 1849 and worked in a home for abandoned children in Córdoba before going to Beasain in 1896 to head the clinic. Garayalde visited the sick in their homes and cared single-handed for the ill of the nearby village of Garín when it was struck with typhoid fever in 1896. She also set up a nursery school, which at one point
had three hundred children, promoted the cult of souls in purgatory, took care of the cemetery, and prepared the corpse of virtually every person who died in Beasain. Sisters like Garayalde took on the work formerly done by women for their extended kin; these sisters were especially needed in factory towns like Beasain where immigrants had left their grandmothers, aunts, and sisters behind.[50]
Alumnos, "Desde Beasain," PV, 26 March 1932.
In Elorrio the mother superior of the community at the old-age home and clinic was a faith healer. When the doctor's guild complained to the bishop and he passed the complaint on to the Spanish headquarters of the order in Madrid, the order tried to transfer the nun, but the people of Elorrio protested so much that the order backed down. The hands-on miracles of this nun, however, were quite different from the holiness of the saint-as-victim, like Gemma Galgani, which the seers of Ezkioga came to embrace. Sor Antonia Garayalde touched the bodies of the living and the dead in Beasain; the Ezkioga seers were intermediaries with the spirits in the other world.[51]
Dossier in ADV Denuncias with letters to Bishop Múgica from the president of the Colegio de Médicos de Vizcaya, Bilbao, 15 August and 13 September 1935, and Sor Sofía Pulpillo, Asistenta, Madrid, 25 August 1935.
We can see the contrast in contemplative and active stances as reflected in religious devotions. In the first years of the century the Daughters of Charity began to circulate little images of the Miraculous Mary. Groups of thirty households, known as "choirs," pooled money to buy them and passed these boxed images of a powerful Mary daily from one house to another. The people would always light a candle or oil lamp before the image, and the boxes had a slot for alms for masses for deceased members, the costs of the Association of the Miraculous Medal, or the local poor. Images like these of different devotions circulated (and still do) throughout Catholic Europe. The Passionists circulated ones of their saints, as did the Carmelites the Infant Jesus of Prague, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and Thérèse de Lisieux. Some orders supplied printed prayers with the image. In this period the Miraculous Mary was fresh and exciting. In Beasain Sor Antonia established no less than twenty-four coros covering 720 families. In some places the devotion took on a life of its own.[52]
This devotion spread to Oiartzun in 1920 from Rentería and Irun without the involvement of religious. Within three years the images linked 480 families in Oiartzun: Lecuona, AEF, 1924, pp. 21-22.
Not surprisingly, from the start at Ezkioga this Mary was in a sort of competition with La Dolorosa as the preeminent divine figure. The Beasain chauffeur Ignacio Aguado saw the Miraculous Mary on July 8, and for a while others saw her as well. A Daughter of Charity was present when the Bilbao engraver Jesús Elcoro saw La Milagrosa on July 30.
[Elcoro] tries to explain the stance that the Virgin took in her appearance, and begins to hold out his arms the way the image of the Miraculous Mary does. The crowded conditions do not permit this, and a Sister of Charity says, with extraordinary excitement, "The Miraculous Mary! It's the Miraculous Mary! Isn't it true? Make room, let him put his arms the way he has seen the sweet Virgin."
And as if conjured by the outburst of faith of the little nun, the youth has an apparition again. The nun says to him, "Tell the Virgin that we
Cover of home visit manual of the Miraculous
Mary, published by Vincentians in Madrid, ca. 1926
love her a lot, and that we come to make up for the many offenses against her in Spain."[53]
Txibirisko, PV, 10 July 1931; "De Ormaíztegui," PV, 17 July 1931, p. 8; PV, 25 July 1931, p. 2. The girls of Albiztur especially tended to see La Milagrosa, LC, 28 July 1931, p. 5, and A, 23 August 1931, p. 2. Quote from Pepe Miguel, PV, 31 July 1931, p. 4.
Eventually La Dolorosa emerged as the dominant symbol of the visions, a symbol oriented more toward contrition and penance. It was more suited to contemplative and Passion-oriented orders, like the Passionists, Capuchins, Carmelites, and Reparadoras. La Milagrosa, like Our Lady of Lourdes and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was a more active, optimistic image appropriate for orders involved in good works or healing.
Male Religious
Nuns might be believers or disbelievers, supplicants or sister seers of the visionaries. Male religious could also be spiritual directors to the seers or expert examiners of visions. Some clergymen, like Padre Burguera himself, thus had a professional as well as a personal interest in the apparitions.
From their junior seminary just over the hill in Gabiria, Passionist professors and students could hear the hymn singing and prayers at Ezkioga and they were inevitably embroiled. The Passionist order, founded in Italy in the eighteenth century, had established its first house in Spain in Bilbao in 1880. In 1931 the north was still its stronghold. In the first weeks of general excitement at Ezkioga the Passionists were "almost all in favor." Some individuals converted at Ezkioga went to confess at the Passionist seminary. On 1 August 1931 two fathers were said to have seen one of Patxi's "levitations." The seers tapped into Passionist interests with visions of the Passionist Gabriele dell'Addolorata and the would-be Passionist, Gemma Galgani. The Ezkioga farmer Ignacio Galdós had a vision of a Passionist preaching to more than four thousand people; in the vision a star fell from the sky until it was by the side of the preacher, who distributed parts among the crowd. Two-thirds of the people disappeared into the darkness, while the remainder, brilliantly lit, fell to their knees; the Passionist blessed them with his cross.[54]
For Gabiria, Antonio M. Artola with Joseba Zulaika, Bilbao-Deusto, September 1982, p. 4. For life at the school, Ecos de San Felicísmo, 1932, pp. 197-199, 230-233, and Artola, Martín Elorza, 16-31. Initial Passionist enthusiasm: Basilio Iraola Zabala (b. 1908), Irun, 17 August 1982, p. 1, who said his first mass in Gabiria in 1931, and Dositeo Alday, Ramón Oyarzabal, and Rafael Beloqui, Urretxu, 15 August 1982; confessions, B 51; for Patxi's "levitations," Elías, CC, 21 August 1931; for Gabriele dell'Addolorata, ARB 33-34; for I. Galdós, B 755.
The initial enthusiasm of the Passionists is understandable given their devotional aesthetic. Passionists had accompanied their sodalities to the visions of the Christ in Anguish at Limpias, a kind of throwback to the Baroque devotions of Holy Week that declined in the north in the nineteenth century. This kind of devotion has revived in part because of parish missions. In their missions the Passionists set up outdoor stages. A parish priest in Navarra commented on their "special method":
preaching from a stage or platform in an appropriate place and giving a brief talk on one aspect of the Passion of Our Saviour after the principal sermons; they did the apparition or entrance of the Most Holy Virgin, the descent from the Cross, and the procession of the holy burial.
The visions at Ezkioga also had as their central metaphor the Passions of Christ and the Virgin, and Patxi's similar stages at Ezkioga served the same purpose, the provocation of remorse by a kind of sacred theater. The order's magazine, El Pasionario , carried almost no news of the apparitions, but issues published before the visions started included depictions of the Passion in poses much like those later struck by the Ezkioga seers and descriptions of the mystic life of the German stigmatic Thérèse Neumann. The magazine was read in the villages and towns around Ezkioga.[55]
For mission, Venancio Jáuregui, "En Goizueta," BOEP, 1916, p. 154. Basilio de San Pablo, "Manifestaciones de la Pasión." Luistar was the distributor of El Pasionario in Albiztur. Another Passionist magazine, Ecos de San Felicísimo, printed a report on the visions on 1 September 1931.
After the exposé of Ramona's miracle, most of the Passionists turned against the visions. Indeed, some, like Basilio Iraola, a friend of the Ezkioga pastor, were opposed from the start. But a few remained firm in their belief. I spoke in 1982 to Brother Rafael Beloqui, who said he had been to the visions thirty-nine times, primarily because he enjoyed the praying so much. In June 1933 a certain Padre Marcelino, based in Villanañe (Alava) and Deusto, was thrown from a horse when returning from a remote village where he had celebrated mass. A rural doctor told him he was in critical condition, and after his condition worsened he said he saw the Virgin who told him he would recover. He attributed the cure to the Virgin of Ezkioga. Rumors like this and one that a Passionist had seen Gemma and San Gabriele at the site gave the believers hope that the order would be on their side.[56]
B 739-740. After the war a few Passionists still believed in the visions; see Beaga, "O locos o endemoniados."
In the first flush of enthusiasm in the summer of 1931 Franciscans, Capuchins, Claretians, and Dominicans went to the vision site and published their impressions, which varied from noncommittal to guardedly enthusiastic. And as with the Passionists, so with the other orders: after early enthusiasm for the visions they eventually followed the diocese into opposition. Only a few individuals persisted.
The Franciscans carried the most weight in Gipuzkoa, with houses in Zarautz, Oñati, and Aranzazu. The believers and friars I talked to agreed that the Franciscans came to oppose the visions strongly; believers attributed this to a fear of competition. A man in Tolosa claimed Aranzazu was the place Bishop Múgica met to plot against the visions. Another rumor had it that a Franciscan outspoken in his opposition to the visions had fallen to his death while directing the construction of the church of Our Lady of Lourdes in San Sebastián.[57]
B 301 mentions a Franciscan missionary assigned to India who was cured of gout at the shrine. For the plot see Lucas Elizalde, Tolosa, 6 June 1984, p. 2, and for the rumor see Ducrot, VU, 23 August 1933, p. 1331.
The Franciscans were from the same kinds of families as the seers and believers, so their opposition was especially hard to bear. Indeed, of all the religious I visited, it was among Franciscans at Aranzazu that I found most sympathy—not for the seers, but for the believers. When the seer Martín Ayerbe of Zegama became a religious, he joined this community.In the 1920s about thirty thousand pilgrims went to Aranzazu each year. This was a relatively small number for that period, especially compared to the crowds at Ezkioga. But Aranzazu was the major Marian shrine in the province and one to which many of the believers in Ezkioga were devoted. They recognized the apparition of the Virgin in Aranzazu as a local precedent, and when the Ezkioga site was declared out-of-bounds, some believers went to Aranzazu to meet and pray.[58]
M. Ayerbe died before becoming a friar. A seer from Zaldibia was a novice in 1952. Figures from José A. de Lizarralde, in Guridi, AEF, 1924, pp. 97-100.
In 1919 Capuchin preaching had sparked the visions in Limpias. The Capuchins had six houses in the wider vision region but none close to Ezkioga. Some of the friars involved with Limpias took an initial interest in Ezkioga, but many became convinced that the visions at Ezkioga were a plot to embarrass Catholics.
Pedro Balda, the town secretary of Iraneta, told me that he and Luis Irurzun went to Pamplona in an attempt to leave the notebooks of Luis's messages with Balda's uncle, a Capuchin. Luis went into a vision, with Balda's uncle in prayer alongside him, but as he came out of it the superior arrived and gave him a kick. Balda and Luis decamped with the notebooks and Capuchin alms-gatherers spread the word that Luis had been booted out of the house.[59]
Damaso de Gradafes at Basurto, who had taken his youth group to Limpias, took the members to Ezkioga as well, and Andrés de Palazuelo, who wrote in favor of Limpias, published an article on Ezkioga in El Mensajero Seráfico, 16 September 1931. For Ezkioga as plot Enrique de Ventosa, Salamanca, 5 May 1989, and Francisco de Bilbao, Madrid, 6 May 1989. Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, p. 16; he and Luis had first tried to leave Luis's notebooks at the Jesuit house in France, La Rochefer, but they failed. A sympathetic Capuchin, P. Bernabé, occasionally preached in the Goiherri. The Claretians had been sympathetic to the Limpias visions and printed favorable articles about Ezkioga in their national magazine, Iris de Paz. But I know of no Basque Claretian involvement.
Dominicans went to Ezkioga from Montesclaros in Cantabria and nearby Bergara and reported for El Santísimo Rosario , the magazine that first publicized Fatima in Spain. But not all Dominicans were receptive. Luis Urbano, the man who single-handedly discredited the visions at Limpias and Piedramillera in 1919 and 1920, published in his magazine Rosas y Espinas the first negative article about Ezkioga written by a religious. In this period Dominicans in Salamanca, Madrid, and Pamplona had a kind of rival to Ezkioga: the divine messages relating to Amor Misericordioso, Jesus of Merciful Love, received by Marie-Thérèse Desandais (1877–1943). The abbess of a convent of Dreux-Vouvant in the Vendée, Desandais published her revelations under the pseudonym P. M. Sulamitis. González Arintero, the Dominican who published Maria Maddalena Marcucci, first came across Desandais's writings in 1922. He dedicated much of the last seven years of his life and the pages of his journal to spreading them. In the late 1920s a wealthy laywoman in Madrid, Juana Moreno de Lacasa, financed the publication of the messages in pamphlet form by the hundreds of thousands. In San Sebastián the count of Villafranca de Gaytán de Ayala persuaded a number of bishops to allow leaflets to be inserted in diocesan bulletins. And Dominicans spread the devotion with lectures and a special magazine and by installing paintings of the Merciful Christ in their house in Madrid in 1926 and in Pamplona in 1932. The Ezkioga seer Jesús Elcoro, given to seeing nuns, claimed to see Sulamitis with the Virgin.[60]
For Arintero and Merciful Love see Fariñas, "Apostol"; Suárez, Arintero, 275-309; and Staehlin, Padre Rubio, 247-251. See Gaytán de Ayala obituary in VS 40, no. 361 (January-February 1959), pp. 69-70; he gave a speech about the devotion in the Vitoria seminary in February 1932, Gymnasium, 1932, p. 124; the Sulamitis leaflets received the nihil obstat in Vitoria by March 1929. P. M. Sulamitis, España'ko Katolikoai (To Spanish Catholics), was published in Bergara with the imprimatur of Justo de Echeguren and Manuel Lecuona in 1932. For paintings, see Fariñas Windel, "Apostol," 114, and "Un Cuadro de Ciga," La Tradición Navarra, 29 December 1931, pp. 1-2. The Dominicans of Atocha in Madrid published the magazine Amor Misericordioso. For Jesús Elcoro, R 8.
The messages of Merciful Love posed fewer problems for the church than those of Ezkioga. Very little of their content was bound by time and place. They were the product of a single visionary who could be silenced at any time; they came through a respectable journalf and enjoyed ecclesiastical permission. They were not propositions to the hierarchy from the lay public, much less from poor rural children, housemaids, farmers, and workers. Inspired females could be heard only if cloistered and directed. It helped to disguise their identity. Most readers did not know that J. Pastor (Marcucci) and P. M. Sulamitis (Desandais) were women. The Merciful Love messages too were quite different from those of Ezkioga, emphasizing the mercy of God as good father, not the anger and chastisement of God offended. In 1931, when events seemed to be going against Catholics and Catholicism in Spain, the idea of a chastisement was perhaps more in line with contemporary developments. Merciful Love had less appeal to the Basque public than darker calls for penance, atonement, and sacrifice.
"I am Merciful Love!" holy card, ca. 1932
Two orders with influence in the area, the Benedictines and the Jesuits, kept their distance from the visions. At the Benedictine monastery of Lazkao, eight kilometers from Ezkioga, most monks strongly opposed the visions and told their confessants not to go.[61]
J. B. Ayerbe claimed to García Cascón, 22 March 1934, 3 pages, typewritten (AC 416), that Conchita Mateos convinced her confessor at Lazkao, Padre Leandro. A seer from Zaldibia entered a Benedictine convent in Oñati: Rigné, Ciel ouvert, p. D.
The Jesuits did not report the visions in their magazines even in the first months. The elite male order in Spain, they educated Spain's elite. They were largely an urban order and were less likely to be related to the seers at Ezkioga. I know of few direct Jesuit links even to believers.But even before Laburu got involved, the Jesuits could hardly ignore what was happening. Their great shrine at Loyola was only twenty kilometers away, and the confessionals periodically filled with people from the vision sessions. Pilgrims
to Ezkioga from other parts of the country and abroad made detours to see Loyola and inevitably commented to the fathers about the visions. Nonetheless, in the summer and fall of 1931 the Jesuits were keeping a low profile. In May Jesuit houses had been burned down in Madrid and elsewhere, and they knew most republicans thought the order should be dissolved. Antonio de la Villa accused them in the Cortes of promoting the Ezkioga visions, the accusations itself a cause for prudence.[62]
B 51-52, 751-752. See the Azpeitia correspondent's passionate reply to de la Villa in A, 23 August 1931, p. 2.
Examples of Jesuits speaking even guardedly in favor of Ezkioga were thus rare. A Jesuit at Loyola told two French visitors from Tarbes that the purpose of the visions at Ezkioga and Guadamur was not to set up a shrine like Lourdes but to warn of impending persecution and to revive the faith of Spaniards. Salvador Cardús of Terrassa corresponded with a Jesuit in India who was interested in Ezkioga and Madre Rafols, but even this distant friend requested great discretion lest "someone else, with indiscreet zeal, might later go around saying to people, 'A Jesuit said this,' and many times it turns out that what was said with the best of intentions is not interpreted in the same way."[63]
French visitors at Loyola at end of August, "Les Apparitions d'Ezquioga," La Croix, Paris, 15 October 1931, p. 3, from Le Semeur, Tarbes. Pere Pou i Montfort S.J. to Cardús, Sacred Heart College, Shembaganur, Madura District, 18 August 1932.
Believers resented the Franciscans but held no grudge against the Jesuits, despite Laburu's hand in their defeat. A Jesuit from Betelu was the key person distributing the prophecies of Madre Rafols. And the ex-Jesuit Francisco Vallet had prepared the followers of Magdalena Aulina. Male seers went to the Jesuits for spiritual exercises. Even the Ezkioga souvenir shops of Vidal Castillo had a Jesuit connection: they were owned by the Irazu family, who ran the stands at Loyola and Limpias. So however much the Jesuits tried to keep their distance from Ezkioga, they formed in fact a part of the context that nurtured the visions.
Hence we find visions in which the seers protest the expulsion of the Jesuits, settle into stances that seem to replicate those of Ignacio de Loyola in paintings or in the wax statue at Loyola, and report seeing Loyola himself giving Communion. And, as in the case of the Benedictines, believers occasionally came across a Jesuit they considered sympathetic. Nuns from Bilbao persuaded one Jesuit to go see Gloria Viñals when he was in Pamplona, and López de Lerena alleged that he subsequently had a vision of his own in the cathedral. After the war the Jesuit confessor of a seer from Azkoitia introduced him to another Jesuit in a high position in the Vatican. But the believers I talked to knew of no member of the order who worked actively or spoke out publicly for their cause, and the documents I have read mention no Jesuit other than Laburu who actually went to Ezkioga.[64]
On the expulsion of Jesuits, Cardús cites a vision by a female seer, 1 September 1931, who complained to the Virgin, "What will we do without them?" and Burguera cites one by Benita Aguirre, 30 June 1933 (B 497); at the end of 1932 J. B. Ayerbe claimed the support of Padre Iriarte, "que está considerado en gran santidad" ("Las maravillosas apariciones," AC 2:4). For Viñals (Padre Zabala): Sebastiáan López de Lerena to Ezkioga believer, 2 September 1934, private collection. For Azkoitia (Padre Imaz): Juan Celaya, Albiztur, 6 June 1984, pp. 27-28.
Carmelites took more interest. Since the time of Teresa de Avila and Juan de la Cruz, the Discalced Carmelites considered visions, revelations, and investigation of such phenomena as their particular expertise. And although Basque and Navarrese Carmelites were standoffish on the whole about Ezkioga, some individuals were sympathetic. The order drew on rural and small-town Basques to
supply missions in South America and India. Children participated in this effort through La Obra Máxima , based in San Sebastían.[65]
In addition to the small house of Carmelites at Altzo above Tolosa, there were others in Bizkaia at Larrea, Begoña, and Markina and in San Sebastián, Pamplona, and Vitoria.
Believers placed their hopes for a convincing public rebuttal of Padre Laburu on the Carmelite Rainaldo de San Justo, for two decades a professor in Rome. I talked to his nephews, the well-known Nationalist clergymen Domingo and Alberto de Onaindía. He told them that one little element of truth in an apparition was enough to give it great significance.[66]
Domingo Onaindía Zuloaga, Saint Jean de Luz, 11 September 1983. Padre Rainaldo had written in Vida Sobrenatural about Thérèse de Lisieux, who was canonized in 1925. Pilgrimages went to Lisieux from Pamplona in 1923 and 1926, but by 1931 the first flush of the devotion had passed and Saint Thérèse appeared to the Ezkioga seers infrequently. J. B. Ayerbe recorded her giving blessings cheerfully in visions of Asunción Balboa in Urnieta and Tolosa in 1934 and María Nieves Mayoral in Urnieta in 1935 (AC 209, 210, 213, 372).
In Pamplona Padre Valeriano de Santa Teresa, known for processions of children in honor of the Infant Jesus of Prague, supported confessants who had attended vision sessions. And at Altzo before the Civil War Padre Mamerto, a simple man from Bizkaia, a naturalist, friend of animals, and healer, was a firm believer in the visions and was not afraid to proselytize for them.[67]For Padre Valeriano (b. Amorebieta, 1865), DN, 22 December 1933, p. 5, his golden anniversary; Maritxu Güller, San Sebastián, 4 February 1986, p. 15; and R 52. A street urchin converted by a flower from a seer went for confession to the Pamplona Carmelites (Rolando, DN, 19 October 1932). For Padre Mamerto: Pío Montoya, San Sebastián, 11 September 1983, p. 4, and 9 February 1986; Domingo Onaindía Zuloaga, Saint Jean de Luz, 11 September 1983; and P. Santiago Onaindía, Larrea, 10 February 1986.
The Carmelite who took the task of testing seers most seriously was Doroteo de la Sagrada Familia, born Isidro Barrutia in Eskoriatza, another enthusiast of the cult of the Infant Jesus. From 1933 until 1936 he was the superior of the Carmelite house in San Sebastían. Shortly after Bishop Múgica's edict against the visions, Padre Doroteo attended one of the visions of a seer in Tolosa. He knew Juan Bautista Ayerbe and let him know he was Patxi's spiritual director. When I mentioned Doroteo's involvement to his brethren, they said it was in character. He may have been the Carmelite who made Ramona swear that her messages were true and one of those López de Lerena and others mentioned as having tested the seers.
Many religious, especially Carmelites, submitted the seers to mystical tests, such as having them end their visions by mental command from their spiritual superiors, and they assured us that the phenomenon that occurred in the seers was, without a doubt, of a supernatural character.[68]
Doroteo, Historia prodigiosa; in Tolosa, Ezkioga believer to Cardús, 12 October 1933; on Doroteo and Patxi: Ayerbe to Cardús, 24 October 1933; Padre Santiago Onaindía, Larrea, 18 October 1986—"era muy aficionado a esas cosas"; on Doroteo and Ramona on 4 February 1933: Rigné to Ezkioga believer, Santa Lucía, 27 December 1934, private collection; quote from López de Lerena et al. to bishop of San Sebastián, 1952, p. 5.
Burguera's volumes on God and art were printed by the Carmelites of Valencia, and when he went to Rome in 1934 he carried a letter of introduction to the general of the order.[69]
B 351; for Rome trip, Sedano de la Peña with Lourdes Rodes, Barcelona, 5 August 1969, p. 42.
The Carmelite Luis de Santa Teresita was the brother of a child seer from Ormaiztegi. His parents believed deeply in the visions, and the Catalan supporters often stopped at their house. He was studying for the priesthood when the visions started and was ordained in 1933. He eventually was named a bishop in Colombia and died there in 1965. Two of his sisters became nuns. Brothers of other seers became Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans. Before and after the visions, seers, believers, and the religious professionals around them were often related to one another.[70]
In some of the other orders there were one or two religious who pursued an interest in the visions, like Padre Maguncio of the Clérigos of San Viator in Vitoria, or the Redemptorist Padre Mariscal, known within the order for his interest in the marvelous: Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 46-50; Balda to Mariscal, Irañeta, 11 October 1934, AC 250.
The Brothers of Christian Schools had at least ten schools in Basque-speaking Spain, including those in Zumarraga and Beasain; they brought students to the site in February 1932 (Surcouf, L'Intransigeant, 20 November 1932). The Marist Brothers were expanding and had eight schools in the same zone, including the one Cruz Lete attended. I know of no involvement of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, who had a novitiate and six schools in Gipuzkoa, or of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, who had six in Bizkaia. These teaching orders were of French origin.
A few sympathetic members of the clergy can have a disproportionate effect on a religious movement stigmatized as unorthodox. In the seers' search for confessors and spiritual directors they were in a buyer's market. There were priests
in their own towns and villages, priests in surrounding towns, priests in rural religious houses, and finally priests in the cities and neighboring dioceses. These clergymen offered a broad spectrum of attitudes toward the visions, and any of them could dispense sacraments and absolution. So it was relatively easy for seers to find sympathetic clergy and religious. At the beginning of 1933, in spite of the Laburu lectures, Juan Bautista Ayerbe knew personally ten priests who were open believers and another twenty who believed in private.[71]
J. B. Ayerbe, "Las maravillosas apariciones," AC 2:4.
Bishops could not control what the laity, clergy, and religious did in private. Múgica could make rules and decrees, but in the protected secrecy of the confessional information and grace could flow in both directions. In selected female houses the Ezkioga female seers found curiosity and goodwill as well as a clientele for spiritual services. Some priests and members of orders found support for their devotional agendas in the visions. But others had practical, personal uses for direct contact with the divine. In the intimate communities of cloistered nuns in particular these two modes of belief coincided, the interests of the order and the interests of a specific set of human friends, living and dead. Some houses became unanimous centers of belief.
There could be many reasons for persons in religion to support the visions, if discreetly. But there were few reasons to oppose them actively and vocally. Such opposition would earn the enmity of fervent believers, who in Gipuzkoa and the Barranca were virtually everywhere. Clergy opposed to the visions were generally more than happy to leave the task of discrediting them to the vicar general, the bishop, and Laburu. The Dominican Luis Urbano and the Carmelite Bruno de Sainte Marie, sharply opposed to the visions, were safely distant in Valencia and Paris. Republican ridicule was insubstantial. In Gipuzkoa only the layman Rafael Picavea took up the thankless task of examining the visions critically. Even Laburu did not publish his lectures in anything like their entirety. Only in Tolosa, Legorreta, Zaldibia, Legazpi, and Ezkioga itself did parish priests rigorously enforce diocesan orders to deny Communion to seers and believers.
It is not difficult to be enthusiastic about alleged religious visions or miracles. As long as the seers seem to act in good faith it is more difficult to work up a strong head of indignation against them. For six months El Día , a newspaper administered by priests, described the visions in detail. But after the diocese spoke against the visions, El Día fell silent. Thereafter it provided almost no new information or analysis of the phenomenon. If the apparitions were not "true," how could they have come about? After Laburu's talks, Bishop Múgica's circulars alone answered the articles and books in favor of the visions. As in other spheres of public life in Spain, enforcement of rules was left to the authorities.
9.
Kinds of Seers and Contact Between Social Classes
The Kinds of Seers People Heeded
The visions at Ezkioga occurred in a society whose members believed that certain kinds of people were closer to the sacred than others and thus more likely to have visions. These biases affected the seers' acceptance or rejection by the community. They also set limits on our knowledge. We may assume that those whom society penalized rather than rewarded for having visions reported them less. Ecstatic religion surely has systematic relations with the social order, but we can know of these relations only through social facts. Secret, private, and unrecognized seers evade us.[1]
Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 23.
In the first months of summer 1931, when the Ezkioga visions were respectable, stereotypes and prejudices determined which seers people recognized. For instance, the priests, doctors, and town officials of the informal commission at Ezkioga made a special effort to obtain the statements of adult male seers; these authorities were all males and they seem to have trusted the
male visionaries most. The Zumarraga priest Antonio Amundarain declared in mid-July 1931,
We have, gathered by us and examined by doctors and priests, about sixty cases. Of these about half are rejected immediately after a very summary examination, either because of the physical condition of the declarers or because of the state of their nerves, etc. There are others, however, who interest us intensely, as they offer an extraordinary sense of reality.[2]
PV, 18 July 1931. For the committee at Oliveto Citra see Apolito, Cielo in terra, 49-56, 59, 135-136.
According to a Catalan pilgrim, the Zumarraga doctor was the first hurdle: "Dr. [Sabel] Aranzadi (who is quite strict) examines the psychic state of each alleged seer, and only after he decides that a case offers certain guarantees is it considered by the office." Aranzadi himself told a reporter the men especially interested him.
Thus for instance we see healthy and strong men profoundly affected who return time and time again to Ezquioga because they continue to be troubled when they go back to their homes and cannot bring themselves to think that what they have seen so clearly could be a hallucination. The trouble is that these men, precisely because of the emotion that takes hold of them, are the persons least willing to come to the first-aid room [to make statements] so as not to encourage what they consider a morbid curiosity.[3]
F. D., at Ezkioga, August 6, in CC, 16 August 1931; Aranzadi in ED, 26 July 1931.
Others on the commission shared this attitude: "In general little attention is paid to the statements of the women (Pardon, fair sex) [sic ]. The statements of tough, strong men, like those of children, give one pause and are profoundly troubling." Newspaper reporters usually selected certain seers to feature from those the commission interviewed, and they shared the commission's respect for men. In spite of the virtual absence of repeat male visionaries in the first month, newspapers printed photographs of seven of the twenty-three adult men, as opposed to none of the sixteen women seers they reported. Those photographed included a farmer, three cattle merchants, a chauffeur, and a taxi driver. Reporters played on the religious indifference of the male seers, especially the San Sebastián taxi driver. The Irish observer Walter Starkie was told that the driver had been "a drunken dissolute sot" and was now "a model of holiness." Subsequent literature dwelt similarly on the conversions of two or three workers who were anarchists and socialists from Bilbao. But adult men were a small minority of the seers. They were newsworthy because they were exceptions and because they gave the visions dignity.[4]
Lassalle, PN, 6 August 1931; S 128.
Patxi Goicoechea was one of the few male "youths" with multiple visions, and from July 8 until mid-October press and public paid him exceptional attention. Although he had already been a practicing Catholic and a "man of order," the press presented him as a model of conversion. In analogous fashion, the highlight of parish missions was the Communion of hitherto lukewarm men on the last dramatic day.
Throughout Spanish history until very recently authorities have consistently discounted the visions of adult married women. The attention women received at Ezkioga was no different. Only in its later, disrespectable phase did any mothers come into prominence. Reporters named many women as seers but generally did not describe their visions in detail. The following account, for 18 July 1931, is an exception that reveals the underlying attitude:
A woman at our side with a tearful voice says [to the Virgin], "Mother, mother, why have you been scaring us for so many days?" Can this poor woman be aware of what she is saying? Later she says [again, to the Virgin], "You have come very late tonight; what do you want?" Frankly, it would never have occurred to us that this woman could see the Virgin Mother…. Every firefly brings forth two or three cries from women.
We may assume that many of the women seers had repeat visions that the press ignored.[5]
For history of women in visions, Christian, "Visions in Spain"; for quote see Luzear, ED, 21 July 1931.
There seems, however, to have been a reverse discrimination, a certain partiality for young and unmarried women. Teenage girls from urban Tolosa and Pasaia and from farms in Azpeitia, Gabiria, Ataun, Bergara, Beizama, and Ormaiztegi, some of them servants in town houses, were regular seers at Ezkioga from the second week. By covering them extensively the newspapers encouraged and rewarded them for their visions.[6]
Visions before 21 August 1931 reported in the press (excluding the original two seers):
|
Seers with visions in this period not reported in the press who later became prominent: four women (M. A. Aguirre, E. Aranda, P. Ciordia, M. Recalde), one young woman (G. Viñals), and one male child.
Why did people consider young women particularly credible as seers? During the first half of the century in the Basque Country much religious effort had as its goal the control of females, particularly unmarried ones, and thereby the salvation of men as well. For girls this control centered on the Daughters of Mary, which placed them in a quasi-sacred role in the parish. In revival missions the Daughters of Mary received Communion after the children, by this measure becoming the group second closest to God. The missioners knew they could count on adolescent girls for piety and enthusiasm. The Jesuits, the Daughters of Charity, and the secular clergy all promoted the sodality. The first chapters in Gipuzkoa were in Azkoitia and Azpeitia in 1860; by 1930 there were one hundred chapters. Catholics mobilized this sodality in the crisis of 1931. The assembly of 1,500 Daughters of Mary at the shrine of Itziar in early May was a kind of public witness of support of the exiled bishop. And in Bergara on May 31 the monthly Communion of the group coincided with municipal elections; in this tense atmosphere the clergy paraded 350 girls through the streets, showing the flag. La Constancia reported the sortie with the headline, "The Fine Example Set by the Daughters of Mary."[7]
Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria promoted the sodality: Echaniz, Estrella del Mar 1931; LC, 12 May, p. 4, and 5 June 1931, p. 8. See also Asociación de Hijas de María de la diócesis de Vitoria, Reglamento, 9th ed. (Vitoria: Montepío Diocesano, 1929).
A measure of the effectiveness of the church's control of girls is that even anticlerical skeptics took the purity of the teenage seers for granted. The republican schoolmaster of Ezkioga wrote to a Madrid newspaper, "All the hysterical señoritas are confirming the famous apparitions; we say give them a good
boyfriend and they will be cured of their neurasthenia." One kind of "miracle" at Ezkioga in the autumn of 1931 consisted of medals, seemingly from the sky, falling to girls in vision. The medals were those of the Daughters of Mary, badges of heavenly approval and certificates of good conduct for visionaries.[8]
Romero, HM, 5 August 1931.
Those present at the visions have pointed out to me that beauty enhanced credibility. Patxi Goicoechea was held to be quite dashing. Walter Starkie himself was smitten with Lolita Núñez. Photographs of seers in vision show that some quite ordinary faces took on a special attractiveness when rapt, and spectators likened the young girl seers to young saints. A Catalan compared one girl seer to Gemma Galgani, and photographs of the seers resemble Gemma in pose and facial expression. Others besides Raymond de Rigné compared seers to Jeanne d'Arc, whose resistance to foreign rule had a special resonance for Basque nationalists. The adolescent girls stood ultimately for the Virgin herself, whom one seer described as "very young" in one vision and "age nineteen or twenty" in another.[9]
For Galgani see Elías, CC, 19 August 1931, and Sans, "Problemática"; a later example of facial transformation in Staehlin, Apariciones, 387-389. For Jeanne d'Arc see B 275, 291, 413; for the teenage Virgin see PV, 12 July, and ED, 19 July 1931.
Children were another sacred category. Up to 21 August 1931 newspapers reported, in addition to the original two seers, ninety-two separate visions of nine girl and eight boy visionaries aged three to fourteen. The percentage of child seers, especially girls, who had two or more visions reported in the newspapers is quite high, indicating that children persisted in visions and that the press was interested in them. The children most involved, after the original seers from Ezkioga, came from the adjacent towns of Ormaiztegi, Zumarraga, and Urretxu and the slightly more distant towns of Legazpi and Albiztur. Parents and sometimes parish priests accompanied them to the site. While 80 percent of the regular teenagers were from farms, children with visions were more likely to be from village centers or towns; many spoke Spanish. Their more sophisticated backgrounds may have helped them receive and produce vision messages with political overtones.
People expected young children at Ezkioga to see something. A brother and sister from Estella in Navarra agreed to believe in the visions if, on an excursion, their younger brother, aged seven, saw the Virgin. The sister remembers continually inquiring, "Have you seen anything yet?" as the boy peered into the darkness and replied dispiritedly, "No … no …" In mid-July 1931 a thirteen-year-old boy from San Sebastián went to Ezkioga with his father and his young cousin from Legazpi. The cousin pointed out a spot in the trees where he saw the Virgin on July 8. The city boy then had his first vision in the same place. He moved in with the Legazpi relatives and went to Ezkioga daily, and his picture was in El Día on July 21. Once children started having visions, it was hard for them to stop. The seven-year-old girl from Ormaiztegi who first heard the Virgin speak had visions from July 6 to July 10; the next day the child did not want to go to the site, but believers came and bundled her into a taxi. The deputy Antonio de la Villa protested in the Cortes against school excursions to Ezkioga because of the unhealthy pressure to have visions.[10]
For Estella children: Bienvenida Montoya, San Sebastián, 11 September 1983. All 1931: for San Sebastián city boy, ED, 19 July, p. 9, 21 July, p. 8, and 6 August, p. 2; for seven-year-old girl, ED, 15 July, p. 8; for de la Villa speech, DSS, 13 August; Crisol, 27 July.
Image removed -- no rights
Two priests take Benita Aguirre's declaration of a vision, 1931 (?). Photo by Raymond de Rigné, all rights reserved.
Several persons who went to Ezkioga in these first months of 1931 told me they were impressed especially by visions of very young children or infants. Children have been models for the devotional behavior of adults since the Gospels. At the time of the visions, parishes often organized skits or processions, with children as angels or saints; some parents dressed their children as angels with wings for First Communion; in some areas adults considered children privileged intercessors for the dead. The boy Guy de Fontgalland was a new model for a holy child in France.[11]
On children in Basque culture: AEF, 1924, pp. 71, 85, 148; as intercessors for the dead: Ott, Circle, 91; and mission processions: Perea, El Modelo, 2:997-1001. For Guy de Fontgalland see Perroy, La Mission d'un Enfant. On children as mediators with the supernatural in other contexts, Frijhoff, Evert Willemsz., and Apolito, Dice, 141-144.
Children also played prominent parts in village missions. Hear a priest describe one in Navarra in 1920:
On the second day the Communion of the children was followed by the consecration of all of them to the Sacred Heart. This was a tender and moving ceremony, during which I saw many fervent tears quietly falling, not being foreign to this holy weakness he who writes this. The ceremony was a very powerful way to rend completely the hearts of parents and other adults present.
Children as angels on mission day at Lasarte, 1930. The
girl in the center is the Miraculous Mary. From Nuestro
Misionero, January 1930. Courtesy Instituto Labayru, Derio
Similarly, in a secular context in Spanish-speaking Navarra, I have seen reticent, suspicious parents won over to an interest in Basque culture by witnessing their own young children performing folk dances and singing the Basque soldier song. A cultural group from Bilbao prepared the children with one afternoon's rehearsal.[12]
Legaz, "En Navarte," 317.
What made children important as visionaries was their alleged lack of guile and their supposed ignorance of the wider world. A man from Lezaun remembers being the only child in Lizarraga who did not see the saints arrive in the sky. As a result, his own mother considered him, age seven, "incrédulo [lacking in faith]." His mother had taken him so he would have a vision, for at the time in Lizarraga people simply assumed that all young children would see. The Catholic press placed great emphasis on the spontaneity of the first children's visions, and Antonio Amundarain took pains to refute the idea that they had heard in the Eskioga school about the visions at Torralba de Aragón.[13]
Argandoña, "Apariciones en Lizarraga"; for Torralba connection: Romero in La Prensa, 8 July; Masmelene, EZ, 15 July; and Amundarain in PV, 18 July 1931.
Nevertheless, articles about the child seers at Fatima, La Salette, and Lourdes must have contributed to the number of child seers at and around Ezkioga. Consider the girls of Ea in Bizkaia, for instance. In April 1931 ten of these girls,
Children as angels for First Communion at Piarists in Pamplona, 1934. Collection
of Ramón Goñi Nagore, Basque Studies Program, University of Nevada, Reno
who look from a group photograph to be between eight and fourteen years old, saved their pocket money and sent it to La Obra Máxima to baptize a pagan girl whom they wanted to name María Fátima "because the recent apparition of the Virgin to three little Portuguese shepherds enchanted us." We have seen that Bernadette was especially important for girls from Albiztur. The child seers in general are good examples of a kind of circular validation: when children reproduce material from adults, they enhance or consecrate it.[14]
La Obra Máxima, August 1931, p. 253, letter of April 9. The children could have read about Fatima in the magazine Jaungoiko-zale.
As potential visionaries children had skills that most adults had forgotten. Children throughout the Catholic world play "church" just as they play "doctor," "teacher," and "house." The historian José Ignacio Tellechea, who like a seasoned bloodhound put me on the track of many documents and witnesses for this study, writes in his autobiography about his childhood games. He remembers at age eight in 1936 confessing and saying mass for his pals on a makeshift altar in the Navarrese village of Ituren. The children held processions, prayed, and sang hymns in the attic, where an image of the Infant Jesus of Prague (his mother signed him up in the sodality right after he was born in 1928) presided over the ceremonies. Tellechea writes that his play church was "immensely serious." Here are all the ingredients of the child visions in the Barranca, not far away in time and space.[15]
Tellechea, Tapices, 59-60; Basque children still play "church": Manterola, Juegos, 580.
The step from game to vision is short. The children of La Salette were erecting a play altar of flowers when their visions began. Two vision sequences in Spain in 1961 began when the religious game children were playing took on a life of
its own: at Garabandal (Cantabria) they were imagining the devil and the guardian angel; at Villaesteva (Lugo) they were playing mass.[16]
Blackbourn, Marpingen, 47; for Garabandal, García de Pesquera, Se fue, 16-21; for Villaesteva, Manuel Moreira, Villaesteva, 6 August 1977.
Children having visions were often deadly serious. But in presenting their visions and organizing the spectators they applied the skills they developed in play. All children know how to imagine, how to intensify emotion, and how to abstract themselves from those around them. It seems that one reason the Ezkioga visions multiplied was that in a region suddenly alert to divine help, the adults were eager to join the game. Schoolteachers, village priests, and parents were willing to take children and children's claims seriously. Young children had an unusual mandate to play, and play was rampant.It was not chance that children started off the Ezkioga vision sequence. Adults would not have been credible. Ten days before the visions of the two original seers, Santa Lucía schoolchildren, a respected farmer from Ezkioga allegedly had an accident with his oxcart loaded with logs; the Virgin appeared, saving the oxen and his son, who had been on the cart, from falling down an embankment. The man, Ignacio Galdós, told the story at home and in the tavern, but nobody believed him. In late July he showed the site of the accident to the Valladolid priest Baudilio Sedano and wept in gratitude that finally somebody cared. Galdós later became an assiduous and well-respected seer, attending the visions from August on. But even so the press paid him little heed. As an uneducated, pious peasant, his visions were less newsworthy than those of more distinguished or less devout men. Men served as confirming witnesses and as exemplary converts, but it seems that adult men were not acceptable, at Ezkioga or in most of the other twentieth-century Spanish visions, as initiators of a vision sequence.[17]
For Ignacio Galdós: Sedano memoir, 5-7, and Elías, CC, 15 August 1931. For confirmatory visions of men, Blackbourn, Marpingen, 142. The visions of the farm laborer Auguste Arnaud at Saint-Bauzille-de-la-Sylvie in 1873 attracted only local attention (Commission, N-D de Dimanche).
The Kinds of People Who were Seers
We have seen how clergy and press tended to promote some men, teenage girls, and child seers and to exclude adult women. As the church and urban arbiters of culture gradually relinquished control of the visions, some kinds of seers became more "visible." From all my newspaper, printed, photographic, manuscript, and oral sources I compiled a list of about 250 persons who had visions in Ezkioga proper, the rest of the Basque Country, and Navarra from 29 June 1931 until the Civil War in 1936.[18]
Evarista Galdós predicted in 1932 there would be 250 seers, SC D 64-69. For some seers I have only fragmentary information; newspaper reports might give the hometown and indicate the age and sex but little else; sometimes reports did not give a seer's name.
Of the seers I identified, about 50 had no visions at Ezkioga. Most of these were children who had visions only in their home villages.The remaining 200 or so persons, those with visions at Ezkioga proper, fall into two groups. One group comprises those (40 male and 28 female) who turned up in the press only once, about whom subsequently we hear no more. Most of these had their visions in July 1931, and it is among these early seers that reporters seemed to have skewed their reports to emphasize older males. We may assume that there were many more casual seers on the days of mass attendance like July
12, July 16–18, July 25 and 26, and October 15–20, when reporters referred to other, unnamed seers; it is likely that women predominated among the unnamed.
For July 1931 I know of about 100 seers in all, many identified only by gender and town. My sources are almost exclusively the press. From August through December, when there are letters, diaries, and photos but fewer newspaper reports, I know of 37 new seers, many of them children and teenagers who visited Ezkioga from the Barranca, Albiztur, Zegama, and Urretxu. After the vicar general's note in October that discredited Ramona's wounds, turning the tide against the visions as a whole, there was no longer the stimulus of thousands of people praying together and singing Basque hymns which earlier produced seers out of spectators.
From 1932 to 1936 I found 39 additional seers at Ezkioga, almost exclusively in the writings, photographs, and memories of believers. Here there was no bias against women, but these sources mention few casual seers (the 3 named were women on the Catalan trips). The regular seers in this period were well known, since literate believers were busy chronicling the events. We can thus safely say that from 1931 until the Civil War children and women predominated, that they were largely poor by national standards, and that as the visions lost public respectability the proportions of children, women, and the poor increased.[19]
Seers at Ezkioga proper, date of first mention (in parentheses, number of these seers photographed):
|
Sixty percent of the seers I know were female. This proportion was roughly the same for children, youth, and adults. For the repeat seers at Ezkioga proper, the proportion of female seers ranged from two out of three (67 percent) in the first month to four out of five (80 percent) of the new seers in the last years.
Children aged fourteen and under accounted for 40 percent of the seers at Ezkioga proper and 70 percent of the seers whose only visions we know about took place away from Ezkioga. After July they accounted for about half of the new seers at Ezkioga. Children—Benita Aguirre foremost among them—retained prominence until the Civil War.
Youths (jóvenes, mozos , or mozas , terms that seem to refer approximately to the age range 15 to 25) accounted for about 40 percent of the seers in the first month and less as time went on. Ramona, Patxi, Evarista Galdós, and Cruz Lete worked actively to organize and promote the visions. Unmarried and with few family responsibilities, they were able to find the time to build reputations and create a following at the visions.
Adults—whom I define as those over twenty-five years old, about when youths began to marry—comprised only about 33 percent of the seers overall. As we have seen, for the first month the newspapers inflated this number by including casual seers who were men. Only at the end of July 1931 did three men emerge as habitual seers. They were all of humble background: the farmers Ignacio Galdós of Ezkioga and León Zabaleta of Oñati and the foundry worker José Garmendia of Legazpi. Thereafter there were only two more male seers and they were prominent after the Civil War. Among the habitual adult seers, then,
Spectators at Ezkioga, Lent 1932. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
women were the great majority. The audience, however, was mixed: crowd photographs show men and women in equal numbers.[20]
In four photographs 15 and 18 October 1931 I could distinguish 495 males and 480 females and in four photos from Lent 1932 I found 262 males and 289 females.
Women, youths, and children, in comparison with adult men, have in common a lack of power. What we know about the backgrounds of the seers confirms that on the whole they were persons with little public power in society. Those who became "regulars" tended not to be well-off or well educated. I was able to place about 75 percent of the seers at Ezkioga roughly on a social scale. Some were "distinguished"—the kind of people the press referred to as Don, Doña, Señor, Señora, Señorita, or Señorito. Such deference was never gratuitous and referred exclusively to those, including children, with a high rank. One in six seers (about 16 percent) at Ezkioga overall fit this category, but only about one in ten in this group admitted to more than one vision and none admitted to many. The newspapers featured these seers because they provided credibility to the visions as a whole. Similarly, distinguished seers were highlights in the literature about the Christ of Limpias. One of the reasons the diocese of Pamplona did not make public the visions at Piedramillera was precisely because none of the seers was a Don.
At Ezkioga, in fact, there was not much "society" to boast about. No priests or doctors admitted to having visions. One nun from Barcelona did tell about a vision, but only to her fellow pilgrims. The absence of priests was troubling for
the seers, and Evarista claimed that some clerics had visions and kept mum about it: "The Virgin told me that here in Zumarraga there is one who has seen her and there are two in Navarra." A Madrid lawyer was a seer, as was a diplomat, the director of an electric company, and the son of a bank manager from Zarautz; but each reported a vision only once. A few of the summer people had visions, as did some upper-class Catalans in 1932, mostly notably a woman from a prominent landed family of Vic. The upper-class child seers included Iñaki Jaca, the son of a manufacturer of wicker furniture in Zumarraga and the boy from San Sebastián on vacation in Legazpi. But these were exceptions as well. In retrospect, the most famous "distinguished" seer was Haydée de Aguirre, a young woman who later became well known as a fiery speaker at mass meetings for the Basque Nationalist party. She said she saw one or more rosaries in the air above the hands of a little girl.[21]
Emilia Cantero Llaurado from the convent of the Esposas de la Creu had visions on 7 and 8 March 1932 (Cardús to Rimblas, 10 March 1932); Evarista vision of 5 April 1932, SC D 64-69—clerical seers would have had every reason to keep quiet. Loreto Albo Molins was from a landed family of a village near Vic, the unmarried sister of two priests and a doctor; she had visions 4 and 5 April 1932, ARB 109, B 633, Sicart photos 15, 39. For Iñaki Jaca see B II 625 and ED, 26 July 1931, LC, 28 July 1931, and ED, 29 July 1931.
Haydée de Aguirre talked to Salvador Cardús (SC E 101-102) October 17 about what she had seen the day before: "[The girl] was in ecstasy, and all at once some of us realized that a little above the seer were hanging suspended in the air some rosaries. Some invisible being was holding them with two hands by two upper ends, so that they took the form of an elongated triangle. The child, still in ecstasy, reached out a hand and took it.... Today has been the day of my life that I have received Communion with the most devotion." See also R 34, and for Haydée de Aguirre at Ezkioga, Easo, 16 October 1931, p. 10.
A big step down on the social scale were people from the trades in the market towns—cattle and pig dealers, a draughtsman, the child of a furniture restorer. From this level there were about twenty seers; only three—Lolita Núñez, Jesús Elcoro of Bergara and Bilbao, and Cruz Lete—became seers of renown. Others from Ormaiztegi, Beasain, and Zarautz had visions for shorter periods.
But the seers well represented the peasant families of Gipuzkoa, or at least the farm women and children; the rural folk who went to the visions would have recognized in them their own kind. Fully half of the seers I know at Ezkioga were from farming families or families of artisans—blacksmiths, rope-makers, and woodworkers—who directly served the farm communities.
Servants, like Ramona Olazábal, were in this class. In the early decades of the twentieth century service in the homes of the wealthy or the shorthanded was part of the life cycle of rural women in Gipuzkoa, who learned domestic skills that would serve them in married life. The mother of the first two seers had worked in the home of some rural bakers of Urretxu before she married. Service was also a recourse when running a farm was no longer an option. The seer Juliana Ulacia grew up on a farm her parents rented in Beizama, but when in 1932 her father died in an accident, her mother took a job as a servant in Tolosa. Juliana began to have visions a year later, when she was thirty-three.[22]
Niece of Ulacia in Tolosa, 6 June 1984, and Boué, 92.
Seers also included a few urban workers or members of their families. Most were from the company towns around Ezkioga and had farm backgrounds. Included here are four chauffeurs (mecánicos ), servants of the wealthy. Like the "distinguished" male seers, they had their visions once and dropped out of the picture. Whereas female servants, as we will see below, had incentives to keep on having visions, male servants and industrial workers had reason in the ridicule and political distrust of their fellows to stop having them.
Finally some seers came from Gipuzkoa's underclass of temporary labor, the poorest of the rural poor, the homeless kind who subsequently died in hospices or had to be taken in by believers. I know of eight of these seers. While the very
rich quickly shied off, the very poor, the downwardly mobile, and the unconnected stuck to the visions. Such persons through their visions found a spiritual shelter and a caring community. But by no means were they the norm.[23]
For the very poor see O'Neill, Social Inequality.
Certain kinds of people in Gipuzkoa were less likely to be seers, or at least they were less likely to reveal visions: adult men, male and female factory workers, men and women dependent on fishing, merchants, priests, the liberal professionals, town dwellers (especially "distinguished" ones), and nuns. By and large the visionaries we know about were rural and Basque by birth. Out of one hundred Ezkioga seers resident in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia whose surnames I know, only ten might not have been Basque in origin.[24]
Non-Basque family names: Aguado, Aranda, Bedoya, Cabezón, Fernández, Miranda, Núñez, Rodríguez, Sánchez, and Taboada.
Contact between Social Classes
While there were no "distinguished" regular seers, we have seen the interest the visions aroused in the wealthy and the aristocratic. Many summer visitors to San Sebastián, Zarautz, and the watering spots of Zestoa and Ormaiztegi went to Ezkioga. As a member of the gentry wrote in the Madrid monarchist daily in August 1931, "Going to Ezquioga this year is the unavoidable duty of every good vacationer, as it was to go to Limpias in 1919." Bilbao industrialists and stock-brokers, their wives and friends, also went. These people shared with the rural Catholics a deep anxiety about the Second Republic, and some were equally hopeful that God would step in.
On the Ezkioga hillside the well-off prayed side by side with the poor, an anomaly not lost on observers of all stripes. La Constancia 's correspondent from Tolosa wrote on July 15 that pilgrims to Ezkioga were "numerous in all classes and conditions in this city, from the best known to the most humble." The same newspaper returned to the theme:
One of the most distinctive aspects of this constant pilgrimage is the mixing of people of all social classes. Indeed, next to the local and summer aristocracy, which gives such an extraordinary contingent of devotees to Ezquioga, go the most modest people, who willingly make the financial sacrifice that the trip entails.
Rural folk noticed the mix as well. The Argia correspondent from Matxinbenta argued that the presence of the rich proved the seriousness of the visions: "Those who say this is the stuff of witches or the foolishness of farmers should go to Ezkioga to say the holy rosary, and there they will see if all those cars belong to farmers or people from towns, and when they see rich folk kneeling in the mud they will know who has faith."
Outsiders too found the mixing remarkable, as did the canon and deputy from Toledo, Ramón Molina. A decade earlier, Catholic commentators found similar relief from the class struggle at Limpias.[25]
Gentry quote in Santander, ABC (Madrid), 13 August 1931, p. 16. LC, 16 July 1931, p. 8, and 19 July 1931, p. 2; also the pamphlet ¿Qué Pasa en Ezquioga? p. 8, and Lugin, A, 23 August 1931; Molina, El Castellano, 24 August 1931, p. 1; Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 97-99.
Social hierarchy was as rigid and economic differences as sharp in rural Gipuzkoa as in the industrial towns and cities. Apart from the gap between nobles and nonnobles and between those with degrees and liberal professions and those without them, there were steep gradients separating wealthy from poorer farmers and those with access to land from the rootless. Religious houses reproduced these differences. They distinguished between fathers and lay brothers, mothers and lay sisters, the former educated and fulfilling the sacerdotal, teaching, and healing tasks, the latter uneducated and limited to the menial maintenance tasks. And in the diocese there were major differences between priests after years in the priesthood. Benita Aguirre heard the Virgin address these differences: "During the chastisement the rich will be poor and the poor will be better off than before, but nobody will be rich."[26]
On class structure see Caro Baroja, Los Baroja, 273; "El Castigo: Declaraciones de Benita Aguirre" (vision of 8 February 1932), printed, in Laburu papers in Loyola. B 488-489 omits these lines.
The extremes met in the arena of domestic service. Antonio Amundarain's mother, who married a Carlist soldier, served before her marriage in the Liberal household of a San Sebastián shopkeeper. During the Carlist bombardment of the city in the 1870s a grenade hit her employers' balcony and she heard them say, "The Carlist pigs, full of cider and beans!" Her grandson felt the slur like a whiplash more than one hundred years later; for him it epitomized the gulf between the devout agricultural countryside and the mercantile city. We find the same resentment in Pilar Ciordia's vision of the vicar general's untimely death and abrupt removal to hell. She asked rhetorically, "What good to you are so many servants, being driven so much in automobiles? Poor thing, what good is it to have a rich family, if you cannot take anything with you?"[27]
Juan María Amundarain, San Sebastián, 3 June 1984, p. 2. The vicar general Echeguren described José Garmendia to the Jesuit Laburu, "smelling like wine, hardly able to articulate words" (notes in FL). Ciordia vision, B 692-693.
Whereas the servants were the poor in the houses of the rich, priests and doctors were the rich (or at least the learned) most likely to enter the houses of the poor. Benita in her visions learned from Jesus that doctors who charged too much and priests who did not believe in the visions would die in the chastisement.[28]
B 579, undated.
Doctors and priests served as go-betweens. The doctor from Tolosa who examined Ramona's wounds had assisted at her birth. The local Zumarraga doctor, Sabel Aranzadi, was the ideal intermediary between the seers and the press; he was at ease with both, for the grew up on a nearby farm, as did the Ezkioga priest, Sinforoso de Ibarguren. Another doctor provided Laburu with inside information on seers and their work experience in San Sebastián. When the milkmaid, herself an intermediary between the farm and town folk, wanted to spread the news of the initial visions, she went to a priest from her social class, Miguel Lasa. Doctors, priests, and servants were links between the classes; they introduced seers to believers and to the press.The intensity of the visionary experience fused disparate elements—at least temporarily—into unusual compounds: women and men, mistresses and servants, children and adults, peasants and urbanites, priests and confessants. Previously, well-determined patterns had connected the different elements. Potentially, every farm girl was an urban servant, every wealthy person a master.
Farm families paid rent to urban and noble landlords, sold milk to town families, sold pigs, lambs, and calves to town dealers, and bought from town stores and bread trucks. Children and adults, men and women, all knew the patterns and the degrees of deference.
They also knew the system was changing, that workers could make a decent living in the new factories and bright children could find a career in the church. They saw how entrepreneurs, originally canny farmers, could gain economic leeway in the changing society and, like Juan José Echezarreta of Legorreta and Patricio Echevarría of Legazpi, build industrial empires in a lifetime. And they had learned that younger sons could make their fortunes in Latin America and return to live in leisure in new chalets.
In any case, the wealthy and the poor, the socially prominent and the anonymous, interacted. The rural and urban elites were visible in their summer places, on the beaches, and at their rural "palaces," like one near the foot of the Ezkioga hill. Women of modest means who took turns as servants saw the wealthy from inside these houses. Just as in the preindustrial rural South in the United States there was a certain familiarity between blacks and whites, so in Gipuzkoa wealthier and poorer families made alliances and knew each other well. Walter Starkie noticed the ease with which Carmen Medina interacted with the people around Ezkioga: "She stopped to speak to every peasant she met and later in the day she visited sick women of the parish and gave money for the poor."[29]
S 125.
Juan Ignacio Tellechea in his autobiography alludes to the friendship between his modest family and a wealthy one. In 1910, at age twenty, his mother, who was from Zumarraga and then unmarried, started sewing for the family of the owner of a large textile factory in Vilabona. On occasion the family would invite her to eat with them or take her to the theater in San Sebastián. The relation lasted all her life. She made christening gowns, wedding dresses, even shrouds, for five generations of the family. Over the years she formed a close bond that she passed on, when she married, to her own children. The lifelong confidante of the mother, she was also close to the children. And when her own son José Ignacio lay critically ill in the hospital of San Sebastián seventy years later, her employer's children were among his visitors. When one of the employer's daughters became a Carmelite, Tellechea's mother made her habits. In turn, the nun became Tellechea's spiritual godmother when he became a priest. She organized her convent to pray for him in his illness.[30]
Tellechea, Tapices, 83, 311, 413.
Benita Aguirre's large family had a series of connections with those more wealthy. Patricio Echevarría of Legazpi chose Benita's father as foreman of a production line at his tool works and helped him acquire a large old house. Benita's eldest sister, Bitori, described the visit of a wealthy woman who knew her parents well, perhaps from earlier employment, and carried Bitori off, then age twelve, as a maid with the promise of taking her for the first time to the beach.
A third wealthy family, the Garayaldes of Tolosa, later befriended the Aguirres during the visions and provided a refuge from the press in their home.
When the subordinate members of these alliances had visions they gained new options. They did not necessarily gain the options in current relationships (with fathers, landlords, employers, politicians, parish priests, shopkeepers, doctors) in their daily lives. These partners may not have been believers. But for farm girl visionaries there were aristocratic ladies who took them on as servants because of the visions; for children there were adults who served as temporary adoptive parents; for confessants there were priests who wanted to hear more about the other world.
The system of connection up and down the social scale could be played in both directions, and prior to the visions some families were better at playing it than others. Of course, under normal circumstances, those higher in society had the most options. Patricio Echevarría chose which man he wanted as foreman. Benita's father could do little more than say yes or no. Workers, servants, and confessants were not a scarce resource in an economy that counted on over-population. But as in Spain today people from any level of society could initiate the process of establishing chains of long-term contacts up and down the social structure, and the links could be extraordinary durable. For what was at stake was a trust that transcended class or personal short-term interest—a moral bond that would ensure that a transaction would not go sour, that a maid would not steal, that a worker would not go on strike, that a client would pay for goods he bought on credit. In such a system a person with a complaint could go to other members of the family or to the intermediaries through whom the contacts were made. Obligations to kin served as bonds for economic transactions. The visions at Ezkioga took place in a rural society in which economic bonds were moral bonds, even in the local factories. It was a society well aware of the alternative—the more purely economic vertical connections between workers and employers in Bilbao, Irun, San Sebastián, and Madrid. In these places workers needed the countervailing horizontal bonds of socialism or anarchism for protection.
The groups of Basque farm neighbors who as a matter of course worked together in material and spiritual matters turned up in the cuadrillas of the rural seers. And the long-term help that the Virgin at Ezkioga offered reaffirmed this kind of long-term cooperation of rural folk at the same level. The Virgin ordered the people of Bachicabo to harvest Eusebio's potatoes, as they would normally do when a neighbor was sick or injured.
The Virgin's attitude reaffirmed as well the long-term bonds of patronage that had grown up between the wealthy and the rural poor. The seers replicated this kind of bond with the major promoters. Benita's family moved easily between the Echevarrías, Bitori's employer, Padre Burguera, and the Catalans. But in these new relationships there was no longer such an imbalance of options. Benita's father may have had few choices economically, but Benita herself, once people
understood that God had chosen her, could select from among all the promoters, reporters, and photographers. Even the boss's family took a lively interest in her visions.
The women who had visions at Ezkioga worked in the houses of persons who could patronize the visions. We know of seers who were ex-servants (Ramona Olazábal) and servants (Evarista Galdós and the Ataun girl). We know of seers who began having visions while servants of believers (Carmen Visa), seers whom believers took on as servants because of the visions (Evarista Galdós and the Ataun girl, both by Carmen Medina; at least one seer by Isabel Arcelus in Ormaiztegi; and Luis Irurzun as aide-de-camp in the Civil War), and seers who made believers out of their masters by having visions in the houses where they worked (the case of servant-seers in Tolosa, Ordizia, San Sebastián, and Madrid). We know of visions by the chauffeurs of a lady from Eibar, of the duke of Infantado, and of the owner of the apparition site.
The same spiritual adventure joined servant, mistress, and sometimes master in a new way. In Tolosa a sister of a servant held visions and there would appear on her tongue a white wafer, seemingly out of nowhere, all in the house of believing masters. A Portugalete family held regular vision sessions with two servants, a man and a woman, as seers. Anna Pou had visions in the house of her masters near Vic in the winter of 1933. In Barcelona some of the same people who went to Ezkioga were followers of the washerwoman Enriqueta Tomás, whose messages appeared written on her arms. For all of them the story of Gemma Galgani must have had a special resonance. She too was a kind of servant, experiencing visions and reenactments of the Passion in a house where she helped with the laundry and the ironing.[31]
Cf. Blackbourn, Marpingen, 126.
The visions inevitably affected the relations of seeing servants and believing masters. In his lecture denouncing the visions Laburu used the fact that Carmen Medina and the girl from Ataun ate together as evidence against the visions. We saw that a male visionary told Carmen Medina that the Virgin had said they should marry. A servant seer prominent in Spain in the 1980s went from serving meals to her masters to being served meals by them.
Servants are trained cultural mediators. In order to serve they have to learn the idiom of their masters and be sensitive to their needs and inclinations. The messages the servant seers of Ezkioga received from the divine at the same time transcended and resolved their bicultural way of life, providing for them, their families and communities, and their masters' families and class a common enterprise. Masters sometimes treated servants as ignorant and innocent boys and girls, which made the servants' visions more believable for their masters.
The cultural historian David Sabean has written that "the position of anyone in a hierarchy of the exercise of power is not simple, and there are satisfactions and deprivations at all levels."[32]
Sabean, Power, 25.
Some of the seers seem to have taken pleasure in getting their wealthy, powerful, or prominent believers to do things for them.
Carmen Visa in vision at Ezkioga, 22 June 1932. Courtesy
Arxiu Salvador Cardús i Florensa, Terrassa
Benita Aguirre came to control Padre Burguera's life almost absolutely. María Recalde at the drop of a suggestion got Luisa Arriola to drive to Burgos. Patxi got Carmen Medina to take him to Toledo. And for a while seers throughout the region got their parish priests to act as their secretaries.
But as Sabean suggests, there could be a converse pleasure. In the visions I have studied, the powerful and sophisticated refresh themselves by shedding power and placing it, however symbolically, in the hands of the less powerful. What interests me is not so much the sudden intoxication that the less powerful experience when they have new options. After all, that transformation we understand intuitively because it is part of the process of growing up. What interests me more is the refreshment that the powerful experience when they withdraw from control, which is more counterintuitive. In some ways child seers could become like adults because certain adults joyfully became like children, like the Priest-Niños. The ultimate model for this relinquishment of power was Christ in the Passion.
The unseemly mixing of social classes as a result of the visions at Ezkioga provided one way for opponents, like Laburu, to discredit the seers and the apparitions. When referring to Patxi's connections with Carmen Medina and her
like, Rafael Picavea played on its unnatural aspect: "They take you back and forth in automobiles. Marquises and duchesses, sisters or consorts visit you. Aristocrat? Come on, Patxi, be reasonable. I like you better as a regular lad at the Basque social club."[33]
Picavea, PV, 13 November 1931, p. 3.
But there was a deep logic in the mingling. Patxi was an anomaly, a peasant among aristocrats as well as a young man who was devout. Whether by inspiration or nudging, he was able to reach the edge of the possible and voice the unspeakable, the unpublishable: the call for a holy war to reclaim the state from the unholy republicans. His vision was a "hidden transcript," a scenario that many people already feared and many hoped for. He could voice the scenario only because conditions were extreme, because he was a Basque country lad, and because of the charisma he had accumulated in his spectacular trances. I doubt that the general public would have accepted the message as divine had it come from a priest or an upper-class seer.[34]
Scott, Hidden Transcript.
The mixing of classes itself was clearly an incentive both for seers and believers. The visions provided a way to overcome barriers that kept people apart. Although the class struggle was not as burning an issue in rural Gipuzkoa as in Catalan textile towns, the visions at Ezkioga, like the movements of Father Vallet and Magdalena Aulina, were attractive in part because they provided one way to transcend social tensions. In Gipuzkoa the gap the visions bridged was that between rural farm families and the urban elite. This bridge was achieved at a time when both urban Nationalists and Integrists idealized rural life for its cultural traditions and intense faith. For years the Catalans had been singing wishfully in the Parish Exercises hymns with words like:
We are brothers! both rich and poor
Away with strife and bitterness!
We are brothers! With good works
Let us unite our hearts.
At Ezkioga they saw their ideals in action.[35]
L. Valls and Ll. Millet, "Som germans! [We are Brothers]" in Obra dels Exercicis Parroquials, Manual de l'Exercitant (Barcelona: P. Calmell, 1928), 48.
Many of these elements come together in María Recalde's account of her meeting with Padre Laburu in Durango. She claimed that she reminded him of his errant youth and his own conversion by a woman as humble and miserable as she, and this allusion supposedly made Laburu burst into tears. At least in the retelling, Recalde challenged hierarchies of gender, class, and respectability by using her position as underdog. For the bourgeois Catalan and Bilbao supporters, the Ezkioga visions in general and the Recalde/Laburu story in particular resonated with the old traditions of apparitions to the powerless and the despised. Believers saw Laburu, as they had seen Justo de Echeguren before him, as obstructing a divine will that made no distinctions based on gender, wealth, or education. But Laburu too, so this story went, could be touched, just as he had been converted (in the story) by a poor woman, perhaps a nurse or a servant.[36]
For Recalde Laburu accounts, ARB 73-74, and Cardús to Pare Rimblas, 17 June 1932.
The Ezkioga visions suggest the hidden potential of intimate contact between social classes throughout the hierarchically organized Spain of the 1930s. The left labeled and identified social class as an issue. But it was the right that through religion forged an interclass alliance of the devout peasantry, the regional bourgeoisie, and the monarchist aristocracy. It is typical of these inspired interclass movements that the seers or mystics are from the better-off peasantry and either have been or subsequently come to be servants in the households of the powerful. In their visions and divine messages they formulated a worldview and agenda that spoke to the world they came from and the world they were coming to know. Part of the excitement, even exhilaration, of the movements came from a catalysis of social classes. A parallel would be the exhilaration and energy released in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s when blacks and whites worked together. Historians have underestimated the popular Catholic support for the military uprising of July 1936 that started Spain's Civil War. That support increased throughout the 1930s. In this critical period a religious mobilization cut across the lines of social class to defend the old society under attack with a preview of the coming reign of Christ.
10.
The Vision States
A variety of uncommon physical states helped the Ezkioga seers to break the bonds of social class, gender, and age and enabled the seers to speak the unspeakable and express the inexpressible. The videntes (in Spanish) or ikusleak (in Basque) (those who can see, seers) saw things that the mass of spectators did not, whether blinding light, the Virgin, saints, Christ, the devil, or heavenly tableaux. Over time many of them also became "hearers" of divine messages, and some of them felt the divine touch. Often during the visions, believing spectators smelled heavenly perfumes.
I located references to the physical states of seers in about four hundred visions. This material reveals patterns for individual seers and a slowly evolving general model of how to have visions and what kinds of things to see. It reveals as well the attitudes toward unusual physical states of those who chronicled them and of the doctors and priests who diagnosed them. We are thus led to the highly polarized debate as to whether atypical states of consciousness are evidence for the supernatural. Positivist psychologists, spiritists,
and followers of Catholic mystics quickly incorporated the visions at Ezkioga into this ongoing argument.[1]
Two forums for this running debate were La Revue métapsychique and Études carmélitaines mystiques et missionaries.
People thought of visions and ecstasies as experiences that happened to saints, occasionally to religious in convents, but rarely to ordinary people like Bernadette or the children at Fatima; visions were definitely not a part of daily life. Devout laypersons may occasionally have had ecstasies. The contemporary poet Orixe described a repeated childhood experience in Huici (Navarra) when his grandmother would fall into a daze as he read to her the Way of the Cross on the balcony. Her eyes turned up and she seemed not to breathe. But none of the scores of elderly persons I talked to in the course of my research had experienced such a mystical encounter before the visions began at Ezkioga. One visionary about seventy-five told me he had known no seers before the events started. His only ideas about visions or ecstasies came from sermons about saints.
They would say here when friars came or in sermons that in such and such a place people talked with God, and that even today there are people who talk with God and so on. But we could not understand it. It is so hard to grasp. It is easy to say. But who speaks with God?
Yet there may be more in the way of a local tradition than I discovered. Trancelike states occurred in religious of both sexes; moreover, rural Basques read deeply in religious literature and many had kin in convents. In 1877 the Prophet of Durango, who proclaimed himself Saint Joseph, had visions of angels in his attic.[2]
Orixe (Nicolás de Ormatxea), "Amona," written 1896-1900; farmer seer, March 1983, pp. 18-19; for Durango prophet see Barandiarán, AEF, 1924, pp. 178-184. Basque visions of the dead or the vision of the prophet of Mendata in the 1870s seem to have been without trance.
In a number of places in Spain and Europe laypeople regularly enter into some unusual physical state. Shrines like El Corpiño (Pontevedra) attract persons who are afraid they are possessed. In southern Italy and Sardinia persons who think spiders have bit them perform a kind of curative dance. At the feasts of the Madonna dell'Arco near Naples and Santa Rosalia in Palermo pilgrims arrive in abstracted states. And at Echternach in Luxembourg pilgrims until recently entered a kind of trance through dancing. But in Europe in the early twentieth century the altered states that the church tolerated were isolated from everyday society; they took place behind convent walls or in remote cultural pockets. Only a few revered laypersons, like the German mystic Thérèse Neumann, bore witness to ecstasy, if at great physical cost.[3]
Lisón, Endemoniados; de Martino, Terra del rimorso; Gallini, Ballerina; Jansen, "Dansen voor de geesten"; Lewis, Ecstatic Religion; Rouget, Music and Trance. For therapeutic trance dancing by women throughout North Africa, see Jansen, Women without Men.
Yet a collective memory of trances in apparitions persisted throughout Europe and was maintained in shrines, legends, sermons, and prints. For the Basques Lourdes was the most obvious example. And it seems that the Ezkioga seers and organizers leaned first on Lourdes as a model for a liturgy, for an etiquette of how to act, and for physical symptoms of ecstasy.
The Role of the Liturgy: Priests, Seers, and Audience
Starting on the third day of visions, in July 1931, a kind of liturgy provided a context and meaning for the events at Ezkioga. Within this context seers came
forward in a variety of physical conditions, ranging from the unaltered, everyday state of the first girl, to the deep trances of Patxi, to what appeared to be total unconsciousness in others. The seers appear to have learned from one another and from those who paid attention to them, so over time their physical states converged. As the number and quality of the spectators waxed and waned and the liturgy evolved, so did the vision states.
As we have seen, the priest Antonio Amundarain of Zumarraga improvised the liturgy. He got the first seers to hold candles (like Bernadette at Lourdes) and recite after him the rosary in a small procession to the vision site on the Ezkioga hillside, and he had the onlookers recite the Litany with arms outstretched. The time of the seers' first vision—about 8:30 in the evening—determined the time for these prayers. What quickly evolved was a kind of orthodox ceremony, led by at least two priests, at an unorthodox time (after dark) and in an unorthodox place (a semiwooded hillside). Apart from the late hour, all of the other elements were fairly predictable. From the fifteenth century, at least, on the rare occasions when people had visions in the countryside, the townspeople would go there in procession. And no one thought it strange to say the rosary, for the words "Hail Mary, full of grace … Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners" were quite appropriate.[4]
For first days see Justa Ormazábal, Zumarraga, 10 May 1984, p. 2; and LC, 7 July 1931. For historical background, Christian, Apparitions, passim.
Doubtless Amundarain called on his experience at Lourdes. In the diocesan pilgrimage the year before "the zealous parish priest of Zumarraga, don Antonio Amundarain, recited the Rosary, alternating in our two national languages. The fifth mystery was prayed by all with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, with the bishop setting an example." As at the apparitions at Ezkioga a year later, the Basque hymn of farewell, "Agur Jesusen Ama [Goodbye, Mother of Jesus]," followed this rosary at Lourdes and many present wept.[5]
BOOV, 1930, p. 472.
The Zumarraga clergy organized the vision scenario in the first months. On July 7 they separated the two original child seers, praying a rosary simultaneously with each to check whether they were separately seeing the same thing; subsequently the priests confirmed the simultaneous vision to the crowd. After the visions were over and the children appeared to the crowd in a window, people applauded and wanted them to speak. So Amundarain recounted the details of the first week of visions and had the children recite three Hail Marys. On the next night his assistant Juan Bautista Otaegui led the rosary, and during the second mystery the prayers halted as Amundarain gave a running account of what the girl said she was seeing. During the Litany another girl interrupted the prayers, crying out "Mother, what do you want?" from the shoulders of her father.
It is not easy to describe the emotional jolts of faith that people felt in that impressive crowd of men and women. What sad groans! What humble words! What distress! What trembling! What tears of joy!… Hearts of
stone would have softened in that touching moment. How could one fail to weep in that happy moment of love?[6]
All 1931: ED and LC, 9 July; LC, 10 July; José Garmendia, EZ and ED, 11 July (quote); A, 19 July. For Santa María del Villar (Época, 16) Amundarain's account was a translation for those who did not know Basque.
Amundarain thereafter extended and fine-tuned the liturgy. On July 11 after the rosary and the Litany, a priest directed the crowd in the singing of a Salve. On July 12 after the five mysteries of the rosary, Amundarain asked the crowd (by then 25,000) to sing "Egizu zuk Maria [Pray for us, Mary]," One writer described this mission hymn as "the dear melody that our mothers put in each of our souls to invoke in times of importance the Mother of Heaven with the clean confidence of children." After the Litany Amundarain added seven Hail Marys in honor of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin. He was applying time-proven techniques of parish missions to arouse repentance in the vision sessions. As on other nights, the seers punctuated the prayers with cries. La Constancia confirmed that the effect was "simple and grandiose, with an emotion that makes the soul swoon. If only for the benefits of this public fervor, one should go to Ezquioga."[7]
All 1931: LC and ED, 12 July; ED, 14 July; and LC, 14 July. For "dear melody" see Dunixi, ED, 18 July. For the liturgy at Oliveto Citra see Apolito, Cielo in terra, 41.
The ceremony enhanced the visions and the number of seers increased dramatically. After noting that on July 12 about one hundred persons had visions, the somewhat skeptical reporter of El Pueblo Vasco warned that the mood had become contagious.
Of the thousands and thousands of persons who come to Ezquioga, there are many whose temperaments, already excited by what they hear and read, are in a state of extraordinary impressionability that disposes them to a fit or a fainting spell as, in the midst of that impressive religious expectation, the almost fixed hour approaches people consider propitious for the apparition. So while these special circumstances continue, there will always be half a dozen persons who fall into trance and assure they have seen the apparition. But it is possible that there are also those who out of vanity or by imitation assure the same thing and even talk about it with a disorienting seriousness or with a suspicious good humor.[8]
PV, 14 July 1931.
Soon the crowd became a vibrant, collaborative chorus for the visions and a source of new seers. The group prayers became a kind of clock. Seers began their visions "during the second mystery," "at the start of the fourth mystery," "during the fourth mystery," "at the second Hail Mary of the fifth mystery," "at the beginning of the Litany," or "after all the prayers were over, when people were beginning to leave." And the seers or the holy figures they saw began to intervene in the ceremony and direct the crowd. On July 8 the ceremony was over by 9:45 P.M. ; four nights later it lasted until 11 P.M. because more seers interrupted the prayers. When a woman from Azpeitia continued to see the Virgin after the rosary on July 13, the priests led extra prayers and she reported that "the Virgin's face was happier, and [the Virgin] went down on her knees."
The next night a twelve-year-old boy who saw a panoply of holy figures—the Virgin, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, two angels, some male religious—noticed that a heavenly nun was saying the rosary with the people. What began with children seeing the Virgin as a distant divine figure became in two weeks a kind of joint mission session. Earthly and heavenly participants met at a junction of the two realms.[9]
ED, 14 July 1931, probably Juana Ibarguren of Azpeitia; for boy see LC, 16 July 1931.
El Pueblo Vasco again warned how easily these conditions could give rise to visions.
The ambience could not be more propitious for suggestion, and so, admitting, of course, the possibility of the supernatural, we should read these reports with great reserve, above all taking into account the age and condition of those who claim to have participated in these visions.
On the next day, July 16, people expected a miracle. El Día 's description of the atmosphere confirmed this warning:
The voice of the priest who led the prayers reached distinctly the entire field. A vast murmur replied religiously…. The moment was one of intense emotion, and not only religious emotion, but the expectation of the unknown, and an expression of anxiety or fear could be seen on many faces. The cry would go up. Where would it be? Everyone looked at his neighbor, and no one was sure of himself.[10]
PV, 16 July 1931, and ED, 17 July 1931; see also Gatestbi, "Ezkion zer? [What Happens in Ezkioga?]."
On the eighteenth of July, another day of expected miracle, seers periodically cut into the priests' prayers, and when these were over, few in the enormous crowd departed.
Everywhere there started up prayers of isolated groups, men and women on their knees with their arms in the form of a cross praying devoutly without anyone allowing the least lack of respect. Gestures and partial movements [of individuals] throughout the crowd indicated that the mysterious phenomenon was under way.[11]
All 1931: ED, 19 July; Luzear, ED, 21 July; PN, 19 July; Iturbi, EZ, 23 July. From these sources the liturgy on July 18 consisted of a rosary led by a priest and two or three youths, a hymn, two Litanies, Salve Regina Gregoriana, Hail Marys to the Seven Sorrows, the hymn "Egizu zuk Maria," then prayers dispersed through the crowd. Over the month of July the order of these elements varied.
By then the sessions of prayers and hymns began after the priests had demanded quiet and continued in what one newspaper called a "sepulchral silence." The seers interrupted the service during and after the prayers. A schoolteacher described the spontaneous part on July 19:
And here the marvelous, the eminently simple and moving part began: "Ayes" and isolated shouts here and there: strangled cries, loving questions to "Mother! Mother!" some serene and ingenuous, others anguished and with an indescribable tone of voice—wails, fainting, tears, pressing appeals for forgiveness and grace; alteration of the calm and silence around the seers.[12]
Martínez Gómez, VN and PN, 22 July 1931.
We saw that some of this "alteration of calm and silence" involved applause, enthusiastic shouts, and vivas to the Virgin, to Christ, to Catholic Spain, and probably to Euskadi, to Christ the King, and to Alfonso XIII.
Walter Starkie, the Irish Hispanist, described the mix of liturgy and visions:
The Litany in contrast to the rosary was recited in Latin, and right from the start I felt that curious sensation of collective excitement … as if the devotional excitement of those thousands and thousands of people had enveloped me and lifted my soul out of my body. Suddenly I heard a cry piercing through the buzzing rhythm of the Litany.[13]
S 132-133. For this mix at Oliveto Citra see Apolito, Dice, 218.
The visions and the prayers, the cries and the buzzing rhythms, created a single dramatic structure. On July 21, for example, the original girl seer saw the Virgin open her arms during the rosary and she saw her wave when the crowd sang farewell with "Agur Jesusen Ama [Good-bye, Mother of Jesus]." And a boy saw the Virgin pray the rosary with the crowd, passing the beads through her fingers, and he saw her smile and move her lips as if singing.[14]
Similarly, when Bernadette said the rosary at Lourdes, she saw the Virgin counting beads. LC, 22 July 1931, has the first mention of the Agur hymn. The press referred to "Egizu zuk Maria" more frequently, and of the hymn the canon Juan Bautista Altisent of Lleida wrote: "When ... a shrine is built here that all of Spain visits in enormous pilgrimage, this hymn will without doubt be the equivalent of the 'Ave' of Lourdes" (CC, 9 September 1931).
This boy seer began to have visions a quarter of an hour before the official prayers, and other seers imitated this kind of excursion from the liturgical perimeter. On July 23 a fifteen-year-old farm girl from Ormaiztegi also saw the Virgin before the prayers. She described the Virgin following the movements of the crowd in prayer and kneeling on a kind of stairway when the Litany began. The ceremony Amundarain had set up to contain the visions had been outflanked, and the visions thereafter often preceded the official program and almost always continued after it.[15]
PV, 24 July 1931, p. 2.
Amundarain thought of the prayers he led as collective atonement for the burning of religious houses in May. María de Echarri confirmed that the prayers addressed the hostile climate for Catholics in Spain:
No prayer against the Liberals precedes or follows the rosary. They pray, for sure, fervently and with many tears, for Spain, for the nation that is more loved when it is more humiliated and disgraced. They pray for those who persecute Christ; they ask for mercy for those blind with hatred, so they can see, repent, and be saved. In the prayers there is not a whit of anger or indignation. Mercy and forgiveness are the feelings expressed.[16]
Amundarain to A. Pérez Ormazábal, 25 July 1931, in Pérez Ormazábal, Aquel monaguillo, 109-110; Echarri, Heraldo Alavés, 25 August 1931. María de Echarri was at Ezkioga sometime in the preceding week.
But as we have seen the seers even more than the priests keyed the visions to the particular circumstances of Basque and Spanish Catholics, expressing on behalf of the Virgin what the priests would not have dared to say in public. The familiar prayers and hymns of the liturgy set a general tone of penance; the vision messages that erupted during the ceremony provided specifics.
At 5 P.M. on July 24 an Ormaiztegi teenager seer was the first to see the Virgin in daylight. Her vision was a relief to Amundarain, for many people had voiced unease at the nighttime appearances. Four days later Amundarain started the
night session earlier, at 6:30 P.M. Nevertheless, most of the seers did not have visions until nightfall, about two hours later.
Shortly after the rosary had ended, and with still some daylight left, a movement of suspense of the entire crowd lets us know that one of the phenomena that everyone is awaiting with feverish anguish has occurred. The light gets dimmer and dimmer until the hillside is completely dark. It is at this time that the cases of vision occur in greatest number…. No one is capable of describing the emotion one feels at this time.[17]
For day vision see LC, 25 July 1931, p. 2. Patxi tried and failed to have a vision at the same time (ED, 24 July 1931, p. 8). Ten days earlier Amundarain had organized a rosary at 6:30 P.M. to see if Patxi and others would have visions in daylight, but they did not. Quote from F. D., CC, 16 August, for 6 August. Similarly the canon Altisent, CC, 9 September, for 18 August, "It has just got dark ... the time for deep emotions has come."
The priests decided that if the visions were going to continue and masses of spectators remain in the dark, a liturgy the clergy led was better than freelance prayers in small groups. So in spite of the new daylight rosary, priests led others into the night. The original rosary had five mysteries in Basque and a Litany in Latin. Later people prayed the expanded version of three parts and fifteen mysteries. By August 18, because of the numerous pilgrims from San Sebastián, Navarra, and Catalonia, one five-mystery section was in Spanish. This formal service generally ended around 8:30 or 9 P.M. , but at least on some nights there were rosaries as late as the visions lasted.[18]
At Knock in Ireland in 1880 the priest switched to English from Gaelic as pilgrims came from farther afield; see Nold, "The Knock Phenomenon," 45. There were at least two and generally three five-mystery rosaries between July 29 and Ramona's wounding on October 15. I do not know if priests led all of them.
Up to the time of Ramona's wounding in mid-October, the seers continued to orchestrate the prayers, interrupting the official liturgy and expanding into the periods before and after it. A visitor described Benita Aguirre in the rain of July 27, "with a powerful and angelic voice, crying out repeatedly, 'Egizu zuk Maria gugatik erregu [Pray for us, Mary]' (the first line of the hymn), leading the immense multitude to get down on their knees and sing hymns to Mary and say repeatedly the Litany and the Salve." Another wrote on July 30 that a girl from Bergara asked the Virgin, "'Do you want us to pray?" The girl then "asks us to pray and all of us prayed fervently seven Hail Marys." On August 16 during the liturgy a young girl from Albiztur told the crowd the Virgin wanted them to pray the rosary with more seriousness and sing the Salve better.[19]
Visitor: Cuberes i Costa, EM, 5 August 1931; for girl from Bergara: N., "Anduagamendiko agerpenak [The Apparitions of Mount Anduaga]," 708; for Albiztar girl: Luistar, A, 23 August 1931.
In late July the hope for a great miracle waned and attendance declined from tens of thousands to under five thousand nightly. People began to come with a different attitude. No longer potential seers, they became spectators. No longer nervous, fearful, and excited at the prospect of becoming seers themselves, many came just to see the famous in action. At the end of July Walter Starkie wrote, "Poor Dolores, for many of those good people you are like Francisco Goicoechea—a purveyor of nightly stunts, and you act as a thriller for them." In early September a writer in El Liberal of Bilbao observed: "For several weeks now, people who go to Ezquioga no longer think they will see the Virgin; they go to see the seers, the ones who do not miss a day."[20]
S 148; Millán, ELB, 10 September 1931; also Txibirisko, La Tradición Navarra, 19 September 1931.
This shift in spectator attitudes had various causes. After two or three weeks the visions lost their novelty. Attendance from the immediate Basque hinterland declined, and visitors from farther away, less sensitive to the local mood, were
People watching seers in vision on stage, 27 December 1931. Photo by José Martínez
less likely to be seers. Starting in mid-July the press had begun to point to the unusual nature of the trances of some seers, like Patxi. In October Patxi put up the stage so that people could see the seers better. The platform was especially necessary when it became evident that miracles—trances, stigmata, or falling ribbons or medals—would happen to the seers themselves, not to the assembled crowd or the world at large. Priests led the nonstop rosaries from October 15 to October 20 from the stage, near the seers in a row, each seer in front of a helper. The seers were still facing the cross and holy trees where they saw the divine, but the people now faced the seers, not the cross or the trees. Many people had their backs to the Virgin.
After the end of October the cold and the rain and the negative press reduced the audience; at times all the spectators could fit on the stage with the seers. On a more informal basis, priests continued to lead rosaries, but Amundarain no longer organized them. When on December 26 the vicar general forbade priests to go up to the site, the prayers were led by seers, laypersons, or believing priests from other dioceses. Separate seers in vision led their cuadrillas up the hillside following the stations of the cross. Catalan pilgrim groups had their own prayer directors. But only during Holy Week 1932 and in September of that year did attendance climb once more into the thousands, with the kind of massed prayers so powerful in stimulating visions and moving hearts.
María Recalde in vision with rosaries, 1932. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
With a smaller audience, the seers could attend to the needs of those around them. Over the summer believers began to give the seers large numbers of medals, rosaries, and crucifixes to be blessed. A Catalan woman described Ramona Olazábal in early September:
One day, before the prayers began, one of those present gave this girl his rosary so she would have it in her hands during the ecstasy. She accepted it with signs of pleasure, but the idea spread and they did not stop calling her, each handing over to her a rosary…. When the rosary began, she stopped, knelt devoutly, and the ecstasy came very quickly. Afterward I asked her, "Did the Most Holy Virgin bless them?" "Yes, She blessed them," she replied.[21]
Delás, CC, 20 September 1931, about her visit September 3-5.
Image removed -- no rights
On the left, bent over by the weight of an invisible cross and kept from falling by two
men, a seer who is an elderly farm woman acts out the stations of the cross in vision,
May 1933. This seer will distribute as divine tokens the roses the woman in the
foreground carries. From VU, 23 August 1933. Photo by J.A. Ducrot, all rights reserved.
Photographs from the fall of 1931 and the spring of 1932 show the visionaries draped with devotional paraphernalia. As in the Barranca, most visions featured a moment when the Virgin would bless these objects. People who had connected medals with the holy trees now gave them to the seers to hold. The seers themselves had become the center of attention and a focus of miracles.
The believers took great pleasure in these divine tokens. A vision by Ignacio Galdós in November 1931 of angels receiving medals from the Virgin reflects the relation of believers to seers.
In her right hand the Virgin held silver rosaries, and in the other, many gold medals, which, raising her hand, she offered to all of us. The medals were all different, and I recognized only one, of Saint Anthony. Eight angels appear, and all kiss the scapular of the Most Holy Virgin, and then she puts a medal around the neck of each, and the angels, in their enthusiasm, like children, show them to each other and then soon disappear.[22]
SC D 102-103.
Catalans watch Benita Aguirre hold a crucifix for a boy to kiss, winter 1932. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
Medals and rosaries by this time had become a kind of medium of exchange that bound believers and seers together. In some cases, on instructions from the Virgin, the seers gave their own crucifixes, medals, or rosaries as gifts to believers; then the believers would buy others and give them in return.[23]
ARB 122, 139-140.
Visions included the obeisance of angels, who formed a kind of court for the Virgin, bowing, kneeling, and receiving orders. Similarly, believers kissed seers' hands, whether those of Ramona after the wounding or those of Benita when she returned their rosaries.We have also seen the flower become a divine symbol. Away from Ezkioga, some children in trance saw the Virgin in a flower or had visions of flowers or rewarded spectators with flowers. This distribution of flowers, easier in small groups, became common in the Ezkioga visions in 1932; thus blessed flowers, like blessed rosaries, were something that pilgrims took home as personalized talismans from the Virgin.[24]
For the language of flowers, of which this seems to be a refraction, Goody, Culture of Flowers, 232-253.
Another way to distribute grace was to press a crucifix to the lips of observers on the Virgin's command. From December 1931 seers in vision offered crucifixes to certain persons or invited certain individuals to come forward, giving them a
crucifix to kiss. Seers gave some believers the crucifix to kiss for an especially long time and ignored others altogether.
By distributing divine approval, the seers set up a kind of hierarchy of grace among the spectators. In the case of the Catalan expeditions, this new hierarchy sometimes reversed the order of the group. The factory worker José Garmendia and the humble farm woman María Recalde picked out the servants and the poorer members of the group not only for special favors but for notice as future seers. To be sure, they also singled out those who were chroniclers, like Salvador Cardús, Arturo Rodes, and Rafael García Cascón. Those they skipped were generally the few doubters or cynics in the expedition or onlookers obviously skeptical of or entertained by the events. In the Catalan groups these were the persons for whose "conversion" to Ezkioga members prayed. The later liturgies then, like those of the visions in villages away from Ezkioga, incorporated into the relations between seers and spectators a kind of theater of grace. Promotion, inclusion, conversion, or exclusion provided the tension in the plot.[25]
See ARB, passim, for descriptions of these events, for instance, pp. 110-111. G. Klaniczáy pointed me to an early equivalent in the way the ecstatic boy Henricus distributed kisses in "Legenda S. Emerici Ducis," E. Szentpétery, ed., Scriptores Rerum Hungaricum (Budapest, 1938), 2:452.
Vision States: How Others Saw Them
In about half of the Spanish lay medieval visions that we can document village priests or civil authorities instructed seers to return to the divine figure and request a proof. Some of the proofs they brought back were signs on their bodies or on those of other townspeople: a hand fixed as a cross; a mouth that would not open; wounds from a divine beating; sudden blindness; the prediction of imminent death from the plague of a seer or villager. We saw an echo of these signs when the judge could not undo Rosario Gurruchaga's hands, when Cándida Zunzunegui became supernaturally heavy after the police arrived, when Ramona and Luis had blood on their hands, and when the seers foresaw their own death.
In medieval accounts the physical state of the seer while having visions was not an issue. Only when laypeople began to doubt visions at the beginning of the sixteenth century do we read of a seer's claim to trasponerse , to be "transported so that she did not know or think she was in this world but rather the other." The authorities did not ask witnesses about these states, and indeed, most visions we know about took place without witnesses.[26]
Christian, Apparitions, 185-187.
By the time of the Ezkioga events, however, the new model of public trance-like visions applied, based presumably on Lourdes and ultimately on conventual mysticism. No longer did lay seers shuttle back and forth between the saint and the community after private visions. While their first vision might be private, they took along witnesses in subsequent sessions, and their state of consciousness while in vision was relevant to the process of validation. An altered state served as a sign. For inexperienced observers such a state might be proof that the visions were true. For seasoned clerics it might simply indicate that a seer was not
consciously faking. In any case, the old idea that contact with the divine left some kind of effect on the body resurfaced. Ezkioga believers refer to this state as being "en visión." Reporters from Basque newspapers, careful about prejudging the visions, generally avoided the word éxstasis , associated with sainthood, and only occasionally used the more neutral word trance .
Since at least the turn of the seventeenth century, when the Italian physician Paolo Zacchia described some religious visions as symptoms of mental illness, doctors took part in deciding whether visions were authentic.[27]
Marchetti, "La simulazione."
For some altered states might indicate not an ecstasy resulting from contact with the divine but another physical or mental condition. Animal magnetism, catatonia, epilepsy, hypnotism, hysteria, intoxication, mania, neurosis, obsession, somnambulism (which associated a trance with a dream state), and suggestion were diagnoses that experts offered at one time or another for seers at Ezkioga. Amundarain wanted to rule out alternatives like these, so in the first days he brought in the local doctor, Sabel Aranzadi. As with the doctors of the Bureau de Constatations at Lourdes in regard to miracles, Aranzadi's job at Ezkioga was to eliminate natural alternatives to ecstasy. His presence gave the commission the legitimacy of science.Aranzadi and other doctors took the pulses of the original brother and sister in vision and found them normal and steady. But since these children did not seem to experience any altered state, either during or after their visions, what they saw rather than what they felt was newsworthy. One of the reasons the public abandoned them rather quickly was the sheer simplicity of their experience. Rafael Picavea wrote of the boy, "The new seers have eclipsed him. He neither suffers moving faints nor falls into truculent pathological dreams."[28]
For pulse, all 1931: LC, 12 July; EZ, 15 July; ED, 17 July; ED, 19 July; Picavea, PV, 6 November.
The newspapers spent more time on those who showed more physical symptoms. The first of these was the chauffeur Ignacio Aguado, one of four successive youthful males who were skeptical about the visions and were then struck with visions themselves. When Aguado saw the Virgin during the rosary on July 4, he had been laughing and joking with friends. He felt something like a faint and fell down for about a minute. To observers he seemed unconscious, but as he described it, "I fell to the earth, but I did not lose my senses [el sentido ] and I continued to see the image." He had to be carried into a house and then driven back to Beasain. By one account he made a confession and became a churchgoer. The big play the press gave Aguado, side by side with the initial account of the child seers, indicates his critical role in supporting them. El Pueblo Vasco even inserted a cameo photograph of Aguado alongside one of the original seers' family. For most readers his conversion was part of the first account of the visions they read.[29]
All 1931: LC, 7 July; DN, 7 July; PV, 10 July (Aguado quote); A, 12 July (Aguado confession); GN, 17 July.
Patxi Goicoechea of Ataun was next. He fell down on July 7, after the regular prayers were over and he had made a joke about the Virgin. He had bounded to a rise on the hillside and pointed her out with a shout. On the advice of someone
nearby, he asked the Virgin three times what she wanted, and she said they should say the rosary. Those around him did so. Reporters described him then as keeping his eyes open but losing consciousness (sin sentido, kordegabeta ), as fainting (desvanecido ), as having a fit (pasmo ) or a rapture (arrobamiento ), or as remaining ecstatic (extatico ). His friends carried him down the hill. Like Aguado, he said, "I fell down in a faint but I did not lose consciousness; as I went down the hill in their arms she continued before me." By this time there was a first-aid room, and the doctors there found Patxi's heart working well. Like Aguado, he was shaken and someone had to drive him home. He did not recover fully until late that night, and for four days he did not eat, hardly slept, and was sad.[30]
All 1931: LC, 9 July; LC, 12 July; PV, 12 July (quote); A, 12 July.
In early July there were other seers experiencing trancelike states, but at first the press was interested not so much in the seers' partial loss of senses, which served as a kind of proof, but rather in their fall to the ground and the physical aftereffects. On July 8, the day after Patxi's vision, it was the turn of Xanti, a youth from Gabiria. He was allegedly stunned in mid-blasphemy as he raised his wineskin (or, in another account, as he rolled a cigarette). He had said there was no saint, male or female, who could knock him down, presumably referring to what happened to Aguado and Patxi. Three days later Aurelio Cabezón, an eighteen-year-old newspaper photographer who had been bantering with teenage girls during the prayers, suffered a similar shock. By his own account he saw the Virgin coming toward him, he gave a shout, and he fell to the ground unconscious. There doctors found his pulse racing. He regained consciousness in about half an hour. Afterward he was pallid, faint, thoughtful, preoccupied, and distracted. When he returned to take photographs on July 18, he had another vision during the rosary and was spooked again as the Virgin seemed to be coming toward him. He let out "a terrifying cry that echoed across the entire hillside" before falling unconscious.[31]
For Xanti see ED, 11 July 1931; Garmendia, EZ, 12 July 1931; and Cuberes i Costa, EM, 5 August 1931, citing Rvdo. Juan Casares's notebook. According to local people, Xanti stayed converted even though he worked in a factory. For Cabezón, all 1931: ED, 12 July; PV, 14 July; ED, 14 July; ED, 19 July.
This kind of initial "conversion by reaction," something like that of Saul on the road to Damascus, also occurred to a factory worker from Beasain. He allegedly said he would shoot his pistol at the Virgin if she appeared, and he promptly fell back into the arms of the church organist. It also happened to a taxi driver from San Sebastián, who allegedly made fun of the visions and fell backward and began to weep. It happened as well to Ignacio in Bachicabo in August, to a youth aged twenty-four named Nicanor Patiño, who made fun of the apparitions in Guadamur on August 29, and to Luis Irurzun in Iraneta in October. In 1920 a youth from Los Arcos had experienced the same reaction when he threw a coin at the Christ of Piedramillera. Under the pressure of the events, some of the most adamantly opposed, the most skeptical, were paradoxically those closest to belief. For Catholic newspapers these cases provided perfect object lessons for the Republic—they emphasized how divine power reduced proud men to weaklings. Therefore journalists emphasized not the altered state or the vision itself but the physical and psychological defeat.[32]
All 1931: factory worker (LC, 12 July), taxi driver (ED, 17 July; LC, 17 July; PV, 23 July; S 127-128). Patiño vision, 29 August, in El Castellano, 31 August 1931, Martín Ruíz, El Castellano, 2 September 1931, and León González Ayuso, Guadamur, 5 November 1976; for Los Arcos youth: Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 132-133, 140; see also Bloch, "Réflexions," and Goguel, La Foi dans la Résurrection, 419.
Attention to working men with "conversions by reaction": top,
reporters and chauffeur Ignacio Aguado in Legorreta, 9 July
1931 (photo by Pascual Marín, courtesy Fototeka Kutxa, Archivo
Fotografico, Caja Gipuzkoa, Donostia-San Sebastián); bottom, priest
and doctor with farm laborer Nicanor Patiño at Guadamur, 1931 (from
Ahora, 5 September 1931, courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid)
As these males were achieving special prominence, women and children were also fainting right and left (the words used included deliquio, desmayo, desvanecimiento, síncope, pérdida de conocimiento ). Again, the final faint and aftershock seemed to be the determinative reaction, the evidence that the vision was real. For example, an eighteen-year-old female from Zestoa gave a great scream when she saw the Virgin on July 14 ("I could not hold it in"). She was not able to sleep the next night and was in an acute state of nervousness the next day.[33]
PV, 16 July 1931.
But El Día 's reporter was early in discerning a difference between genders. After interviewing a farmer still terrified the day after his vision, he wrote, "But not in all cases does the apparition have this upsetting effect, which seems to be more common among the men, who fall into faints or are semicataleptic." He mentioned two young women, Evarista Galdós and Juana Ibarguren, who "saw the apparition and far from being frightened ran after her, wanting to get closer and find out for themselves if the apparition was flesh and blood."[34]
ED, 15 July 1931.
Other descriptions of Benita Aguirre, Lolita Núñez, Ramona Olazábal, and the original sibling seers show that at least some women and girls welcomed the visions rather than feared them. This too was a pattern in the testimony at Piedramillera in 1920, where a woman saw the Christ smile each time she entered the church. The implication in these accounts seems to be that the women and children were more comfortable with the divine, while men were uneasy because of unconfessed sins and unresolved doubts.We may question whether a pattern emerged at all at Ezkioga or at Piedramillera. An unconscious selection by reporters and priests may in fact have prejudiced their reports. After the initial conversion reactions in July, the priests and doctors fished for more conversion reactions with their printed questionnaire: "What did you think about what was going on at Ezquioga with the visions? What mood were you in when you came to Ezquioga—devotion? diversion? or to make fun?" From Elgoibar a newspaper correspondent wrote that on July 16 four young men in their twenties had had visions. The note described an aftershock for one of them, who could not sleep that night and had to stay home the next day because he felt "abnormal and nervous." Of the other three it said nothing; presumably they slept well and went happily to work. Conversely, the press did not report some of the more traumatic visions of women because they considered the women hysterical. So our sources may be working from a script similar to the one used a decade before to describe those who saw crucifixes move.[35]
ED, 19 July 1931.
The stories of men converted by visions affected the debate on women's suffrage in the Constituent Cortes in Madrid. When the republican priest Basilio Alvarez and the republican pathologist Roberto Novoa Santos argued that women were hysterics subject to the whims of the uterus, the feminist Clara Campoamor countered that all the seers at Ezkioga and Guadamur were hysterical men. Newspapers on the Catholic right cultivated one misconception, that
only men had deep visions at Ezkioga, to show that irreligious men felt guilty. Campoamor used this misconception to refute another, that women were biologically irrational, born of the positivist left.[36]
Campoamor, DSS, 1 September 1931.
When the miracles of July 12, 16, and 18 failed to materialize, public attention shifted to Patxi. His visions were a prolonged spectacle of conversion (weeks after his first vision he would still cry out that he had been bad and he asked the Virgin to forgive him), and he was leading the way with exciting political messages and predictions of miracles.[37]
Lassalle, PN, 9 August 1931, "Mother, Mother, do not weep! Weep not, kill me, but forgive the others, who do not know what they do. Mother, forgive me, don't cry!"
He attracted attention in yet another way: in vision he appeared wholly insensitive to pain. When seeing visions he could talk, hear, and see those around him, but he could not, it seems, feel. As a result he became a kind of exhibit A, like a fakir. His local doctor from Ataun sometimes accompanied him to Ezkioga and other doctors and priests came to examine him in vision. They took his pulse, stuck him with needles and other sharp objects (including, by Bilbao doctors in 1932, a lancet under the nail of his big toe), burned him with a cigarette lighter, tested his pupillary reflex (he had none), and attempted with lights to provoke blinking (in vain). Occasionally he was excited and had what seemed to be convulsions, and once on his return to Ataun his doctor had to give him morphine to calm him. But he seems to have settled into a routine of visions on certain nights at certain moments of the rosary. Doctors described him in vision as catatonic or semicataleptic but in his normal life, out of vision, as sane and well.[38]For pulse see LC, 9 July; EZ, 14 July; S 135; Molina, El Castellano, 24 August; Altisent, CC, 9 September; B 177. For pricks see ED, 19 July; PV, 23 July; Lassalle, PN, 4 August; for lancet see J. B. Ayerbe, "Maravillosas apariciones," AC 1:2. For burns see Lassalle, PN, 4 August, and for pupillary reflex, ED, 18 July. For eyelid reflex see ED, 23 July; Molina, El Castellano, 24 August; Delás, CC, 20 September. For convulsions see PV, 23 July, and for morphine see Picavea, PV, 6 November. Clean bill of health from Dr. Pinto of Santa Agueda, B 380, and Dr. Carrere, AC 405.
This intense scrutiny culminated on August 1 when Patxi supposedly levitated. He declared that the Virgin had insisted, in spite of his objections, that he be elevated for seventy seconds. Although a day later the newspapers backpedaled and said that Patxi's friends simply felt his body become weightless, the idea stuck. Levitating was the stuff of the saints of cloisters, and Patxi became "Patxi Santu." A long and favorable article in Pensamiento Navarro on August 4 entitled "Apparitions? A Trip to Ezquioga" totally ignored the Virgin or her messages and dealt instead with Patxi and his strange vision states.[39]
"¿Qué ocurrió al joven Goicoechea?" ED, 2 August 1931, p. 2; ED, 4 August 1931, p. 5; PV, 4 August 1931, p. 3; Lassalle, PN, 4 August 1931; Rodríguez Ramos, Yo sé, 12-14. Micaela Goicoechea, age 24, who worked as a servant in Legorreta, allegedly levitated on September 6 (Boué, 148; R 47; Paul Romain in EE [April-May 1935]: 3), but two days later a reporter could find no witnesses (Txibirisko, La Tradición Navarra, 19 September 1931). At the end of September the rumor circulated in Bilbao that a boy had risen two meters, "and that because of all this and some other things the doctor was convinced of the truth of everything" (letter from a woman believer, 27 September 1931, private archive). Patxi supposedly levitated again October 17 (Easo, 19 October 1931, p. 8). An old-time believer (Ikastegieta, 16 August 1982) told me he himself saw a woman rise two meters in the air and two men grab her and bring her down.
The first step in any examination by the doctors was to take the seer's pulse. Almost any result was evidence for the truth of the visions for persons disposed to believe. For instance, doctors thought it exceptional when seers went through what were obviously highly moving visions with no change in pulse. The canon Juan Bautista Altisent of Lleida wrote of a boy seer: "I take the pulse of this child while he speaks to me, and it is completely normal. This is precisely, in the opinion of the doctors, the most remarkable thing of all: that in spite of the psychic state of the seer, his pulse keeps completely steady." Conversely, doctors thought it remarkable that Goicoechea's pulse ran so fast after a vision on July 11. Dr. Aranzadi told a reporter: "His pulse rate was fantastic. I was going to draw some of his blood because I feared his veins would burst." For this doctor Patxi's state of arousal demonstrated sincerity.[40]
Altisent, CC, 9 September 1931; Aranzadi quote, ED, 14 July 1931; Aranzadi said in PV, 23 July 1931: "The reality of his severe excitation and convulsions cannot be open to doubt."
Later, when doctors found some seers' pulses to be so slow during visions as to be imperceptible, they considered this phenomenon remarkable too. A professor from the Institut Catholique de Louvain in late August examined a teenage girl, probably Evarista, in vision. He listened to her heart and lungs, took her pulse, and examined her eyelid reflexes. He judged that the heart was beating irregularly, so he brought her out of her vision as a hypnotist would. A San Sebastián doctor examining Evarista in March 1932 found that her heart went three minutes without beating and considered her survival proof that the visions were supernatural. When believers tried to sum up the evidence of pulse rates during visions, they could not agree on a pattern. One Catalan doctor said the pulses tended to be normal, another maintained that they tended to be slow, weak, and sometimes even temporarily absent, and Burguera held that they were largely normal, although those of nervous persons tended to be fast.
As these examples show, doctors tried to apply science to these seers' states, but they had little experience and few standards. Thus they fell back on their inclinations, and since those who went to Ezkioga were more likely to be sympathetic, their findings tended to be favorable. The seers came to recognize doctors as allies. In vision Evarista turned to the San Sebastián doctor, saying, "The Virgin is very pleased by these scientific observations designed to illustrate and propagate the events at Ezquioga." Conversely, what the Jesuit Laburu saw of Evarista and other seers merely confirmed his prior skepticism. In the notes for his Vitoria lecture he wrote, "In any hypnotist or spiritist session, one can find identical phenomena. These things are common and very well known in suggestive phenomena."[41]
For Louvain see Tuya, "¿Apariciones?"; for Galdós, ARB 146; for pulse patterns, B 56-57, 124-134; for Laburu, L 40.
From late July observers stuck seers with pins and burned them—some on the neck, others on the face and on the arms. Baudilio Sedano recounted that when he stuck Benita Aguirre with a long pin, she turned and smiled benignly. A skeptical French doctor did the same to a fifteen-year-old boy. In these instances, the seers showed no sign of pain. Observers tested children in Navarra in similar ways.[42]
"Noticies de Badalona," EM, 19 September 1931 (burns); Baudilio Sedano de la Peña with Lourdes Rodes, Barcelona, 5 August 1969, p. 1; for skeptical doctor, Pascal, "Visite"; Antonia Echezarreta, Ezkioga, 1 June 1984, p. 12 (tests on Ignacio Galdós); Pedro Balda, 7 June 1984, p. 13 (French doctors prick Luis Irurzun); old-time believer, Ikastegieta, 16 August 1982 (use of needles in faces); El Castellano, 26 September 1931, p. 1 (use of light in eyes); Tuya, "¿Apariciones?" (hand over eyes); Celigueta report, ADP, Izurdiaga.
The pupils of the eyes of many seers, like those of Patxi, did not contract when exposed to light. And both skeptical and sympathetic observers mention seers who, like Patxi, did not blink during visions.[43]
B 57-58, 129-134 (pupils do not react to light); Millán, ELB, 9 September 1931 (young man does not blink when lighted match passed before eyes); Altisent, CC, 9 September 1931, on Benita Aguirre and again, CC, 13 September, on Patxi, who did not blink for half an hour in vision; for similar observations: Farre, Diari de Sabadell, 7 October 1931, on teenage girl; Juaristi, DN, 25 October 1931, on Unanu girl; and Bernoville, Études, 20 November 1931, on woman seer.
Starting in late July doctors and priests held a cloth or some other object in front of the seers to test whether the visions were "subjective" (if they continued) or "objective" (if they ceased). The objects blocked visions of some seers but not of others. Again, no one seemed to know what this information meant. In retrospect, one fact seems clear: the seers were in a variety of physical states.[44]Tests with interposed objects reported in PV, 23 July 1931; ED, 22 July 1931 (on girl); S 144 (on Lolita Núñez); F. D., CC, 16 August 1931 (on Benita Aguirre). Thérèse Neumann and seers in Belgium saw in spite of interposed objects, so their visions were classed as interior: Pascal, Hallucinations; on this test at Medjugorje see Apolito, Cielo in terra, 84.
Another proof used to validate the apparitions was the change of expression on seers' faces. A reporter for El Pueblo Vasco noted, "The great transformation in their faces … impressed us vividly, leading us to exclaim, "Something is going
on here!'" Both believing and skeptical spectators singled out the same seers, by no coincidence those whom Raymond de Rigné, Joaquín Sicart, and José Martínez from Santander later photographed the most. Canon Altisent wrote of Benita Aguirre:
The child has a normal kind of face, but at the moment of the apparition the face is so transformed as to become exquisite, something that cannot be described. Then I thought that if Murillo were alive now he would go there to seek the model for the faces of the angels in his inspired canvases.
Similarly, a Catalan woman wrote that Benita seemed "like one of the angels she is contemplating." Salvador Cardús saw the transformation in Ramona as "a reflection of the beauty of the Mother of God" on the seer's face, with "a sweet smile that could only be the Virgin's."[45]
PV, 17 July 1931; Altisent, CC, 9 September 1931; Delás, CC, 20 September 1931; SC E 31.
People also singled out Cruz Lete ("one of those whose face is transformed most angelically") and Evarista Galdós, whose expression was "incredible if she were not really seeing something extraordinary." The skeptical French doctor Émile Pascal also noted the change in Evarista's face.
Little by little her face lights up, she smiles and seems to be seeing a marvelous spectacle. For a half hour her features reflect expressions that are really very beautiful: beatitude, joy, piety, happiness, etc., one after another with an unheard-of intensity. Without exaggerating, one thinks when seeing her of the Saint Teresa in ecstasy by Bernini in the church of Santa Maria in Rome…. Monsieur de Rigné has obtained some remarkable pictures of her … but they give only a poor idea of the intensity and beauty of this ecstatic's expressions. Remember that Bernadette at Lourdes in her visions was as though transfigured. Just seeing her was enough to convince certain witnesses.[46]
Tuya, "¿Apariciones?" 625; Pascal, Hallucinations, 34-35, who cites Estrade, Les Apparitions de Lourdes.
But not all faces were beatific in visions. Some, like Patxi's, alternated between ecstasy and a thick, sleepy look: "During the phenomenon he has two phases, one of apparent ecstasy and another of sopor. When he returns from the latter to the former, Dr. Aranzadi exclaims, 'Look, look what an enormous difference in the lines of his face!'" Others did not look right at all. Several observers I talked to disbelieved the visions precisely because of the faces, presumably the faces not photographed. In Ormaiztegi a priest's sister said, "What faces! They had fear on their faces. If they were seeing the Virgin would they look that way? I cannot conceive it." Two elderly sisters from Ordizia said the seers in trance had "disfigured faces."[47]
Patxi about 6-8 August 1931 in Lassalle, PN, 9 August 1931; interviews in Ormaiztegi, 2 May 1984, p. 2, and with sisters in New York, 3 October 1981.
People saw other changes in the faces. Even skeptical observers noticed a sheen (brillo ) on the face of Luis Irurzun. And occasionally people remarked a special light like an aura or halo. The mother of Antonio Durán, a young lawyer from Cáceres, saw his face "illuminated, as if some kind of light emerged from his features." Arturo Rodes described the original boy seer from Ezkioga as if
Evarista Galdó's in vision, 11 March 1932. Photo by Joaquin Sicart
alight: "It was pitch-black and he seemed to shine like an angel that was adoring the divinity."[48]
Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, p. 5, told me that Victoriano Juaristi remarked on the sheen on Luis's face, and Maritxu Güller also mentioned seeing it; for the transformation of faces, "Lo que ha visto un cacereño en Ezquioga," El Castellano, 26 September 1931, from Extremadura; and ARB 39.
A pilgrim from Catalonia noted as physical signs of the sincerity of a seer from Sevilla, Consuelo Luébanos, the bruises on her cheek from her fall into trance. But the absence of bruises from falls could be still another reason to believe. Two Catalans saw none on Benita Aguirre's face despite her fall, and they generalized, "Even heavy men like Garmendia, whose solid body falls hard and loud against the ground, have never received any injury as a result of such spectacular spills." All of these observations sharpened the public's awareness that many of the seers were in a special state while having visions.[49]
Luébanos in Cuberes i Costa, EM, 5 August 1931. Gratacós, "Lo de Esquioga," 17 Dr. Tortras Vilella of Barcelona commented: "I confess with perplexity that I never observed the least injury" (B 125).
During the summer of 1931 medical interest in the matter was intense. Within a week of the first report there were several doctors present, including the famous Fernando Asuero of San Sebastián. When seers collapsed on the hillside, a doctor
was generally available. Doctors accompanied some seers from their villages; periodically groups of doctors examined the seers together. As the vision states became news in themselves, so did the doctors, including two from Hendaye and the professor from Louvain. This medical interest reflected the importance of doctors at Lourdes and was characteristic of most other nineteenth- and twentieth-century apparition sequences. Rumor had it that Manuel Azaña, then minister of war, had sent Gregorio Marañón, the nation's greatest medical authority, to diagnose the visions on July 22. Patxi, by then well aware of his own exotic properties, said he would like to meet the doctor.[50]
For memoirs of a Basque doctor at Lourdes, Achica-Allende, Cuadernos. Asuero (1886-1942) reportedly assured children they would have no more visions. He had achieved world renown in March and April 1929 for his cures by stimulating the trigeminal nerve. See Barriola, "La medicina," 41-45; Sánchez Granjel, Médicos Vascos, 36-38; Barbachano, El Doctor Asuero; and ED, 12 January 1933, p. 12. On Marañón, ELB, 23 July 1931, and PV, 23 July 1931; S 138; Patxi in Rodríguez Ramos, Yo sé, 15. The San Sebastián priest Pío Montoya, 7 June 1983, p. 3, assured me that Marañón had been there.
The most active among the many doctors on the Catalan trips were Miguel Balari, a homeopath who had previously studied the Barcelona mystic Enriqueta Tomás, and Manuel Bofill Pascual of the Clínica San Narciso in Girona, Magdalena Aulina's personal physician and public defender. The close-knit Basque medical establishment kept its distance, and persons with cures they attributed to the visions could not obtain medical certificates. Not one Basque doctor was a public supporter, much less a seer. At most, some were involved collaterally.[51]
The prominent urologist Benigno Oreja Elósegui (1880-1962) provided Patxi with the use of a car, according to Laburu (L 14). Oreja was a confounder of the Clínica San Ignacio of San Sebastián and spent weekends and summers at his house in Ordizia, Aurteneche, "Vida y obra," 14-67. Patxi approached Oreja's brother Marcelino, the deputy in the Cortes, without success. The daughter of the doctor of Segura was a seer, as was the maid of the doctor of Ormaiztegi: PV, 25 July 1931; PN, 22 July 1931; and Luis S. Granjel, Salamanca, 2 November 1994.
At first the vision states intrigued the Zumarraga doctor Sabel Aranzadi enough that he pointed reporters to the most "interesting cases." He eventually ended by supplying some of the most telling negative evidence. Yet he was never absolutely sure that the visions were false. In later years he told his friends that in spite of all he knew he could not bring himself to throw away the bloodstained bandages of Ramona Olazábal. The president of the medical association of Gipuzkoa, the ophthalmologist Miguel Vidaur, helped Padre Laburu. But neither Vidaur nor Aranzadi took a public stand.[52]
On Sabel Aranzadi: Mate sisters, Zumarraga, 10 May 1984, p. 2. Vidaur when widowed became a Jesuit and went to China; Barriola, "La medicina," 19.
We have seen how in Navarra the psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi, a kind of regional version of Gregorio Marañón, turned public opinion against the visions in the Barranca. In San Sebastián the only doctor publicly opposed was José Bágo, who remanded the seers to the insane asylum. Politics rather than a personal knowledge of the visions seems to have moved him. As far as I know, the pathologist and deputy in the Cortes Roberto Novoa Santos did not go to observe the Ezkioga seers, but his assistant, José María Iza, was at Ezkioga on 17 October 1931. Not surprisingly his diagnosis was that "all have the muscular rigidity, the lack of reflexes, and certain peculiarities in the pupil and the nostrils that indicate the cataleptic state characteristic of hysterics."[53]
On Iza, PV, 18 October 1931. Iza followed the misogyny of his mentor, Novoa Santos, who argued in the Cortes, 2 November 1931, against women's suffrage: "La mujer es eso: histerismo." Heliófilo in Crisol, 3 November 1931, quoted from a 1929 Novoa Santos book: "A woman is a child who has achieved full sexual maturity. The guiding force of her morphological and 'spiritual' distinctiveness is her ovary."
There was always the possibility that some of the seers were mentally ill, a danger to society and in need of treatment. In 1934 a doctor in Soria published the case history of a male patient and seer whose first vision—he saw the Miraculous Mary surrounded by lights—was in 1929. The Virgin told him to "Love charity and you will see the Father of the Poor." He gave his money away, spent some time with the Vincentian Fathers in Guadalajara, then went off preaching on his own in the Alcarria, Córdoba, and Granada. People called him "the crazy friar." Local authorities took him to a mental hospital in Córdoba,
where among other claims he said he had become an automobile driver by order of the Virgin. She chose him to transport the column of Our Lady of Pilar to the village of Villaseca in Soria, where the Last Judgment would be held. He also asserted that one day he would be pope.
This patient was ill in more painful and dysfunctional ways as well, and the doctor concluded that he was insane and a danger to society, with symptoms including weak-mindedness, schizophrenia, and paranoia. But he also pointed out that
there are many mentally ill persons like M. G. whom we come across in daily life, who work and have a social life, individuals who, if they run along in a rut without difficulties and without coming across obstacles that require a healthy mind to overcome get into trouble only when they run afoul of laws and legal codes.[54]
Nieto, "Sobre el estado," 698. I owe this reference to Thomas Glick.
Doctors, reporters, or the general public diagnosed none of the Ezkioga seers as obviously crazy. When studying the unusual and varied vision states, the doctors were observing persons who had every appearance of being mentally healthy, so they focused more on the phenomenon than its bearers. Even Laburu recognized the similarities of the trances at Ezkioga to those other nonpathological contexts produced and he steered well clear of their physical properties in his lectures. When he showed the film of mental patients after a film of the seers, he did so, I think, simply to sway the audience; in the text of his lecture he never suggested that the seers were mentally disturbed.
Whether they believed in the visions or not, those who went to Ezkioga did not think the seers' unusual behavior was the result of mental instability. Some considered rather that the seers' actions embodied the reigning social and political instability (what the count of Romanones, referring to Ezkioga, called "the religious hypertension that the Basque people have reached"). For the believers the dramatic states of the seers reflected the extreme reactions of the divine beings to the plight of Spain.[55]
Romanones made the remark to the prominent French writer Gaëtan Bernoville in the summer or early fall of 1931: Études, 20 November 1931, p. 464.
Thérèse Neumann: The Model for the Evaluators
The holy person who came to mind most when commentators searched for comparisons was the German mystic Thérèse Neumann of Konnersreuth in Bavaria. After a series of physical disablements and cures, in 1926 when she was age twenty-eight she began to have every Friday an extended sequence of visions of episodes of Christ's Passion. During the visions she seemed to weep tears of blood and had the marks of the stigmata on her hands, feet, and left side. Between episodes, in a trancelike state, she might answer consultations of pilgrims. Starting in September 1927, she claimed, she took no food but Holy Communion. The Sunday after Ramona's wounding, somebody distributed at Ezkioga large numbers
Drawing of Thérèse Neumann in vision. From El Pasionario, before March 1931
of an article on Neumann from the Madrid daily Informaciones . The Basque press that reported on Ezkioga carried lengthy stories about the German stigmatic and had in fact already done so before the visions. El Pasionario had been running a series of articles on her for more than a year when the visions started. Those looking for divine signs found that Ezkioga and Thérèse Neumann were part of a divine offensive against materialism and atheism.[56]
For the comparison with Ezkioga see Arteche, ED, 14 July 1931. Polo Benito, El Castellano, 11 September 1931, cited Neumann and Ezkioga, along with Lourdes, Fatima, and Guadamur, as elements of an "ofensiva de Dios." Tuya in "¿Apariciones?" suggested waiting for the truth of Ezkioga to come clear as a cardinal suggested waiting in the case of Neumann. Bishop Mateo Múgica contrasted Neumann's obedience with the seers' rebellion (Sebastián López de Lerena, "Relación de la visita que la vidente Gloria Viñals hizo al Sr Obispo de Vitoria el día 6 de septiembre de 1933," private archive).
For local news of Neumann see Basilio de San Pablo, "Manifestaciones de la Pasión"; "El caso asombroso de Teresa Neumann," ED, 3 April 1931, p. 12; Farges, Easo, 19, 20, and 21 October 1931; Bay, PV, 27 October 1931; "Un caso inexplicado, Teresa Neumann, la estigmatizada de Konnersreuth," Easo, ten-part series from 25 November to 8 December 1931; EM, 12 January 1932, p. 8; A, 9 October 1932, p. 2; for Informacìones Neumann article distributed at Ezkioga see Juan de Urumea, El Nervión, 23 October 1931.
News of this mystic reached Spanish newspapers in September 1927. Some clerical commentators warned against gullibility, referring to the recent cases of Claire Ferchaud and Padre Pio. Ferchaud's vision at Loublande during World War I found favor in the French church, but the Holy Office intervened and in March 1920 condemned the visions unequivocally. Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, an Italian Capuchin, experienced the stigmata in 1918. By 1920 leaves from a rosebush in his monastery and letters with his signature were used in healing in Spain. Spaniards visited him and wrote him for advice. The Holy Office issued five decrees against him starting in 1923, the latest in May 1931. Neumann convinced others, like a Capuchin who had been an early promoter of Padre Pio.[57]
Spanish devotion to Padre Pio in Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 91-92; and Diario Montañés, 13 June 1922, p. 1. Basilio de San Pablo, "Manifestaciones de la Pasión," 1930, pp. 58-62, cites articles in El Debate in September 1927 by "Danubio," in El Debate in September 1928 by Bruno Ibeas, in El Siglo Futuro in October 1928, and in ABC (Madrid) on 3 July 1929 by Polo Benito. Warnings about gullibility: Tarré in La Hormiga de Oro, 6 October 1927, and Gazeta de Vich, 15 October 1931, and Urbano, "Neumann, Rafols." Martínez de Muñeca, El Debate, 26 July 1932. El Pasionario held off reporting on Neumann because of the false miracles at Gandía in Valencia in 1918, the exaggerations at Limpias starting in 1919, and the case of P. Pio.
By the start of the Ezkioga visions Editorial Litúrgica Española in Barcelona had published three books on Neumann. In 1931 she was at the height of her popularity, living proof of the truth of Catholicism, receiving three hundred letters a day.[58]Spirago, La Doncella estigmatizada; Lama, Una Estigmatizada; and Alujas, Teresa Neumann. Herder published Waitz, Mensaje, in 1929, and "Els Fets de Konnersreuth" began appearing in La Veu de l'Angel de la Guardia in October 1930. For Neumann's popularity see M. Lecloux, "Une Conférence sur Thérèse Neumann," La Croix, 27 November 1931, p. 2.
Reports about her fit into an ancient tradition of fasting laywomen who serve as intermediaries for humans with the dead and with heaven, a tradition that continues to the present day in Spain.[59]There was a woman who supposedly lived only on the host in Montecillo, near Espinosa de los Monteros (Burgos) in the 1930s (Baroja, El Cura de Monleón, 146). In 1977 I heard of a similar young girl in the province of Orense, considered a saint for not eating, who had people lining up to visit her and leave alms until a doctor from Vigo administered a drug and she vomited octopus. Apart from the better known cases of holy abstinence in saints, studied by Imbert-Gourbeyre, C. Bynum, and R. Bell, there appears to have been a long and continuous folk tradition of "living saints" of this nature in peasant Europe. See, for example, the Austrian woman in Bourneville, Louise Lateau, 86, and for Asturias, Cátedra, This World, Other Worlds, 264-268.
Some of the enthusiasts for Ezkioga had been to see Neumann. The Bilbao religious philantropist Pilar Arratia found the visionary crucifixions at Ezkioga in January 1932 similar to those of the stigmatic, except they were without blood. The noted Basque clergyman and philologist Resurrección María de Azkue visited Neumann in September 1928 and on his return gave lectures about her; he seems to have been a discreet sympathizer of the Ezkioga visions. Neumann enthusiasts like Raymond de Rigné, Fernand Remisch, Ennemond Boniface, and Gustave Thibon spread news of Ezkioga in Belgium and France.[60]
For Arratia see Echeguren to Laburu, Vitoria, 20 January 1932; Azkue, La Estigmatizada, first published in Reseña Eclesiástica. See R 51, "an eminent priest who has seen Thérèse Neumann, assures that the revelations of Gloria Viñals will be more important"; he mentions Azcue a few pages later.
Father Thomas Matyschok, a professor of Psychic Sciences in Germany, gave lectures on Neumann in Pamplona in August 1932 and in San Sebastián in December. His experience with Neumann qualified him as an expert, so Juan Bautista Ayerbe took him to evaluate Conchita Mateos in vision. Matyschok found in the child the five key qualities he observed in Neumann: (1) she fell into ecstasy suddenly; (2) she was not aware in sight, sound, or intellect of what was happening around her; (3) she remembered faithfully and precisely what happened in the ecstasy; (4) she was insensible to fire, pricks, blows, and the like, and (5) she did not blink or move her eyes when struck by a powerful electric beam.[61]
VN, 3 August 1932, p. 8; LC and ED, 16 December 1932, and PV, the next day; J. B. Ayerbe, "Las maravillosas apariciones," AC 2:5.
Like Soledad de la Torre, Padre Pio, and other "living saints," Neumann was used as an oracle and a prophet. She seems to have worked in synergy with other sources of religious enthusiasm. I do not know if visitors asked Neumann about Ezkioga, but she did answer questions about Spain. Matyschok said that she told him that the Limpias visions were true and that it was the Christ of Limpias that she saw in her visions. Similarly, she told a priest from Zaragoza in September 1935 that she had heard of Madre Rafols's prophecies and that "a young man," whom the priest retrospectively identified with Francisco Franco, was working firmly for Christ in Spain.[62]
J. B. Ayerbe to Alfredo Renshaw, 6 October 1933, ASC; Antonio Gil Ulacia, a priest in Zaragoza, "Un caso inédito: A modo de prólogo," in Vallejo Najera, El Caso. Neumann was also used as an almanac. Diari di Vich, 10 September 1931, p. 3, said she predicted flooding from a great storm that month. In October 1931 she was said to have confirmed the apparitions at Marpingen; as in 1877 Louise Lateau also was thought to have backed these visions: Blackbourn, Marpingen, 167, 368.
People also used Neumann as a counterexample. Rafael Picavea sought to discredit the Ezkioga visions by describing "morbid" phenomena in which self-suggestion played a large part. He cited evidence that Neumann ate secretly and deceived herself as well as others in order to show that Ramona and other seers were equally open to self-deception.[63]
Picavea, PV, 20 November 1931.
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, as psychology became more prominent, even among Catholics there was a kind of open season on religious ecstasy. A diagnosis of hysteria for Teresa de Avila was a major issue in Spanish publications appearing around her third centenary.[64]
Perales, Supernaturalismo, defended Teresa de Avila's visions, locutions, and divine raptures against naturalists like Maury but nevertheless diagnosed her as suffering from grand mal of Charcot (270, 338) and cited as certainties phenomena of spiritism and magnetism (285-297), which he attributed to the devil. Brenier de Montmorant, Psychologie des mystiques, 237 n. 1, gives other participants in the controversy.
The pathologist Roberto Novoa Santos proposed angina as Teresa's divine wounding. These were offshoots of an enormous French literature that sought natural explanations for trances, raptures, miracle cures, and stigmata. Orthodox Catholic psychologists spent much of their time refuting the new studies or denying their applicability to true visions.[65]Novoa, Patografia; he raised the angina issue in a lecture at the Madrid Atheneum, 20 November 1931. For French background see Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 7-28; Hilgard, Divided Consciousness, 1-14; Duchenne, Mécanisme de la physionomie, 145-154; Maury, Le Sommeil, 229-255; Godfernaux, Le Sentiment, 48-59; Charcot, La Foi qui guérit; Charcot and Richer, Les Démoniaques; Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hysterie; Didi-Huberman, "Charcot, l'histoire et l'art"; Murisier, Maladies, 7-72; and Ribot, The Diseases, 94-103. Richet's Tratado de Metapsíquica was published in Barcelona by Editorial Araluz in 1923. For Catholic defense see Brenier de Montmorant, Psychologie des mystiques, 103-205; Mir, El Milagro, 2:712-13, 3:295-315, 361-400; Antonio de Caparroso, Verdad y caridad, 1932; and for a good bibliography see Gratton, DS.
Those defending Thérèse Neumann had to show how different she was from the mentally ill stigmatic studied by Janet in De l'angoisse à l'extase, or fromLouise Lateau, the most famous stigmatic of the previous generation.[66]
See, for instance, Robert van der Elst, "Autour d'une stigmatisation," La Croix, 24 December 1931, p. 3, and his "Stigmates" in Dictionnaire apologétique (Paris: Beauchesne). For Lateau see Imbert-Gourbeyre, Les Stigmatisés, vol. 1, and Curicque, Voces proféticas, 367-399. Bourneville, Louise Lateau, cites other works.
The Jesuit Juan Mir y Noguera charged that many of those challenging Catholic mysticism were Jews: "Yes, Jews who, not satisfied by making themselves lords of wealth, politics, and the press, scale the bastion of science to work more thoroughly their iniquity." The challenge had reached Spain. "Rationalism has infected not a few doctors in the peninsula, and the number of enemies of miracles and divine mysticism is still growing."[67]Mir, El Milagro, 3:399-400.
As far as I know, only one psychologist made a serious effort to examine the Ezkioga seers with "rationalist" theories in mind. The French doctor Émile Pascal was at Ezkioga sometime in early 1932 and two years later he published his attempt to "deoccultize" the apparitions, first in a specialized journal and then in a book entitled Hallucinations or Miracles? The Apparitions of Ezquioga and Beauraing .[68]
Pascal, "Visite" and Hallucinations. He also wrote "Une explication naturelle des faits d'Ezkioga est-elle possible?" EE 8 (October-November 1935). Pascal had already written Le Sommeil hypnotique produit par le scopochloralose (1928); Un Révélateur du subconscient: Le Hachich (1930); and La Question de l'hynoptisme (1930). Under the name Pascal Brotteaux he published Hachich, herbe de folie et de rêve (Paris: Editions Vega, 1934).
Pascal proposed that at Ezkioga the first seers' visions were based on stories about other apparitions and that the visions spread by imitative suggestion. As other instances he cited the Jansenist visionaries in the cemetery of Saint-Medard, an epidemic of possession at Morzine in the 1860s, the contagious effects of mesmerism, and American revival meetings. Similarly, the psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi from Pamplona considered the Navarrese child visions an epidemic of neurosis like similar contagions in schools, hamlets, and entire regions; and the deputy and journalist Rafael Picavea compared the spread of visions to psychological contagion among women factory workers and to the seventeenth-century witch craze.[69]
Pascal, Hallucinations, 42-43; Juaristi, DN, 25 October 1931, p. 12; Picavea, PV, 14 and 20 November 1931. The treatise on crowd psychology by Rossi, Sugestionadores, 113-135, gave examples of group suggestion, including some Italian religious visions.
What interested Pascal especially was the psychic state of the seers. He suggested that the seers were
plunged into a light subconscious state, with a tendency toward a fixed idea. More precisely, the seers are plunged in a low-grade somnambulism, with all their spontaneous attention concentrated on the vision, as with a hypnotized subject under the influence of an intense suggestion. We would call this a light state. For there is missing here one of the characteristics of a deep somnambulism: amnesia upon awakening.
He pointed out the similarity of these seers to persons he had observed under the influence of certain drugs or light hypnosis: all were at least partially aware of what was going on and could remember their experience later. In this kind of half-trance they had contact with the external world and could answer questions from those around them: "The normal consciousness of the ecstatic is present, like a kind of spectator, at the apparitions provoked in the subconscious by the suggestions of the ambience."[70]
Pascal, Hallucinations, 45. See the similar, if cruder, analysis by Millán, ELB, 10 September 1931: "They 'see' their own thoughts, they 'speak' with the mental figure that their brain has lodged and given form, and they 'hear' words that their own 'ego' pronounces, according to the beliefs, feelings, or physical circumstances of the seer-sensitive."
Padre Burguera objected to suggestion as an explanation. He pointed out that many people went to Ezkioga wanting visions but did not have them,
while others who were merely curious or even skeptical did. Pascal countered with the psychological axiom that "instead of evoking the expression of the subconscious, voluntary and conscious attention paralyzes it and blocks its development," which is why those who wanted visions often did not get them. But, Pascal argued, "fear that the subconscious might erupt and the attempt to prevent it from doing so will often evoke it in sensitive persons," a process that would seem to apply to unwilling visionaries like our young male converts.[71]
Pascal, Hallucinations, 48, citing Coué; B 89-115.
Pascal could not avoid Raymond de Rigné, who insisted that Ramona Olazábal's stigmata were not fraudulent. But Pascal held that even if not fraudulent they could be the result of "the intense action of the spirit on the body." He referred to the opinions of Michel de Montaigne and Giordano Bruno that the stigmata of Francis of Assisi were caused by imagination. In a fine demonstration of the single-minded determination of his times to undermine mysticism, Pascal detailed the many as yet unsuccessful efforts by hypnotists and psychologists starting in 1853 to cause stigmata by suggestion.[72]
Pascal, Hallucinations, 54-73.
Pascal agreed with Laburu that the visions at Ezkioga were the effect of suggestion. But Laburu thought there were other, true apparitions. So Pascal tried to show how Laburu's objections to Ezkioga applied equally well to the visions of Bernadette and the other children that followed her at Lourdes. It was in this broader debate over the truth of mystical states and apparitions in general that Catholics and non-Catholics interpreted the vision states of Ezkioga.
Vision States: How the Seers' Experience Evolved
Over time the way the seers had visions changed. As a rule, seers progressed from lesser to greater states of dissociation, from less definite to more definite perceptions, and from less to more sensory involvement.
In the first month men, women, and some children tended to collapse physically after the visions, and observers paid little attention to the vision state itself. Recovery took from a few minutes to a few hours, but it took less time as seers had more visions. The seers obviously tended to find the first visions more traumatic. As time passed their attitude changed from respect, awe, or fear to confidence.
By the time the first Magdalena Aulina trip arrived from Catalonia in December 1931, most of the noisier, more theatrical aspects of the visions had disappered. At Ezkioga in mid-May 1932 Miguel Balari summed up the trances as he knew them: "So this absence of the senses comes to an end, without a convulsion, without any sign of hysteria or anything that could be remotely said to be spectacular or noisy." Pascal remarked on this change: "At times, especially toward the beginning, there were sometimes nervous fits…. But these great
agitations are more and more rare. The calm and deep ecstasy is what is most frequently seen."[73]
The shift in seer behavior may reflect in part the smaller audiences of the seers and their adaptation to the reserve of the urbane Catalans (B 131; Pascal, Hallucinations, 27).
When Juan Baustista Ayerbe described the general pattern of vision behavior at the end of 1932, he pointed out other changes as well.
At first there were visions that were not ecstasies, just exterior visions. Some seers continued communicating with those around them, whom they continued to see, hear, and answer. Later the seers in ecstasy as a rule neither see, hear, nor have the least relation to what is around them.
Nevertheless, they move and retain their intellectual faculties. During the ecstasies the seers move, pray, speak with the Most Holy Virgin and the saints who appear, reason perfectly well, pose the questions they have been asked to pose, receive and later remember the replies obtained from the Holy Virgin, at times unexpected and surprising.[74]
J. B. Ayerbe, "Maravillosas apariciones," AC 1:2.
This change may have come about partly because Patxi was so famous. As observers came to consider insensibility essential to a true vision, they made more and more tests, culminating in Burguera's cull by flame in the spring of 1933. The original seers never fell into trance and made no pretense of being in an altered state. I do not know whether Burguera or anyone else applied fire to them. People later paid more attention to seers who were in unusual and dissociated states.
In the evolved kind of vision, instead of collapsing into a faint when the vision was over, the seers collapsed when it began, as here with Benita Aguirre:
At once, and without transition, as if struck by lightning, the child falls face first, as if some invisible force had thrown her face against the ground…. These falls reminded the observer of the way the Apostles fell back when confronted by the resplendent cloud on Mount Tabor and the way the soldiers fell who had gone to capture Jesus at Gethsemane.[75]
Gratacós, "Lo de Esquioga," 17-18.
When the seers surfaced from this new version of abstraction, they did so quickly: "They return to their normal state as rapidly as they entered into ecstasy, remaining from this moment on completely calm without the need that epileptics have to recover during minutes, hours, or days." More jaundiced observers noted incongruous behavior immediately after the vision ended. It will be remembered that Luis Irurzun was struck down and converted after he insisted on smoking when watching a vision. Two years later he had to kick the habit and was lighting up right after coming out of his vision:
And this young fellow who had been undergoing for three hours this totally exhausting physical exercise [a pantomime of Saint Michael's combat with the devil], this wild man who I expected to collapse in complete prostration, comes to his senses, takes a cigarette out of his pocket, and lights it. And what's more, he is in that instant perfectly calm, as if he had not got out of bed since the night before.[76]
Dr. Tortras Vilella's report, 25 November 1932, B 128. Luis in Ducrot, VU, 30 August 1933, p. 1365. Joan Colomer, the parish priest of Sant Andreu in Barcelona, wrote to Salvador Cardús, 10 May 1932, describing "un vident que despres del rapte encenia tranquilament un pitillo com si res hagues passat."
Within the vision many seers experienced a progress, noted by the anthropologist Clara Gallini in the visions of Bernadette, from vagueness to concreteness in what they perceive. Often visions began simply with a bright light somewhere which developed gradually, evolved, and opened up to produce a humanlike figure, most often the Virgin. This process could take place in one vision, in every vision, or in a series of visions. The commission may have helped along this process of definition with its questions.[77]
Gallini, "Lourdes"; also Staehlin, Apariciones. Use of a written interrogatorio had for centuries been normal practice in both civil and religious investigations involving multiple witnesses. Sinforoso de Ibarguren would have abstracted many of the questions, posed as alternatives, on his two-side printed sheet from what earlier seers told him. He had participated in Jose Miguel de Barandiarán's surveys. We are left wondering just how much of what the seers said they saw was an artifact of the questions, or vice versa. The general patterns, I think, preceded the questionnaire. They certainly persisted long after it was in use.
Light was essential to the visions, as most took place at night. Blinding light characterized the nocturnal visions in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century but not the later daytime visions in Castile and Catalonia. By the time the priests at Ezkioga drew up their Hoja interrogatorio (see appendix), they paid special attention to light: "How does the vision first appear—the image, the brightness, or both at the same time? Is the brightness in the form of a frame [cuadro ], oval, or a chapel or altar? Does it light up the Virgin only, or the atmosphere? Is the light intense or faint?"
As at Mendigorría, light was all some people saw—in trees,as a cross, or simply in a blinding flash. Luis Irurzun described to me his first vision in Iraneta as a great light that made him think he was about to die. But usually the visions of light heralded the arrival of the Virgin. Many seers referred to this preliminary light simply as a great resplendence, but several described the light first taking form. A Catalan woman reported that Ramona told her in early September: "I see the Most Holy Virgin in a brightness [claridad ], but a brightness that opens up (and she joined her hands and opened them to express herself better) and inside it is the Most Holy Virgin of the Sorrows." Similarly, an elderly rural seer explained to me that he would see something like a cloud, which would open to allow the Virgin to emerge surrounded by light. Something like this kind of nimbus of light was a general pattern for the seers in early September 1931: "The Virgin is always seen as if inside a very bright cloud, brighter than the sun they claim, and suddenly it opens and the Virgin appears in the middle, crowned with beautiful stars."[78]
Light: in trees, LC, 7 July; as cross, ARB 123; as flash, LC, 25 July 1931, and Luis Irurzun, San Sebastián, 5 April 1983, p. 2. Ramona quote in Delás, CC, 20 September 1931. Elderly seer, 31 March 1983, p. 18. Rafael García Cascón in La Creuada, 12 October 1931, pp. 424-425.
For Evarista Galdós a circle or hoop of light provided a space for her first, quick, glimpse of the Virgin. She saw
a light in the form of a halo that got bigger and bigger. But I could see the tips and the trunks of the trees, so it would have had a radius of about four meters. But I could not distinguish anything where the light was. In the middle of that brightness, I saw a lady dressed in mourning…. I could not make out her face, as the apparition was momentary, and what's more, it seemed as if she had a curtain of cloud in front of her.
The light itself seems to have continued after this glimpse and to have changed in response to the crowd's behavior: "I saw the light for about five minutes. When
the people would begin to shout, it would go higher away, and when they were praying attentively, it got closer."[79]
Vision on 7 July 1931, B 714-715.
Similarly, a woman from Beizama who worked for a family that moved around Spain saw a "grandiose circle of light that was opening wider and stretching so that inside it I saw heaven [or the sky]." In the center, which "I call heaven [cielo ] and I do not know how to explain," she saw an elaborate scene including a dove, an old man, Christ embracing a cross, and the Virgin as a queen with two angels. In one of Benita Aguirre's visions the splendor emerged from a hole that opened in the sky and into which the Virgin, the Christ child, and angels with baskets of flowers eventually disappeared.[80]
Vision de María Nieves Mayoral (of Beizama) in Ciudad Rodrigo, 2 February 1932, AC 369; Benita vision, 6 August 1931, in F. D., CC, 16 August 1931, full text in chap. 4 above.
Resplendence accompanied the Virgin, whether in the form of points of light or light surrounding or wrapping her entire body. One seer saw the light as emanating from her hands. And Santos Bustos, age thirteen, took a second look and saw a light shining from the Virgin's stomach:
He sees again the apparition, vision, or image of the Virgin, but with greater brilliance and clarity, observing, in addition to what he saw at first, that toward the middle of the body (he points to the upper abdomen) she had something shining that is not like a lamp [lámpara ] but that gave off a very intense light that his eyes could not resist, for they were blinded, and he was again frightened so that he turned his head aside and did not wish to turn it back.[81]
Some descriptive phrases: nimbado por un aro, alrededor de la cabeza una corona difundiendo una luz, bajo un arco de luz, unas luces y entre ellas la Virgen, envuelta en resplandores, envuelta en una ráfaga de luz, luz que envuelve la Aparición, rodeada de luz. For light from hands see María Fernández, 18 July 1931, ED, 19 July; the model would be the rays from the Miraculous Mary. For Bustos on 19 July 1931, Luzear, ED, 21 July.
Beams of divine light seem to have been one means by which the Virgin could arrive and leave. When Evarista Galdós claimed to receive a medal of the Daughters of Mary from on high, it too descended in a light-way: "I saw a light, and in its midst came down a blue ribbon with a medal at the bottom."[82]
Vision, 4 December 1931, B 717. Some seers saw the Virgin heading for Ezkioga on horizontal, unlighted routes. The cattle buyers from La Rioja saw her in the road, and then thought they had run over her (7 July 1931 in ED, 10 July, p. 3, and PV, 18 July, p. 2). And from a hotel window in Zumarraga María Huerva saw her passing through the sky (2 August 1932 in ARB 123, 125).
Perhaps prompted by the priests, the seers remarked on the light's intensity. Several said it was brighter than the sun. This intensity sometimes increased as the virgin emerged or, in one case, as people prayed more. Few mention its color. An elderly seer told me that for him it was more yellow than the sun. For another seer it was reddish. Patxi claimed to see it with the Basque colors, red, white and green. But for most it was whitish.[83]
Light increasing: Badalona, EM, 19 September 1931; light related to prayers: Evarista Galdós, 7 July 1931, private collection; yellow light: 31 March 1983, p. 18; reddish light: ED, 8 July 1931. PV, 8 November 1931, cites Patxi.
Some were visibly troubled by the brilliance they saw and they turned their heads away. Pascal, there in early 1932, wrote, "We note that at the end of the ecstasy all declare to have been lit up by 'great light' that blinded them. They all make the same gesture, wiping their eyes with handkerchief." Seers claimed they could not understand how others could not see it. Patxi pleaded for the crowd to be given a glimpse, "Ama Ama, argitasun pixkabat emaiezu [Mother, Mother, give them a little brightness] … let them see your silhouette at least." The end of the vision was the end of the light. One seer said the Virgin disappeared leaving a kind of flame; another described the aftermath sadly as "all black, all black."[84]
Pascal, Hallucinations, 31. No seers complaiend that their eyes had been injured. Patxi quote, August 16 or 18, in Molina, El Castellano, 24 August 1931. For end of light: Ricardo Fernández, age 17, 19 July 1931, and Carmen Visa on 22 June 1932.
Mary healing the wounds of Spain: "Her heart is still beating."
"Lord I have sinned against thee." "Love my Vicar. Obey the
Commandments. Detest blasphemy." Holy card sent by Ramona
to Cardús, 10 March 1932. Card by Industrial Fotográfica,
Valencia. Courtesy Arxiu Salvador Cardús i Florensa, Terrassa
For some seers, including the original siblings, the divine figure they saw never spoke. Receiving a message under these circumstances was difficult but not impossible. One recourse was that of a ribbon in the sky with letters on it. People carried similar devotional ribbons in processions, left them at shrines, and placed them on wreathes with messages for the dead. Two boys from Zumarraga said they saw a ribbon that read "I ask one thing of you." At Iraneta a youth saw Saint Michael with a waistband with gold letters reading "Defending the Fatherland." Benita Aguirre said she saw the Virgin with handkerchiefs that read
"Peace on Earth" and "Glory in Heaven." One of her visions with a label, "The Most Holy Virgin healing the wounds of Spain," corresponds to a holy card the seers knew.[85]
Zumarraga boys, July 26: ED, 28 July 1931, p. 3; Iraneta youth: Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 8 April 1983, p. 17; similar ribbons hung by the improvised altar in Luis Irurzun's house. Conchita González at Garabandal in the 1960s predicted a banner in the sky with words that would vindicate her visions. For Benita: Pepe Miguel, PV, 31 July 1931, B 486; Benita vision label, 5 August 1932, at the shrine of the Christ of Lezo (SC D 115). The contemporary holy card appeared in El Mensajero Seráfico in late 1931, p. 718.
A more common solution was the careful scrutiny of the Virgin's silent reactions—smiles, tears, hand gestures—to the seer's questions and the crowd's prayers. The questionnaire asked seers if the Virgin communicated by gesture, and indeed there were entire dramatic scenes silently acted out in heaven. These were pantomimes more characteristic of Italian visions in which the actors were the Virgin, Saint Michael, angels, Joseph, the Christ child, other saints, and the dead. Seers recounted scenes one after another; some scenes were stills, like postcards, others were in motion, like silent films. On 5 August 1931 an eight-year-old girl from Albiztur described this sequence in the space of a half-hour:
1. The Virgin of Lourdes on a rock, with Bernadette kneeling before her, and up the mountain the Virgin as the Milagrosa.
2. Jesus, his heart with a great brilliance.
3. The dove, casting a great light from on high on the cross there.
4. I. H. S. These letters on the cross.
5. Bernadette, surrounded by many lambs.
6. Bernadette going out from a house surrounded by many lambs and doves. There is a cross there, and before it, in its center a host … Bernadette and the lambs kneel down.
7. A half of a host on the cross.
8. Four crosses above and below three hearts surrounded by stars.
9. Jesus dressed in white and the Virgin Mother as the Immaculate Conception in a starry robe.
10.A ray of light shining up from below, lighting very clearly the face of the Virgin.[86]
Luistar, A, 16 August 1931.
The cross, which Patxi had recently put up, was part of scenes 3, 4, and 7. It gave those hearing this running commentary something to look at. Three avatars of the Virgin appeared, two of them simultaneously, in scene 1. Note also in scene 1 a vision by Bernadette; we can imagine a kind of infinite regression in this vision of a seer having a vision. Such a regression corresponds to the historical awareness of seers of the visions of their predecessors.
At first Ramona Olazábal saw biblical scenes—the child Jesus lost in the temple, Jesus in the midst of a flock of doves, or Jesus as the good shepherd next to some bleating lambs. Later the scenes became more complex and active, like a frightened angel finding refuge under the mantle of the Virgin and then running happily to play with the others. Or two angels who descended from heaven, one with a rose, the other with a chalice; the first dried the tears of blood of the Virgin with petals and put the petals in the chalice, which both angels then covered and took back up to heaven.[87]
Ramona visions around 30 September 1931, SC E 11-12; later ones in J. B. Ayerbe, "Maravillosas apariciones," AC 1:6. The French writer Gaëtan Bernoville, who had a detailed account, refers to similar tableaux in Patxi's visions: Études, 20 November 1931, p. 460.
Some of the scenes seem especially cinematic. Those of Patxi could be grandiose with military overtones. Ayerbe reported this one:
The Virgin Mary appears to one side, and in the center is a very white dove that gives off more light than ten thousand suns together, and that turns into a white horse. Then Saint Michael appears and does homage to the Virgin, kneeling before her and sticking his sword in the ground. He mounts the white horse and leads thousands and thousands of angels who maneuver following his orders. Again he kneels before the Virgin. The horse turns back into a dove with brilliant light that disappears. And the Virgin says farewell to the seer making the sign of the cross on his chest with the sword she holds in her hand, saying, "Agur Jesus-Jesusekin, Good-bye, Jesus be with you."
Other scenes resembled choreographed sequences from the films of Busby Berkeley or Esther Williams. Evarista Galdós saw Madre Rafols coming down a long stairway from heaven. When she arrived, "She went to the middle of a circumference formed by many angels and knelt before the Virgin. In another vision she came with twenty-four angels, each with a spray of flowers."[88]
J. B. Ayerbe, "Maravillosas apariciones," AC 1:6. Galdós vision, 1 September 1932, B 719.
With tableaux it was possible to communicate horrible warnings as well. We remember the warring angels with bloody swords of late July 1931. On 15 April 1932 Evarista Galdós described moving cuadros —pictures or scenes of the chastisement:
One cuadro is full of blood, which is dripping. Another is full of dead people, some of them very black, several of whom I know. A third shows men at the moment of the chastisement, some asking for a confessor, others, for mercy from heaven. Finally, the last has fire falling in a terrifying way.
Two days later: "One of the cuadros was the rain of an enormous number of snakes, which when they reached the earth rolled around the necks of people, making many bleed."[89]
B 718-719.
The messages became explicit when the scenes included speech. In visions of Ignacio Galdós saints explained the tableaux. On 11 November 1931, for instance, he saw the Virgin. Then twelve angels appeared with gray and white flags and little white books in their hands, singing in a language he did not know. Then he saw a golden door surrounded by fifty golden stars; then Saint Peter with keys around his neck. Galdós asked what the door was and reported that the Virgin and Saint Peter told him it was for "all of us who were here." The holy figures entered, then the Virgin came out and blessed everyone. Then the vision ended. Ramona also asked what her scenes meant and heard the Virgin or Jesus reply with one-line summaries like those on holy cards: "Those maligned will be consoled by their consciences." "You will have no nourishment for your souls
if you do not eat my food." "Receive the body of Christ, for he will purify your thoughts."[90]
For I. Galdós, SC D 96-97. Along with song recitals and short plays, theatrical tableaux were staples of the evenings organized by mission societies, church groups, and seminaries. Descriptions: in Pamplona, VN, 29 December 1933, p. 6; in San Sebastián, ED, 2 April 1933, p. 4; in the Vitoria seminary, Gymnasium, passim; in Zumarraga, PV, 22 January 1932, p. 4; and in the Gabiria Passionist seminary, Ecos de San Felicísimo, 1 May 1932, pp. 197-198. For Ramona summaries: J. B. Ayerbe, "Maravillosas apariciones," AC 1:6.
The banners, pantomimes, and tableaux vivants show that some seers had trouble adding sound, or maybe additional senses, to what they saw. For seers in other places the barrier seems to have been to sight; individuals heard words, but only after a series of such experiences did they see visions. This sequence sometimes happens to those who claim contact with the dead. In any case, the process is cumulative. Once the breakthrough to sound or sight occurs, the more complete communication continues; the visions do not revert to the less complete type.
As the seers added senses, what they perceived also became more precise. Vague and diffuse lines became sharp. Images acquired faces. Faces took on well-defined features, and the features took on emotions. In some ways the process was similar to that of getting to know someone—first seeing the person, perhaps repeatedly, and only later making verbal contact. But there were differences, for nearly all of the seers who heard nothing from the Virgin continually asked her what she wanted, and to some she did not reply. This was no normal acquaintance; the Virgin knew how to keep her distance.
Most seers, if they did not hear words at first, heard them within days of starting their visions. But some took longer. A boy from Zumarraga whose visions began on July 5 did not hear the Virgin speak until his birthday on December 13, when he made a petition for a special blessing for a Catalan lady and received an answer. Evarista Galdós had thirty visions over four months before she heard the Virgin. When she finally heard the Virgin speak, Evarista became more abstracted from the spectators around her. "Until that day I was aware of those who were around me, and what they said, but that day I lost my senses completely, since the Virgin appeared with great light, and I saw nothing but her."[91]
For the Zumarraga boy, ARB 46-47; Evarista vision, 4 October 1932 (B 715, SC E 10-11).
The number of seers declined at the end of July, and the decline in attendance meant that the seers could see one another more easily. Thereafter vision poses and states seem to have become more homogeneous, so some observers began to make blanket statements about trances as a whole. These patterns and this convergence were both the result of the attention of doctors, who rewarded by their attention the seers most insensible, and of priests, who got some seers worrying about the devil.[92]
For convergence of pose as seen in photos see Christian, "The Mind's Eye." For a contemporary set of rules for religious discernment, see Mir, El Milagro, 1:612-613, 2:696-713, 3:342-360.
The Devil and Gemma Galgani
Padre Burguera thought few if any of the seers were faking their visions and few vision states were pathological in nature. He thought the problem was the devil. In 1932 he instructed seers to be wary of the origin of their visions and to
test verbally the figures they saw. He also instructed them to examine their own feelings. Citing ancient doctrine, he wrote:
[The apparition] is good, in general, when it serves or tends to the glory of God, when it sanctifies and saves humans, and when it leaves in the soul of the seer a residue of perfect peace, joy in the Holy Spirit, and great stimulus to advance on the road to Christian perfection. When it leaves trouble in the soul it is diabolical.[93]
Burguera, undated letter to seers, spring 1932, private archive. See also his description of a "perfect ecstasy," hedged with exceptions, which reflects the style of the last seers he believed; B 146-147.
In the questionnaire the local clergy sought the same information. They asked, "During the events, did you feel happiness, sadness, terror, or awe? Afterward?"
The traditional Catholic rules governing investigation of spirits worked against the more spectacular fits and frights. The French writer Gaëtan Bernoville, who was present in mid-October, found three "zones" at Ezkioga. A zone of "theater and fraud," in which he included some of the stigmatizations; a zone of "hallucination, neurosis, and hysteria of a mystic nature"; and finally a zone of "veracity, sincerity, simplicity, and piety." He spelled out his criteria for separating the last two zones:
Fainting spells, cataleptic states, the convulsions into which certain seers are plunged, do not enjoy, we know, the favor of theologians expert in miracles. The impression produced on the observer by certain states of ecstasy at Ezkioga is sorrowful, disagreeable, surrounded with an aura of ominous melancholy.
He singled out favorably the two children who had started everything, "who have never, to my knowledge, been victims of fainting spells or unquiet states of the nervous system."[94]
Bernoville, Études, 20 November 1931, p. 465. Maurice Goguel in La Foi dans la Résurrection, 417, challenged this distinction.
We have seen that in late 1931 some visionaries began to suffer the pains of the Passion in trance, just when more and more of them were placing more emphasis on a chastisement than on a miracle. The start of this trend was the wounding of Ramona, and it represented the logical outcome of public attention shifting from the divine figures to the seers. Rather than describing the Virgin's suffering, as in the first months, the seers suffered themselves. After Lent in 1932 some teenage and young women acted out Passions lasting up to twenty-four hours for select observers in private houses. Here the model appears to have been Gemma Galgani. I do not know how much the local Passionists had promoted her story. Already before the visions people in the zone around Ezkioga contributed alms for her beatification. Some seers claimed to have heard of her first from the Catalans in August 1931.
Germano de San Estanislao's biography of Gemma and his texts of her letters and ecstasies came out in Spanish in Barcelona in 1912 and 1914.[95]
Germán, Vida; Germán, Cartas y éxtasis; Basilio de San Pablo, Lo Sobrenatural.
His first-person account demonstrated in an ordinary person the Catholic physics and metaphysics—levitations, visions, physical appearances of the devil, stigmata—whichrefuted the rationalists. Gemma used as models Gabriele dell'Addolorata and Marguerite Marie Alacoque. The painful but nonbleeding Passions of Ezkioga seers like Evarista Galdós and Pilar Ciordia, complete with flagellation and an unusual concentration of images of blood, resemble Gemma's Thursday-night Passions.
The model of Gemma as a substitute Christ may have helped change the passive trances of the seers into active, dramatic performances. With a greatly diminished audience and virtually no coverage by the press, the seers became holy people for their private followers more than charismatic guides for the nation or prayer leaders for the multitudes. In her last years Gemma was a kind of living saint who in ecstasy relayed to Christ and the Virgin the prayers and requests of those who came to her for help.[96]
Germán, Cartas y éxtasis; 240: "Look Jesus, many people come to me hoping for a divine favor."
The Ezkioga seers would have recognized her as a precursor; they expected an early death, like hers. Burguera tested the Ezkioga seers by flame and needle as priests had tested Gemma. Gemma's spiritual director told her how to test for tricks by the devil, and Burguera repeated these instructions. The seers who had Gemma-style visions said they saw the devil as well as the Virgin in their visions.Conclusion
In spite of general patterns in content and behavior each seer had idiosyncrasies. Some were rigid in trance, others relaxed; some were alternately rigid and relaxed. Some fell forward, others backward; others did not fall at all. Some kept their eyes open, others kept them closed. Some were placid and beautiful, others tortured and frightened. Some eventually could have visions anywhere, some only at Ezkioga, and a few only in their home village or at home. The vast majority fell into a quietness, but Luis Irurzun, in contrast, sometimes launched into intense movement, like the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century "athletes of God." As Rigné put it, "The truth is that God can vary infinitely the kinds of his manifestations."[97]
Schmitt, Raison des gestes, 319; R 45. Catholic experts like Padre Mir took this variety for granted: "The truth of the raptures can be known more for the things discovered in them than from their exterior signs" (Mir, El Milagro, 2:706, citing Lapuente, Guía espiritual, book 3, chap. 8, par. 8).
Whatever form the vision state took, it was the entry into that state and the passage into another realm that gave the seers a new and unusual power. Affluent urbanites pampered, chauffeured, and listened to them. Children in trance could get whole crowds of adults, including the priests, the moral leaders of their region, to obey them. And children and farm people could govern the crowds' emotions much as a mission preacher might, making them weep out of sympathy, wail for their sins, and cry out for the nation.
These strange states enabled children to govern their immediate superiors, bring their parents day after day to the visions, and summon their parish priests and doctors. At Ezkioga a four-year-old seer from France was able to get his mother and his uncle to eat grass, as Bernadette had done at Lourdes on the Virgin's orders. In subsequent sequences of apparitions the pattern of testing their
power continued as child seers made unusual demands on adults. One day in 1947 a ten-year-old girl at Cuevas de Vinromà (Castellón) gathered in vain several hundred thousand persons on the outskirts of town, including the lame, the halt, and the blind from half of Spain, hoping for miracle cures; and in 1954 two girl seers of Ibdes (Zaragoza) set up camp in a hut outside town, had their meals brought out to them, and tended sheep contributed by the villagers, until, on the Virgin's orders, they donated the flock to a home for the aged in Calatayud.[98]
Christian, "Apparitions and the Cold War."
But most important these children and farm people achieved free public speech. Just as spirit mediums provided a voice for women in nineteenth-century America to tell large audiences their deepest ideals, so the trances at Ezkioga provided the young, the dispossessed, and females a place in the public arena usually reserved for adult men. The vision state protected this speech. In spite of dozens of false predictions that mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, led some to give away their money, and in a few cases brought the seers new clothes, free travel, and easy lives, no court ever tried seers for fraud.[99]
Braude, Radical Spirits.
There were suspicions about some seers, in addition to Ramona. Several older priests I interviewed thought that one of the most prominent male seers was acting in bad faith. And I heard that two female seers with spectacular trances had admitted in confession that none of their visions were true. One confessed on her deathbed and the other gave permission for her confessor to spread the word without naming her. But the idea of lies and willful fraud I found only among the clergy, not among the press or the laity.
More than the divine messages, the strange physical states themselves were the ultimate argument for the truth of the apparitions. When in September 1933 Bishop Múgica condemned the visions, the Integrist weekly La Cruz was disappointed. The newspaper had believed Ramona's miracle and had argued against the governor's offensive. It reported none of the diocesan moves against the seers and nothing of Laburu's lectures. In a front-page article on September 24, La Cruz finally gave in: "El Señor Obispo has spoken on Ezquioga. And definitively. Obedience has more merit when it is difficult." But two weeks later La Cruz ran a dialogue between a believer in Ezkioga, Martín, and a disbeliever, reserving the most attractive arguments for the believer, who was still impressed by the extraordinary, unexplainable vision states:
I saw them with my own eyes—the way they lost consciousness [konortea galtze ura ], the way they were staring fixedly up as if they were dead, without hearing anything, the way they stayed there a long time without being aware of anything. All this—if the Virgin Mary or some other celestial being was not involved, how could it have happened?[100]
His opponent could only reply vaguely that there were other ways to explain such phenomena.
The need to dismiss the trances inevitably led to shorthand "explanations," much as folk wisdom had it that the Christ of Limpias had a mechanism that enabled it to weep (in fact, people claimed to see the image move, but no one saw it weep). The most common way of labeling and dismissing the vision states at the time was to call them vaguely "witch-stuff." Some reached for scientific terms. A Terrassa couple reported: "It is all hypnotism, just as we thought before we went." And a priest wrote Salvador Cardús that the cause was "illusionism and autosuggestion." When disbelievers speak now of what they saw, they still give pseudoexplanations: "cosas de histerismo [hysterical things]" said a hotel owner in Zarautz, "ataques epilépticos [epileptic attacks]" claimed a merchant in Ormaiztegi and a doctor, "espiritismo y teatro [spiritism and theater]" argued people in Durango. An educated woman from Beasain told me that she thought the trances were
the result of some kind of injection or some drug or something…. I remember that they would go into [one of the houses near the apparition site] and people would say, "O there they go, yes, now they're going to prepare them." But we didn't know if they really gave them a shot or if they just gave them breakfast.[101]
Beasain woman: Zumarraga, 9 May 1984, pp. 2, 6.
Others simply wonder about the strange behavior. An elderly priest from Oiartzun recalled a boy, probably the original seer, "playing with two stones in front of me, and suddenly [the priest looked up at the sky], "Ama … bai ama … bai ama [Mother … yes mother … yes mother]."[102]
José Cruz Beldarrain, Oiartzun, 29 March 1983.
I have tried not to mix my understanding of what was going on with the understanding of the people of the thirties. I prefer the neutral term vision state to the usual suspects like apparition, trance, ecstasy, hysteria, dissociation, possession, or shamanism. Theological, anthropological, psychological, psychiatric, and social neuroscience understandings of these phenomena as well as the vocabulary change rapidly. What people understood in the 1930s and the words they used then are primary material. Different kinds of readers should be free to understand them as they like. Virtually every label for these phenomena has an analytic and ideological load. Labels commit the discussion to a discipline and then within a discipline to one side or another in what for many specialists is a passionate, ongoing ideological war. The different written forms of the Basque language pose similar problems for nonpartisans. The mere act of writing a place-name (Ezquioga, Ezkioga, or Ezkio) or even naming the language (vasco, euskera, gipuzkoano) can immediately alienate some readers.
My reticence is also born of ignorance. There is an enormous literature in books, journals, and symposia on trance, ecstasy, dissociation, and altered states. Much is highly technical and forbidding. But the following ideas inevitably influenced my presentation.
In cultures throughout the world socially acceptable entry into the vision state is the rule rather than the exception. All humans can enter into such a state. By the mid-nineteenth century there were scholars who recognized that trance or ecstasy was a feature of most religions.[103]
My ideas have been clarified by the works of I. M. Lewis, Gilbert Rouget, Erika Bourguignon, and Barbara Lex (see bibliography). Already in 1894 André Godfernaux held that the tendency toward dissociation manifest in extreme form as ecstasy "exists in different degrees, although often imperceptibly, in normal individuals," and he noted the return to normal after the ecstatic crisis: Le Sentiment, 49, 58. Maury, Le Sommeil, 229-231, cites J. Braid, Observations on Trance (London, 1850).
I have treated the vision states at Ezkioga on the whole as "genuine," that is, not a product of conscious deceit or what people normally consider illness.Some classes of people, or people in certain phases of the life cycle, enter these states more easily than others. Scholars have selected as candidates, whether reasonably or not, near-pubescent girls, women in general, those under stress, those deprived of calcium, those deprived of light, those whose diet contains ergot, and those who have something to gain in prestige, attention, or goods. We have seen that at Ezkioga women and children predominated. Among the children there were more girls than boys. There were more seers at some ages than at others. We cannot know how much social censorship and self-censorship affected these figures.
Broad cultural patterns may help determine just who feels free to declare visions and whom people believe. Spanish Catholics of the early twentieth century understood that some stages in the lives of females and males were more conducive to holiness, and they believed some kinds of seers more than others. There were particular sociopolitical reasons why visions and conversions would be welcome from young men. For reasons of obvious self-interest, in the Basque Country of the 1930s some groups, like children, would want to have visions and others, like adult men, would not. In short, social attitudes powerfully affect which visions we come to know about.
A variety of techniques can facilitate the entrance into the vision state: meditative, pharmacological, or outside stimuli like music, rhythms, lights, or hypnotic suggestion. Psychologists of the period knew these techniques; Émile Pascal was an expert. At Ezkioga the rosary, the hymns, and in particular the rhythmic choral stimulus and response of the Litany may have helped to prompt visions.[104]
Goodman et al., Trance, Healing, and Hallucination; for the effect of repeated rosaries see Apolito, Cielo in terra, 149.
There was also a kind of learning through imitation among seers. At Ezkioga new seers had visions while observing the visions of their predecessors. Not all who tried succeeded, but children especially found it natural to try. A woman who was a child at the time in Urretxu told me: "Boom. They would be saying the rosary, boom, suddenly one would fall, boom, suddenly another. They fell down…. It had an effect on me, it scared me and all. I remember that we played at falling into a position like that. But we couldn't get it right.[105]
María Teresa Beraza Zabaleta, Hernani, 2 May 1984, pp. 3, 7.
In her case the imitation was conscious, but recent studies on the contagion of moods through facial expressions indicates the extent to which humans are intimately linked consciously or unconsciously to those in proximity. There may be other yet undiscovered modes of connection between bodies—through pheromones,for instance—which facilitate imitation and contagion of emotions. At Ezkioga imitation of some kind was clearly at work from seer to seer, from seer to spectator, and from spectator to spectator.
The vision state can also become habitual. As a seer gets used to the experience, the nervous system adjusts and the behavior changes. Scholars describe these adjustments as "tuning" and "sensitization." Observers noticed such changes at Ezkioga. The seers calmed down as their visions continued and their perceptions became sharper, including more of the senses. With habituation the seers also gained greater control. While the first visions seem to have been involuntary, sometimes even against the seer's will, as time passed the more practiced seers could have trances whenever they wanted. Seers from a set of visions elsewhere in Spain in the 1960s explained to a diocesan commission how they could enter deep trance at will and gave an on-the-spot demonstration. Ezkioga seers entered trances at will in the offices of the judge and the governor in San Sebastián. One of Laburu's arguments against the visions was precisely the seers' control of their visions. The seers explained their ability as a divine gift.
This habituation may also have had pleasurable qualities. Apart from spiritual and social rewards (presents, respect, transcendence of class, gender, or age discrimination), I wonder if there was some biochemical addiction at Ezkioga. Children would drag their parents to the site, with trips up to an hour each way on foot in the rain on muddy paths. Some seers persisted with regular visions for years, sometimes in most unpleasant conditions. Patxi, for instance, kept going to the site three times a week at night into 1933, rain or snow, although the press pilloried him and most of the believers ignored him. Luis Irurzun seemed to become as addicted to visions as he was to smoking. And the first boy also continued having visions for more than two years, although totally shy about public attention. Whether there was a seer present or not, the rosary seems to have had an exhilarating, restorative effect for the old-time believers.
That there was a variety of vision states at Ezkioga was patent for all to see. At Ezkioga the external differences seemed to fall into groups that occurred in sequence: the distressed conversion by reaction of July 1931; the quiet, passive visions in a second phase in late 1931; and the active, performative trances of 1932. But there were also individual styles that connoisseurs learned to expect and appreciate as they would those of artists.
The seer in vision does not necessarily experience a radical break between the "normal" and the "altered" state. In spite of major variants in terms of insensibility or reflexes, almost all Ezkioga seers were partially conscious and partially rapt, able to communicate and mediate between their inner world and those around them in the outer one. Teresa de Avila would have recognized this state, for she wrote, "Although a few times I lose my senses … normally they are disturbed, and although I can do nothing with myself, I do not cease to understand and hear exterior things, like something far away."[106]
Vida, chap. 20, cited by Mir, El Milagro, 2:707.
It is evident fromthe Ezkioga visions that this halfway state was ideal for mixing the voluntary and the involuntary, for satisfying the needs of others as well as expressing the divine or inner world's imperatives.
The many Ezkioga visions I have studied were never totally unpredictable. While it is probable that the scribes would have rejected any truly unusual visions, it could be that there was little truly unusual to record. It could be that the visions derived from elements in the seers' memories. The phenomenon of déjà vu is perception experienced as memory because of a short-circuit in the brain. The Ezkioga visions may have been the converse: memories that the force of fear or desire recombined and seers experienced as perception. The halfway vision state could have facilitated such a short-circuit. Of course, the devout had no reason to expect any truly innovative or unusual content in visions; for them apparitions were a way to gain access to a supernatural world they already knew a lot about. As Willa Cather had Bishop Lamy explain: "One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love…. [F]or a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always."[107]
Cather, Death Comes to the Archbishop, 50-51.
Vision states will have a greater impact in societies where visions are less frequent. The visions at Ezkioga occurred in an unusual environment as far as world societies go, one in which people did not normally see others having visions. The whole appeal of apparitions in the special form they developed in nineteenth-century France depended on the general public's understanding of apparitions as unusual, critical events, special divine interventions to change the course of human destiny. Since seeing persons transported was also exceptional, the public associated the two. The exceptionalness of the vision states became proof of divine intervention. We can measure the impact of deep trances in the West by the inordinate attention doctors and social scientists have accorded them.
11.
Sacred Landscapes
Shrines, Visions, and the Landscape in Spain
In Spain, as in the rest of Mediterranean Europe, the sacred is part of the landscape. About half of the 360 or so district and regional shrines in Spain are on hills or mountains; about one out of five has an important relation to trees or shrubs, and the same proportion has a relation to springs and to caves. Indeed, many have two or more of these natural features as a significant part of their sacred ecology. Shrines to Mary relate much more to trees than do those of other saints or of Christ.[1]
Shrine images of Christ in Spain are usually in chapels on the fringes of towns, in parish churches, or in cathedrals. Few are associated with natural features. About a fifth of all the Spanish district shrines are in towns and have no association with natural attributes. All figures are from Christian, "Santos a María," a census made from 1966 to 1972 of shrines in peninsular Spain which draw the devotion of three or more towns. See also Nolan and Nolan, Christian Pilgrimage. A version of this chapter was published in Gajano and Scaraffia, Luoghi sacri, and is informed by the other papers in the volume.
The legends of rural shrines often involve tension between town and landscape. The divine will repeatedly foils attempts by clergy and civil authorities to capture images (as if they were relics) and take them to the parish church. Images return mysteriously to their place of origin; shrine building materials move at night; a half-constructed shrine collapses if it is not in the right place. In these stories the saint virtually drags the human group out into the countryside. Half-wild animals and marginal humans like shepherds
and children serve as intermediaries. The humans come to know the healing powers of water and dirt and the sacred talismans of leaves, twigs, and stones.
Both in the late medieval period and in the twentieth century documented visions, like undocumented legends, feature these elements of the landscape. Nineteenth-century folklorists tended to see in this continuity an atavistic paganism. Such an understanding has given some historians the idea that true Christianity only got under way in Europe in 1545 when the Council of Trent reorganized the religion under parish and diocesan control. Perhaps they would reconsider this conclusion if they knew what their twentieth-century Catholic neighbors still practice. But if Christianity is simply the common religious beliefs and activities of Christians, it is unreasonable to regard such practices as pagan.[2]
Of thirteen cases of visions in Spain before 1520, one was associated with a hill, five involved springs or other sources of water, three involved trees, and two involved stones. Two were outside preexisting rural chapels, and three were in towns (Christian, Apparitions). Of twenty-five public vision sequences in the 1931-1934 period, eleven were associated with trees, seven were on hills or mountains, three by rivers or springs, and one in a cave. Of eleven well-known vision sequences in the years 1945-1962, six were associated with trees, three with hills or mountains, and two each with springs, caves, and stones (Christian, "Apparitions and the Cold War"). Each of the major vision sites in the 1980s was associated with at least one of those natural features.
Hills, Trees, and Water at Ezkioga
An examination of how people incorporated a hillside, trees, and water into the visions at Ezkioga will help make this point clear. Starting with the visions the Ezkioga site was sacred for some people, not sacred for others, and of undecided status for still others. Visionaries, believers, chroniclers, and photographers seemed collectively to develop the shrine and its setting.
From newspaper reports, the private papers of believers, and photographs for the first three years of visions at Ezkioga we have an almost week-by-week record of how seers and believers discovered aspects of the place to be sacred. We can watch their attention shift from one element in the landscape to another. In a process of wishful remembering, they adjusted the story of the apparition to fit the sacred landscape as they revised it.
According to a woman who as a child was with the original seers, the brother and sister first saw the Virgin "up the mountain" or "in the sky." They might well have continued with visions looking up at the sky from the bottom of the hill, for only when the priest Antonio Amundarain took them up the hill did they identify a particular place. A devotee of the Virgin at Lourdes, Aranzazu, and the chapel of La Antigua on the mountain above Zumarraga, Amundarain made sure to identify the place.[3]
LC, 7 July 1931, p. 1; Felipa Aramburu, Zumarraga, 7 May 1986.
This siting was not easy. The first report relating the visions to the landscape placed them in brambles between two apple trees, and someone even drew a souvenir postcard of this scene.[4]
PV, 10 July 1931, p. 3.
But there were days when the priest had to lead the children to various points on the hill before they saw anything. Other seers took up the idea of two trees, but most of the earliest reports mentioned no trees at all; indeed for years afterward there were visions of the Virgin and other heavenly figures moving over the landscape—from higher to lower on the slope, from the oak grove over the meadow to the apple trees, or simply across the sky.When early newspaper reports did mention trees, they might place the Virgin between, above, or directly on them. On 11 July 1931, when there had already
been many seers, the city youth Aurelio Cabezón jokingly asked some girls, "Do you really think the Virgin is going to put herself on top of that tree?" But then he himself saw four or five lights above the tree, which disappeared, leaving "on the background of the clear sky, the image of a woman … and then the figure moved, walking in the air ten meters toward the top of the mountain." The next day two different seers saw the Virgin with a new attribute—flowers. The flowers are pictured on the apple orchard postcard and we have seen that they became a kind of attribute of the Virgin. Sometimes seers saw the Virgin throw flowers to the multitudes.[5]
ED, 12 July 1931, p. 12; ED, 14 July 1931, p. 12.
But as more people became seers and had visions more complex, they reached a consensus on location that provided a center for the hillside arena. Already on July 7 the first newspaper report mentioned "the site of the apparition." From then on the vision was in "the accustomed place." While this expression might refer broadly to the entire hillside with its mix of fields, meadows, orchard, and woods, the context always pointed to a particular spot. Photographs taken in mid-July placed the "site" of the visions to the left of the meadow, near the edge of the woods. A caption on July 15 read, "According to those who assure us that they have seen it, the apparition is located over the trees that appear at the left of the photograph."
On the night of July 16, when up to forty thousand people were present, a reporter wrote that "[the girl seer] is taken to a spot in front of the trees where, according to her, the first apparition took place." A Bilbao paper published a daytime photo of the seers praying there, with the label "the place of the apparition." Note how the press and perhaps even the children had merged the downhill position of the children at the first apparition and the new, uphill site in front of trees. The trees in this picture may be the same ones that provided the focus for the visions for the rest of the first year. The children are looking at a frame, like one for a large picture, at the base of the trees, presumably over the blackberry bushes where the visions at first seemed to occur.[6]
LC, 7 July 1931, p. 1; photographs in ED, 15 July 1931, and GN, 18 July 1931, p. 2. For downhill location see Felipa Aramburu, Zumarraga, 14 May 1986, and photograph reconstruction by Joaquín Sicart (my files).
But what happened on July 16? Led to this by now official place, the girl saw nothing and wandered "from one end of the hillside to another, hunting out the most propitious places and fleeing the crowds. She could be seen looking in all directions at all points in the horizon," until she finally had her vision. Although this description left the phenomenon as amorphous and unfixed as it really seems to have been, the newspaper also used the phrase "the site of the apparitions" and put a cross on a photograph that gave readers a focus and a center, however illusory.[7]
ED, 17 July 1931.
The Bilbao reporter first identified the site as "a little group of oaks." Like all reporters, he had obtained an account of the first vision, which, although it correctly placed the children downhill, placed the Virgin in the trees. He said one particular oak was important, and when on the second day the children tried to get to the Virgin, "the vision disappeared in a very bright flash of gold as they
touched the tree." Here again the past had been reworked, for he made no mention of apple trees or brambles. The oak was the key, he emphasized: "That's what we said, an oak, a young oak. But on this oak …"—echoing the biblical phrase "But on this rock I shall build my church." When he was at the site on July 15 there was already barbed wire around the trees. A Franciscan from the shrine of Aranzazu who visited the site the next day found that indeed people had singled out one oak and put some kind of mark (contraseña ), presumably religious, on it. Many of its leaves had disappeared. "It is, they told us, the tree around which the vision generally occurs."[8]
GN, 17 July 1931; E. G., "En torno a los sucesos," 238.
The arbitrariness of choosing these particular trees and surrounding them with barbed wire was not lost on another journalist:
There are three little trees there surrounded for the last few days with barbed wire, because popular devotion, it is not known why, chose to locate the apparition there, despite the fact that, according to the seers, the apparitions occur practically everywhere.[9]
ED, 19 July 1931, p. 9.
But it was not "popular devotion," a phrase as vague in 1931 as it is now, that chose to locate the apparition, for the press and Amundarain contributed to this choice. If by "popular" the writer meant "unlettered," "primitive," or even "lay" the word was incorrect. Whoever put up the barbed wire could not have done so without the acquiescence of Amundarain, noted churchman, writer, and spiritual director.
Indeed, only twelve days after the visions had started and before the barbed wire was up, Amundarain sent a letter to the regional press which in essence said that people should act at the site as if it were holy: "The apparition site has begun now to be regarded with veneration and the greatest respect; it has become a place of prayer, of recollection, of greater faith and piety." For Amundarain the prayers and hymns that he and other priests led had created a sacred space. I take it that he refers to the hillside in general. He sought to reinforce this piety and warned against immodest dress in women and indecorous behavior in men. A Franciscan at Ezkioga on July 16 also remarked on the churchlike nature of the proceedings and the atmosphere.
We had not gone to a shrine; but the place itself had been converted into a living shrine, with no walls but the surrounding mountains, and with no roof but the immaculate vault of heaven. The prayer, which issued from fervent hearts, dissipated in the underbrush and then was lost in space.
In short, on the hillside people soon adopted a churchlike, or more exactly a shrinelike, attitude. On the night of July 18 an old man told villagers, "Boys, take off your hats, because it's like we're in church here." I think the absence of walls and a roof to enclose the space and enforce the piety heightened the emotion.[10]
For the Franciscan's report, E. G., "En torno a los sucesos," 238; ED, 21 July 1931, p. 10.
Not all attending the visions felt this piety, and the public needed periodic reminders. Hence an Argia correspondent wrote in mid-August, "We should be as serious as if we were in church and speak only when absolutely necessary." And Amundarain had to demand, once more, piety and respect: "From the beginning people have noted at the site of the apparitions (and everyone agrees on this) something very difficult to explain, which somehow turns them inward, deeply moves them, and powerfully invites piety." Had everyone agreed, his note calling for piety and respect would not have been necessary. He implied that the "something very difficult to explain" was not just a product of the prayers of those present but was intrinsic to the place, or the result of the divine presence, or both. By then the place was special.[11]
Lugin A, 23 August 1931 (from the town of Matxinbenta); Amundarain in LC, 28 July 1931. See also E. G., "En torno a los sucesos," describing crowd on 16 July: "no todos los que asisten llevan los mismos sentimientos." On October 14 a priest interrupted the rosary to berate a judge and his wife for smoking; ELB, 15 October 1931, p. 7.
given this specialness and the requisite decorum, we might think of the group of trees as an altar and bank of images in a church. Just as Christ was present in the consecrated hosts, the monstrance, and the tabernacle, so Mary was present in the trees—especially, people said, somewhere between two and four meters up on the slim trunks. As happened later in the Barranca, believers set up an altarlike bench and decorated the trees, like an altar, with flowers or religious paraphernalia. The simile was in the minds of the priests, who asked in their questionnaire if the lights seen around the Virgin were in the form of a chapel or an altar.
Although there had been articles in the Basque press about the apparitions of Fatima (where the Virgin appeared on a scraggly holm oak), the shrine in the back of most people's minds was that of Lourdes. On July 12 the seer María Inza from Oñati saw "the personification of the Virgin of Lourdes." Amundarain betrayed his model when he suggested for the July 18 miracle "something startling and supernatural, as at Lourdes … maybe a spring of water." The Lourdes landscape centered on a cave and a spring, and Amundarain hoped for one of these features at Ezkioga. The basic model was some sort of church connected to the landscape, and in this broad sense traditional Spanish shrines were models too, shrines like that of Our Lady of Aranzazu, the patroness of Gipuzkoa, where a shepherd supposedly found the image of the Virgin and a cowbell on a hawthorn tree.[12]
PV, 14 July 1931, p. 7. Comparisons to Lourdes abound in the articles written about the visions, with the suggestion frequently expressed that Ezkioga would be the Basque Lourdes; see, for example, Abeytua, ELM, 22 July 1931, and N., "Anduaga-mendiko agerpenak," 707 (N. was there on 30 July 1931). Inza in PV, 18 July 1931; Adrián Lizarralde, Aránzazu (Oñte, 1950).
If we extend the analogy, the enclosure around the trees (the owner replaced the barbed wire by wooden fencing in early August) would be the equivalent of the presbytery, the area for officiants in churches. And indeed at Ezkioga this space was for the priests, but also for the visionaries, who often superseded the clergy. An elderly priest recalled for me his entrance into this special precinct. It was 15 October 1931. Men had just carried Ramona, with blood streaming from her hands, inside the fence and laid her on a bench. By then aristocratic ladies like Carmen Medina had taken charge of the site. When the gate was open the priest, Pedro Agote, slipped behind Ramona into what he referred to as the
"sancta sanctorum." He was observing the various visionaries when a woman came to him and said:
"You cannot be here."
"Why can't I be here?"
"Because this is a holy place."
"And how do you know it is a holy place?"
"You mean to say that with all these people praying, looking on, you don't
understand clearly that this place is sacred?"
Fifty years later Agote was still indignant. For it was the role and duty of the church, and the men of the church, in particular, to decide which places were sacred and which were not. The church had not made a decision and he personally was dubious. Furthermore, priests had every right to be in sacred places, like the presbytery, and women generally did not. For the woman, however, the presence of the Virgin while the seers were in ecstasy far outweighed any priestly privilege. The fact that thirty thousand people were there, respecting the precinct and implicitly backing up the woman's claim, meant nothing to the priest.[13]
Rvdo. Pedro Agote, San Sebastián, 15 December 1983.
The visionaries and believing clergy wanted to remove the ambiguity and transform the site into a legitimate, consecrated shrine as soon as possible. On July 22, for instance, a girl seer saw a basilica complete with towers, bells, and two doves. And a rich duke supposedly promised to finance the building should the church approve. The basilica, some said, would enclose the trees (now people referred to four trees). One seer saw the Virgin moving across the landscape, "searching for a place for a church."[14]
Shrine visions in B 600-601 and ED, 23 July 1931, p. 8; duke of Infantado and four trees in S 118-119; quote from Delás, CC, 20 September 1931.
In the meantime, the four trees were semiofficial. Pilgrims kissed the important one, festooned it with flowers, and removed bark and leaves as sacred souvenirs. Women told the Irish Hispanist Walter Starkie that the four oaks symbolized the four Basque provinces. Patxi said the Virgin told him to put up a cross and decorate it with flowers at the site of the four trees. Photographs from around 5 August 1931 show him on a ladder installing a crossbar on one of the trees with the site owner's workmen. Local priests are looking on (and reporting every move to the diocese).[15]
S 126; cross in Lassalle, PN, 6 August 1931.
With flowers at the top like a maypole, the cross was a great success with the seers. They began immediately to see Mary on or above it. By mid-August Patxi Goicoechea had hung on it an open wooden box with a picture of the Sorrowing Mother inside. Justo de Echeguren, the vicar general in Vitoria, ordered Patxi to remove the picture. The youth refused, so the Ezkioga priests themselves took it down toward the end of the month. They let the cross remain, but only grudgingly, for as La Croix of Paris pointed out, "no exterior sign of cult can be tolerated before a canonical inquiry makes a pronouncement."[16]
Erection of cross: Molina, El Castellano, 24 August 1931, and Altisent, CC, 6 September 1931; diocesan reaction: PV, 6 September 1931, and Echeguren to Laburu, 13 April 1932. La Croix (Paris), 15 October 1931, p. 3.
Francisco Goicoechea converts a tree into a cross, ca. 5 August 1931. Courtesy Archivo Diocesano de Vitoria
The cross with the shorn and debarked trees remained the center of attention. A Catalan pilgrim in early September described the original visionary boy from Ezkioga patiently accepting rosaries and medals given to him from outside the sacred precinct and touching them to each of the trees next to the cross. In front of the cross and trees Patxi built a nine-by-seven-meter stage for the visionaries. The landowner supplied the lumber and workmen.[17]
Delás, CC, 20 September 1931; LC, 18 October 1931, p. 10.
The stage was half-completed when on October 15 Ramona Olazábal's hands spouted blood, and people carried away on handkerchiefs this new material token to all corners of the Basque Country. A San Sebastián reporter described a priest who cut out a bloodstained splinter from a tree on which Ramona had leaned and he commented disapprovingly:
At the beginning in Ezquioga there was a truly beautiful climate of faith that profoundly moved all who were present, but soon after came the breaking of boughs from trees, and now the soaking of blood in handkerchiefs. This amounts to superstition in persons who by their social position have been trained to control themselves better.
The same correspondent had complained at the end of July that "some people break boughs off the trees to have a souvenir or to keep the branch as a relic. It is a little sad to see the short distance for some people between faith and superstition."[18]
Pepe Miguel, PV, 17 October 1931, p. 3, and PV, 31 July 1931.
Much of the clergy did not share this writer's attitude, and the writer was mistaken in judging attention to bark, leaf, or blood as rustic or lower-class piety. The respected Catholic magazine of Barcelona La Hormiga de Oro captioned a photograph of the four oaks: "Bushes around four oaks without bark or branches. Who would not carry off some splinters to keep and venerate as relics?" Priests owned and supervised El Día , in which a contributor wrote, "I have taken home leaves from those small oaks."[19]
La Hormiga de Oro, 13 August, p. 2; Larraitz, ED, 28 July 1931.
For many priests it was quite all right to collect sacred tokens from Ezkioga. We have seen that a priest from Markina, a teacher in the Vitoria seminary, and even Dr. Sabel Aranzadi collected Ramona's blood. The distinction that the journalist made between educated and uneducated did not hold. For what was acceptable or not, orthodox or unorthodox in this matter was in dispute.In the 1930s the Basque Country was more advanced in understanding its own folk customs than the rest of Spain. José Miguel de Barandiarán, a Basque ethnographer and professor at the seminary in Vitoria, had studied in Cologne, attended conferences all over Europe, and was the driving force behind the Basque folklore society. Work like his had sensitized the educated public to ancient traditions, of which the Ezkioga visions might be part. But even among the informed, there was disagreement as to whether the visions were a bad or a good thing. The Navarrese psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi, for whom the outdoor night visions smacked of "the cult of the moon of the ancient Vascones," warned that if a stop were not put to the visions, they could degenerate into witches' covens. Conversely, for Federico Santander, the monarchist ex-mayor of Valladolid and director of the newspaper El Norte de Castilla , the mythic, folkloric aspect of the visions enhanced them. He emphasized that the Virgin generally came out of the woods, which "acquire a mysterious power to intimidate" at night. He was moved that "today like yesterday and as always, in the full twentieth century as in the Middle Ages, to the echo of the romance of the little Virgin and the shepherd, thousands of persons burning in the same flame of desire should go to the woods at night to see if they can see a shadow." While he was inclined not to believe the visions, he argued that there was no intrinsic reason why they could not be true.[20]
Juaristi, DN, 25 October 1931, and Carlos Juaristi, Pamplona, 17 June 1984; Santander, ABC (Madrid), 13 August 1931.
In Lent of 1932, when people began to return to Ezkioga in significant numbers, Marcelina Mendívil from Zegama announced that the Virgin would mark out a Way of the Cross. By this time the owner of the hill had made a transverse path to permit easier access to the four trees with the cross; along this route Marcelina in vision acted out the stations, falling at the places where Jesus fell on his way to Calvary. Patxi put up crosses the following day. An observer
wrote, "With these emblems we discover that the Virgin desires this mountain to be considered a place of prayer and penance…. No one dares to do anything that would be out of keeping with a holy place. Speaking should be as quiet and brief as possible."[21]
ARB 20-21; photo Sicart, "Trazando un Via Crucis" (my files).
The new Way of the Cross helped bring back the crowds. Supposedly obeying Mary, different visionaries led the stations of the cross at different hours for nine days in a row. Patxi started the novena at midnight. There were groups going up the hill in prayer at virtually all hours. Finally under diocesan pressure Patxi removed the crosses in early April.[22]
Ibarguren to Echeguren, 18 February and 19 March 1932, ADV; ARB 21; Echeguren to Laburu, 13 April 1932; Echeguren handwritten note, ADV Varios 1927-1934. Patxi apparently thought the diocese would put up a canonically approved set of stations of the cross.
The next attempt to make this hillside a place of Catholic cult was in May 1932. From the first month of the apparitions visionaries had seen a shrine on the hill, and those who went to see the bishop described it to him. While the diocese could not legally keep a building from being constructed, it could refuse to consecrate it. The vicar general had refused permission repeatedly for a chapel before José Garmendia saw the Virgin herself mark out the site. On May 2, after a seven-minute trance, Garmendia climbed down from the stage, strode about six meters uphill from the cross and the trees, knelt, made the sign of a cross on the earth, and kissed it. Then he drove in stakes as markers. He explained to the Catalans present that the Virgin wanted her image to be worshiped in a chapel there: "[The Virgin] herself went walking to that precise spot; there she paused a few moments, and then disappeared."
"I don't have to say," one man present wrote, "how all of us, moved, kissed that spot, which from that moment on was sacred for us." Evarista Galdós, who was on the stage, confirmed the location. When she came out of vision fifteen minutes later, she too went and kissed it. The pilgrims immediately gathered earth there, "more as a relic than as a souvenir." But not all were sure that they should keep it. They asked Evarista to ask the Virgin, and the Virgin told her, "Yes, yes, they should keep it."[23]
ARB 21-25; B 634-635; ARB 137-138.
At this point the vision definitively came to ground. The children first saw it in the sky, then they and others saw it above, but close to, trees and brambles. Gradually most seers came to see the vision halfway down the trees and then around the cross as well. But by the spring of 1932 the trees were dead or dying. The Virgin, or Garmendia and Evarista, then chose a new place on the ground for a home. The owner of the land was present at Garmendia's vision and on May 30 laid the cornerstone for the chapel in a formal ceremony, with souvenirs in the foundations and many seers present. Despite diocesan notices on church doors forbidding construction, he continued the work.[24]
Surcouf, L'Intransigeant, 19 November 1932; Cardús to Rimblas, 17 June 1932; also Rignè, Llamamiento, dated 29 June 1932.
In the meantime María Recalde announced that she had seen the shrine with two spouts of fresh water, and then she somehow found a new spring. The believers channeled this water to issue directly behind the pedestal in the chapel. As work on the chapel progressed, the center of the weekly commemorative photographs of the Catalan pilgrims shifted from the trees and the cross. When
Catalan group and seers, ca. 26 June 1932: center shifts from trees
and cross to chapel under construction. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
the chapel was finished the trees were out of the picture altogether: image pedestal and fountain had taken over.[25]
ARB 26-27; B 32-33. Salvador Cardús wrote to Pare Rimblas, 17 June 1932: "Això fa pensar amb Fàtima i Lourdes [That makes one think of Fatima and Lourdes]." From the vision platform the trees and the cross were in front of the chapel and the image pedestal was on an axis with them. Thus while the center of gravity of the visions shifted to the pedestal-with-spring, it did so retaining the cross and the trees.
On June 27 the Ezkioga priest, Sinforoso de Ibarguren, wrote Padre Laburu, "From the spring within the temple they are drinking water, as at the miraculous fountain at Lourdes; everyone thinks it is just fine. What won't some of them believe?" Three days later, on the anniversary of the first vision, the landowner inaugurated the chapel and the fountain, leading about one hundred persons in the rosary. Afterward at the bottom of the hill a Navarrese visionary told him the Virgin had told her that "the water was blessed by her and her Son and would have great value as time went on." That summer the water supposedly cured the landowner's wife of stomach cancer.[26]
Ibarguren to Laburu, 27 June 1932; ARB 27; unsigned, typewritten declaration by site owner Juan José Echezarreta, dated 10 January 1936 (AC 418), who believed that María Celaya saw the ceremony in vision from Bakaiku and sent word that the Virgin blessed the fountain.
Throughout the summer of 1932 the chapel drew pilgrims. After October 7, when the large image of the Virgin made to Garmendia's specifications arrived, the shrine became an immediate target for the government. The statue did not last in the chapel for more than a week. The image moving in exile from house to house became the center of devotion, superseding the landscape of the holy
hill. When Léon Degrelle erected a cross a year later, it only lasted eight days. In 1934 the bishop finally forbade believers to go to the site. They prepared architectural plans for a basilica in 1935, but all for naught.[27]
For basilica plans: letters of Sebastián López de Lerena and Pilar Domingo, private collections, and Basilio Iraola, Irun, 17 August 1982.
Neighbors at Ezkioga say that the owner took the chapel down before the Civil War. For a while the statue was in Legorreta; there are rumors that a priest in Madrid or nuns in Valencia are keeping it until the church approves the visions. In the attic of an Ezkioga farmhouse lies a seven-foot segment of a wooden cross. Now there is a small concrete one near the site of the trees, and a wall set in the hillside serves as a backdrop for religious pictures and a white wooden cross. In 1973 believers following instructions of Luis Irurzun put up a large picture of the Virgin of Perpetual Help.[28]
Alberto, factory town, 13 June 1984.
Believers still meet regularly on the hillside and still carry off bottles of water from the sacred spring. There is a spigot in the wall.Models for the Landscape at Ezkioga
What lessons can we draw from the relation of seers and believers to the Ezkioga terrain? What were their criteria for selecting natural features for the newly sacred landscape?
In a collective process people added incrementally the elements of nature that enhanced the shrine. In this process they modified the terrain itself—removing trees, cutting a path, digging a foundation, channeling a spring—to suit the needs of the humans and the divine. And as the shrine evolved they provided it with attributes both similar enough to those of other shrines so as to be recognizable and different enough so as to be attractive.
Oaks have special significance for some Basques. Perhaps for this reason the oaks supplanted the blackberry bushes and apple trees as the vision site. The most immediate models for the idea of the Virgin on a tree may have been the shrine of Aranzazu and the visions at Fatima. Patxi converted one tree into a cross and decorated its top with flowers. In some of the Spanish visions in the fifteenth century Mary holds a cross, and in one she sticks it in the ground. Surely in the late Middle Ages as in 1931 the wooden crosses were viewed in part as civilized trees connecting heaven and earth. One blatant attempt to assimilate the Ezkioga story to older legends was a newspaper account of the children having their first vision when driving the cows home for milk; this report made the children shepherds and brought domestic animals into the picture. The effort was unsuccessful (others did not repeat this version), doubtless because the known facts were too much against it—the family had no cows. In a sense the shift from trees to a spring recapitulates the ascendance of the new shrine at Lourdes over the traditional Basque shrines like Aranzazu. At Ezkioga the suggestion and selection of natural elements came in myriad visions. The fittest configuration survived.[29]
In parts of Bizkaia people still erect may poles (donienatxak); they used to be oaks or poplars but are now generally pines, with branches and bark removed, and at the top are tied ears of corn and vegetables, laurel and flowers (Gurutzi Arregi, doctoral thesis, University of Deusto). For cows see S 127 and GN, 17 July 1931.
But while people tended to assimilate Ezkioga to existing shrines and symbols there was an innovative force at work as well. For instance, the image of the Sorrowing Mother, which was represented in the Ezkioga parish church in a black robe, appeared in the chapel at the vision site in a white robe. When the diocese demanded the removal of the new statue from the chapel in the fall of 1932, the bishop offered to donate a statue of the normal Sorrowing Mother to the nearest parish church. The seers, however, disdainfully rejected the offer, insisting that the diocese's statue would not have the right dress and would not be in the place where the Virgin wanted it, where new grace was at work through trees, water, and earth.[30]
ARB 25.
So while the Ezkioga shrine would be like other shrines, it would also have to be different. Mary appeared on a tree as at many other places, but not the same kind of tree—not a hawthorn, as at Aranzazu, but an oak. It happens that in all of Spain there is no district shrine with an image associated with an oak tree. Of course, the very name of the shrine, the Virgin of Ezkioga, ensured distinctiveness.Another clear lesson is that the episode of Ezkioga involved no "pagan" wallowing in nature, no reversion to moon cult. The visionaries wanted diocesan acceptance, civil recognition, and a church as soon as possible. They pushed continually for the crosses, images, and altars of parish Catholicism. The diocese's strict control of these symbols left the believers with the natural ones. But Catholicism had long since absorbed the natural symbols of hills, trees, and water from previous religions. In 1931 these elements were as orthodox as church bells and the relics of saints. Fixing on them was evidence of orthodox learned behavior, not instinct and above all not some kind of paganism, whether ancient Basque or the ersatz version inspired by the writings of the historian Margaret Murray. The chief architects of the sacred landscape were the landowner Juan José Echezarreta and the seer Patxi Goicoechea. Both were close to priests and doubtless priests counseled them—Echezarreta's brother José Ramón and the priests and religious of Ataun and San Sebastián. In Mediterranean Europe the sacred landscape is mainstream Catholicism. The apparitions at La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima ratified and celebrated this sacred landscape. But Catholics could find such reverence as well in the Bible: Mount Sinai, Mount Carmel, Mount Tabor, the hill at Calvary, the tree of knowledge, the tree of Jesse, the burning bush, Abraham's oak at Mamre, and the spring that issued when Moses struck a stone with his rod.[31]
S.B. in ED, 7 November 1931, suggested as parallels to Ezkioga not only Lourdes and Fatima but also Mount Carmel.
The biblical scenario most related to the visions at Ezkioga was the hill of Calvary. The Sorrowing Mother, the cross on the hillside, the stations, the visionary crucifixions during Lent, all point toward the Passion. In this replication the nearby towns or the inhabited world would be the equivalent of Jerusalem, joined to the apparition site by the Way of the Cross. Such replications spread throughout the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. The pious added the processional routes of Holy Week, stations of the cross, and Sacro Monti to
their landscape as aids to exercises that provoked sympathy and contrition.[32]
Picard, "Chemin de la Croix," DS 2 (1953), cols. 2576-2606; Leatherbarrow, "The Image and Its Setting," and christian, "Provoked Religious Weeping."
The exercise of the stations of the cross was a high point of every Basque pilgrimage to Lourdes. Visionaries and key lay believers at Ezkioga pushed for the Calvary-like elements, amalgamating them with other elements like trees and springs whose models would have been shrines like Aranzazu and Lourdes.We can see what the acceptable vision sites in the landscape had in common from comparison with those locations rejected, ridiculed, or doubted in interviews, documents, or newspapers. At first there was some doubt about the trees themselves as a suitable site for the appearance of the Virgin. Two of the mockers thought it silly to think of the Virgin Mary on a tree—until they saw her there themselves. But in 1931 most Catholics accepted this placement. A woman I interviewed ridiculed a neighbor who saw the Virgin on the lid of a stew pot. And children saw Mary in several places that witnesses considered implausible: in Urretxu under a sink in a box of sand used for washing pots and pans; on the outside door-latch of a house in Lakuntza; in a road in Albiztur. Marcelina Eraso was interned for her vision on a train, and Laburu found it ludicrous that the Virgin might appear in a bus or a taxi. These places were deemed too mundane and domestic. Such reactions were echoed in the ridicule that greeted the report of the appearance of the face of Christ on a refrigerator door in Tennessee in 1986; a local skeptic commented, "When the good Lord comes, it won't be on a major appliance."
Two other aspects of the visions that people questioned may also help to define what was believable for sacred sites. In the first months the visions occurred at night, when women were supposed to be indoors. We have seen that many men rejected the Ezkioga apparitions for this reason. The implication was that if real visions were taking place, then it was not Mary, but perhaps a witch or the devil disguised as Mary. The psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi referred to the demonic qualities of the night by mentioning moon worship and covens. Day and night can affect places. Just as there are places, so there are times more appropriate to sacredness in a given culture. In the Basque Country of the 1930s many people considered nighttime inappropriate for outdoor sacred ceremony, despite the torchlight processions at Lourdes.
Another aspect that immediately disqualified the visions in the eyes of some observers was their access to a special kind of space—the places where people go after they are dead. As we will see, many visionaries and their families were interested in precisely this kind of space. Night was a particularly appropriate time for contact with the dead, for this was the time when the dead were believed to circulate as ghosts. For most of the clergy, to see the dead in hell or heaven was like trespassing, and this issue divided them cleanly from laypersons.
What seemed to be needed to frame these visions was a space that was accessible to humans yet out of the normal sphere. This space had to be appropriate for meetings with beings from another realm, but from another realm that
overlay and interpenetrated this one. The locations of Spanish shrines and vision sites were not unknown to country folk, but these natural sites were less known than houses, churches, kitchen sinks, and trains. Otherness, otherworldliness, nonhumanness, semiwildness, connection with the sky or with the underground have been common features of "successful" vision and shrine sites in Spain and Western Europe. Perhaps as spaces that are less domesticated, they are more appropriate for spontaneous, and less tamed, manifestations of grace.
While hardly a reversion to paganism, apparitions in the countryside were in a certain sense a reversion to the time prior to the Catholic Reformation. Then the land around settlements had more sacred meaning.[33]
Froeschlé-Chopard, La Religion populaire and "Les Saints."
Recourse to lay visionaries at La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima reversed two centuries of emphasis on the parish church. We should not be surprised that parish clergy and dioceses were suspicious.It is significant that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the key actors in this reversion were often children. In spite of the emphasis on the parish in modern Catholicism, the sacred landscape retained force for the laity in the form of legends and landmarks associated with semiabandoned chapels. The visions in France and Portugal revitalized these traditions and seem especially to have captured the imagination of children. Those who at Ezkioga and in the Barranca insisted on rosaries in front of tree-altars, not in the parish churches, were like the visionary children of the Drôme in 1848–1849 who, following the example of La Salette, led adults out to mass prayers on remote mountainsides. These children seemed to serve as repositories of the culture's prior practices.[34]
Delpal, Entre paroisse et commune, 155-169.
At Ezkioga the added elements of visions at night and visions of the dead accentuated the otherness of the visions—for many observers too much so. These elements pushed the visions beyond the acceptable otherness of the divine world into the suspect otherness of supernatural forces that by 1931 people had come to define as evil. But it should be clear by now that within the limits of the acceptable otherness, Catholics all over Europe have continued to find harmony in their religion, their church, their sacred figures, and the landscape. This was the case a thousand years ago; it is the case today.
12.
Petitions from Believers
Many of those who went to Ezkioga did so for personal reasons that had little to do with the fall of the monarchy, Basque nationalism, or new religious movements. They sought spiritual refreshment, forgiveness, good health, or news of deceased loved ones. They went to the visions, as to Aranzazu or Lourdes, with matters to raise in the divine presence.
Petitioners at Ezkioga had an advantage over those at normal shrines: they might well receive an immediate response. In this respect a trip to Ezkioga was like a visit to an ancient oracle, or a contemporary spiritist séance, or a session of inspired advice from Thérèse Neumann or Padre Pio. The immense, ongoing panoply of connections between the devout and the divine involved both human and divine intermediatries—persons praying for other persons to souls in purgatory and to saints who might in turn be intercessors with other saints and finally with God. People concentrated their affection on certain saints and asked for help at certain sacred beacons in the landscape. In this slowly changing, blinking network, vision sequences like
those at Ezkioga were like a steady lightning bolt, a shortcut to heavenly grace and heavenly news, a highway of light to the sky.
From the start seers and onlookers tried to obtain divine help for particular persons—a boy seer aged eleven for a crippled friend; Patxi Goicoechea for his brother whose eyes were bad; and Lolita Núñez for a woman from Burgos whose daughter was dying of tuberculosis. When the Virgin gave an eighteen-year-old servant in Zarautz one wish, she asked for her brother, injured in an airplane crash, to be healed. The Irish traveler Walter Starkie witnessed "a whole host of blind men with their long sticks."[1]
All 1931: boy, LC and ED, 16 July; girl relays woman's request in LC, 22 July; Patxi in ED, 23 July; Lolita Núñez in S 146; for airplane crash see F. Santander, ABC (Madrid), 13 August—the vision was on July 25. S 131, ca. 29 July. Molina noted the sick present for healing on August 16 in El Castellano, 24 August 1931.
To understand how people used the new power for personal problems, we must put aside the notion that individuals sought help or salvation primarily for themselves. People generally went to Ezkioga in groups of family, friends, or neighbors, as they would have gone to other shrines or other spectacles. And by the nature of Mediterranean society they approached the divinity, as they would approach any person of significance, as members of a group with intense interest in one another's welfare.
When I observed the efforts of family members, close friends, and neighbors to help a very sick child in the Canary Islands, I found dozens of people intervening on the child's behalf. They spoke to God, Mary, the saints, doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators, both directly and through colleagues, friends, friends of friends, and relatives of friends. A given chain of intermediaries was sometimes four or five persons long. Similarly, in the Basque Country the large size of rural families and the necessary close cooperation among neighbors ensured that in times of need country people generally could count on an active network of mutual aid and affection. The historian Juan Ignacio Tellechea's account of people who intervened on his behalf during a critical illness in the 1980s demonstrates that such networks of mutual support function even in urban society. We may expect that at Ezkioga people made prayers more for others—relatives, friends, third persons—than for themselves.[2]
Christian, "Secular and Religious Responses"; Douglass, Death in Murelaga; Tellechea, Tapices.
For members of these large, dense networks, getting access to the seers at Ezkioga was a critical task. The anthropologist Elizabeth Claverie has described with sensitivity the many strategies used by visitors to Medjugorje to locate seers and pass their concerns to the Virgin.[3]
Claverie, "Voir apparaître," and now, Bax, Medjugorje, 43-50.
What she describes accords with what I know of Ezkioga and with what I have seen in the last three decades at apparition sites throughout Spain. In these places persons close to seers—family members, friends, divinely appointed "apostles," trusted priests—play a vital role, for they have the ear of those who have the ear of the Virgin, who in turn has the ear of God. In these places the private nature of the contacts—a fleeting conversation, a visit to the seer's home, a word passed through a third person—makes it difficult to trace requests and responses, to know who gets what in exchange for what. These exchanges are as hard to follow as the unrecorded, often unspoken, traffic in political favors.The Barcelona priest Martín Elías described his own experience at Ezkioga in the first week of August 1931, when the seers with smaller audiences were beginning to find more time for supplicants. On his third day the visions had still not entirely convinced him: "I must confess that many worries, scruples, and difficulties bother me, doubts that I solve as I can, or remain to be resolved. I look for a proof." He decided to work though the girl from Ataun: "As the praying of the rosary had not yet begun, I call the seer. 'A favor. Ask the Virgin for a special blessing for me.' Those around me protest, claiming that the blessing should be for everyone, with one in particular for me." The seer said she would make the request, and during her trance Elías had a mystical experience.
I went off about twenty paces from the site, with a group of workers, and we began the rosary. [The seer] was in ecstasy. We prayed the Litany and suddenly I was as if blind, my entire being invaded by a consuming fire that moved me profoundly, leaving me afterward a well-being and a taste of heaven. For a few instants I thought I was going to fall over on the workers. I have no doubt at all. The request had been made, the special blessing conceded. Now I remember it with joy. Truly, something special happened at Ezquioga.[4]
Elías, CC, 19 August 1931.
The French doctor Émile Pascal described believers writing letters to the Virgin and placing them in the hands of seers; after a certain time the seers reported the Madonna's response. Believers who could not make their requests personally could send them by mail. In late August 1931 Patxi Goicoechea's volunteer secretary in Ataun read many letters: "But we cannot answer all of them. We reply to three or four every day. Most of them contain curious questions; others are to ask Goicoechea to pray to the Virgin for such and such a person or such and such a need."[5]
Pascal, "Visite," 11. He was at Ezkioga sometime in the spring of 1932. For Patxi see Rodríguez Ramos, Yo sé, 15.
We get an idea of the content of these oral and written requests from the diary and correspondence of the Catalan believer Salvador Cardús. Friends and relatives gave him numerous messages to forward to the seers and the Virgin. Since he kept almost all the letters he received and rough copies of the vast majority he sent, we generally know who made requests and for whom, and how the seers responded.[6]
From October 1931 to September 1935 Cardús sent at least 47 letters to Ramona Olazábal and 12 others to her confessor, Francisco Otaño, receiving in return 14 letters from her and 8 from her confessor. From December 1931 to May 1934 he sent at least 22 letters to José Garmendia and received 15. His archive (see Notes headnote, p. 413 above) contains copies of or references to over 400 letters from 1931 to 1939 dealing with Ezkioga and related apparitions.
By extrapolation we can estimate the seers' overall traffic.As editor of Terrassa's Catholic weekly and a veteran of its Parish Exercises, Cardús was well acquainted with the members of Terrassa's industrial and intellectual elite on the town's first bus trip to Ezkioga. By the afternoon of the first day the Terrassa pilgrims had overcome their shyness and were approaching receptive seers with requests. After one of the youths asked Ramona Olazábal to ask the Virgin for a "grace" for the group's members, Ramona subsequently told him "the Virgin had said that she was very pleased with those who had come from Terrassa, that she would help them a lot, and that she had given them a special blessing."
At least four of the trip members had gone with pressing problems. Two brothers brought a letter for the Virgin from a sister bedridden with a heart condition; a couple came to find help for a young son seemingly deaf, dumb, and insane, with destructive behavior we might today call autistic. One of the brothers spoke to Ramona, who passed the letter on to the Virgin, who allegedly replied that the matter was settled. The couple approached Evarista Galdós, who told them after her vision that the Virgin told her that their son would get better little by little and that they should say the rosary in his presence and make a novena to Our Lady of the Sorrows. The pilgrims sent news of the promised cures by telegram to Terrassa, where it was published in the main newspaper.[7]
El Día (Terrassa), 5 October 1931, p. 2.
Given these results, other trip members brought up additional, perhaps not so pressing, problems. The trip organizer asked a boy for the conversion of a certain person, and another trip member made a similar plea for someone else. The boy said the Virgin responded that one of the two would convert over time but for the other she wept tears of blood.On the last day the requests came in fast. Cardús had scruples about asking anything for himself, but he realized how much his wife would want him to. So he asked through the Ataun girl for the cure of his chronic asthma. The seer received so many more petitions that Cardús thought twice and told her to ignore what he had said. One of the other petitions was from a Terrassa woman who asked whether her father, who had died suddenly, was in heaven; she was relieved to learn that he was. Later, on the hillside, one of the four Terrassa priests on the trip told Cardús it was too bad he was missing his chance. The priest called Ramona over, and she encouraged Cardús to ask for a cure. The Virgin smiled at Cardús's petition, according to Ramona, who explained that "even if the Virgin did not say anything, it might mean that you will be cured."[8]
SC E 15-18, 29-35.
Cardús reported a total of seven specific requests over two days from the group of twenty-five from Terrassa, and he implied there were others. By this rough yardstick, at least one in three persons made personal petitions to the seers at Ezkioga. Cardús estimated that there were between ten and twelve thousand persons there on Sunday, 4 October 1931, and no account of the visions between the beginning of September and mid-October mentions more than fifteen seers on any given night. I calculate that each seer daily had to consider about two hundred requests. The demand on their time must have been staggering. No wonder that when Cardús got a chance to speak to a famous seer in private he held it a matter of providence. Perhaps as Catalan gentry the Terrassa group received special treatment from the seers, but local Basque pilgrims would have had similar problems and the seers must have been hard put to listen, remember who had asked for what, and report answers.[9]
Cardús to García Cascón, Ezkioga, 5 October 1931, for crowd the preceding day.
We may presume that such consulting comprised much of the regular seers' day-to-day activity, that wherever they were during the day before their visions they would be accumulating requests and reporting on the Virgin's responses.
Indeed, such demand would itself go a long way toward making visions habitual. The implications for the sense of importance and social usefulness of the farm people, children, and servants who made up the bulk of the seers can hardly be overestimated. In the long, supple strands of delayed reciprocity that formed and still form the unseen moral fabric of Iberian society, these actors were building up stockpiles of favors: suddenly, unexpectedly, astoundingly. The fibers in the society converged on them, as if they were bishops, factory owners, or grandparents of huge clans. Given the seers' similar social demand, it is no wonder that some of them felt qualified to address the bishop, the deputies in the Cortes, the head of the Catalan government, and Prime Minister Azaña. They had become important overnight.
The seers were important not as persons with "clout," kindness, or wisdom but as simple brokers or intermediaries. In the same way female spiritists of the mid-nineteenth century had achieved fame not ostensibly for what they themselves had to say but as passive mediums for the messages of goodwill, social justice, goodness of life in nature, or happiness in the bye-and-bye that their spirit guides proclaimed. But the fact remains that in the seers' patient attention night after night, in some cases for several years, to the spiritual and physical needs of their supplicants, they performed hundreds, even thousands of small acts of mercy and consolation.
On Salvador Cardús's second trip, from 11 to 18 October 1931, he strengthened his bond with Ramona Olazábal, finding through her that his father was in heaven and that he himself would be saved and was "good, very good."[10]
SC E 53-57, 11 October 1931.
He witnessed her wounding and found further proof of her visions in her responses to the petitions of other pilgrims from Terrassa. On his return to Barcelona he became equally close to José Garmendia during the adventure with the Catalan president, Francesc Macià.By the end of October about two hundred fifty people from Terrassa had visited Ezkioga.[11]
García Cascón to Vallet, 31 October 1931, AHCPCR 10-A-27/2.
In the following twelve months others went by car or train or on the Gemma trips. For all of them the friendship of Cardús with the two seers was common knowledge; a dedicated proselytizer, he made known the cures, conversions, and other proofs of the visions. People who could not go to Ezkioga came to him, to his wife, and to their close friends with problems for him to relay to the seers.The forty or so petitions in Cardús's diary and letters fall into four roughly equal groups: those initiated by him; those made directly to the seers by others; those initiated by others and routed through him; and those originating in third parties and relayed to him by those close to him (by his wife, by a fellow wool salesman, by a Piarist priest in Tàrrega, and by a sister-in-law of his employer). There is even one instance of intercession at fourth remove: from an unknown person to a nun who had been his wife's teacher, to his wife, to him, to be forwarded to a seer and then to the Virgin.[12]
Four of the persons on whose behalf Cardús wrote to the seers were clergy or religious. In addition to his friend the Piarist in Tàrrega and the nun who had been his wife's teacher, there was a Jesuit missionary from Terrassa in India and the well-known Barcelona priest and historian of Marian shrines, Fortià Solà. All four asked him to be discreet, for by the time of their petitions Ezkioga was controversial and clerical opinion in Catalonia had swung against it.
In these chains of contacts Cardús sometimes did not know the person or the reason for the petition he was passing on; sometimes he knew the person or the reason but did not mention either to the seers. This lack of clarity made the seers' job more difficult. When Cardús sent unexplained petitions for two unidentified persons to Garmendia, the seer replied crisply that "the Most Holy Virgin Mary Mother of all human beings had stated that in the matter of questions it is necessary to state clearly the subject."[13]
Garmendia to Cardús, Legazpi, 4 December 1932.
From October 1931 until the end of 1934 Cardús made petitions or relayed those of others to five seers (the number of petitions is in parentheses): José Garmendia (18); Ramona Olazábal (11); Benita Aguirre (2); Magdalena Aulina (2); the girl from Ataun (1). He reported direct petitions of his friends to María Recalde and Evarista Galdós as well. His heavy use of particular seers was typical of other intermediaries. The Catalan wool dealer Rafael García Cascón sent petitions he received to Benita Aguirre, and the Urnieta town secretary Juan Bautista Ayerbe was a conduit for Conchita Mateos and Esperanza Aranda.
The language of the petitions and the debt that Cardús and his wife Rosa Grau acknowledged in his letters to the seers for addressing the petitions shows they were like secular favors:
If you have the opportunity I would be ever so grateful if you could … Thank you a thousand times.
A friend from Sabadell well respected also by Señor García asks me to pray to the Virgin for — … if you could ask her I would be truly grateful.
Although I do not know you personally, I take the liberty of asking that you intercede with the Holy Virgin for someone very dear to me. I will be very grateful.
I will thank you a lot, a whole lot.
I do not know how to thank you for your attentions to my mother and especially for your interest in having her next to you during your vision. I have taken all this as one more example of the feelings you have for us, which to be sure, Ramona, we will never be able adequately to repay.
Thank you for what you tell me the Most Holy Virgin said about the sick persons I told you about and especially for your great trouble in helping me, for which I am very grateful and will be always at your service however I can.
This last phrase marked Cardús's long-term debt to Garmendia for saving the lives or souls of his friends.[14]
Sources of each petition quotation, in order: Cardús to Ramona Olazábal, 31 October 1931; Cardús to Garmendia, 7 December 1931; Rosa Grau to Olazábal, 7 December 1931; Cardús to Olazábal, late July 1932; Cardús to Olazábal, 31 March 1932; Cardús to Garmendia, 18 February 1932.
This gratitude accrued to Cardús and his wife from each of their petitioners:
Since your husband is in direct contact with the seers of Ezquioga I will beseech you to send this little note to the one you are closest to, entreating
him to present my petition to the Virgin. A thousand thanks in advance…. You know that I, most devoted to you in Christ, am grateful.[15]
Letter from a friend to Rosa Grau, 27 March 1932.
Cardús thus came to have a position in Terrassa similar to that of the seers he was writing to in Gipuzkoa. For although he was an educated, lettered man, he too was of humble origin. His father had worked in the factories whose owners came to Cardús for spiritual favors. Like the servant and child seers at Ezkioga, Cardús lived in two worlds and this experience deepened his sympathy for the seers and his understanding of them.
These written requests to seers were in addition to oral petitions from their immediate audience. Different seers were better or worse at keeping up with their mail. While Ramona Olazábal was conscientious about oral petitions, she was only a fair correspondent, and Cardús and his wife shifted their mail orders to José Garmendia. Although he was functionally illiterate, Garmendia found a series of scribes to write down his responses. In spite of her youth, Benita (age nine) wrote down her visions when she went home each day and answered her mail herself.[16]
On Benita's writing: Pepe Miguel, PV, 31 July 1931, "esta nena de nueve años escribe sus impresiones sobre la aparición al llegar a su casa"; and ARB 162.
Over time the personal petitions took on increasing importance for the seers and their enthusiasts. By mid-November 1931 the spectators rarely numbered more than a few thousand and on many days there were fewer than a hundred. To these pilgrims the seers could give their full attention and would find out for them from the Virgin whatever they could. For some mail requests in the late spring of 1932 Garmendia describes even making a special trip to the apparition site. By then it was this bread-and-butter work of petitions and divinations that kept some of the seers and some of their followers going. And as earthshaking miracles did not take place, Cardús and others began to consider the personal services of the seers, the conversions that they predicted, and the cures they announced as the main evidence for the apparitions as a whole. For a couple of cures he tried to get certificates from doctors.
Garmendia too took more interest in his responses to the petitions as prophecies and asked Cardús for documents and letters to show that the Virgin had read consciences or foretold the future accurately. Even though, Garmendia said, he "knew everything already from the Virgin," he still asked for the outcomes of the cures he predicted. In January 1933 he wrote that Mary and the Baby Jesus had said that any worthy petition made through him would be granted:
DECLARATION OF THE SEER JOSÉ GARMENDIA ABOUT HIS VISION OF 8 DECEMBER 1933 AT EZKIOGA
The Most Holy Virgin appeared to me as always with the Baby Jesus on her arm, and she told me that her Divine Son conceded to me as with the saints the following privilege:
That to everyone who asks by thought and not by word or writing, by my mediation, some grace or favor, it will be granted, so long as it be
for the greater glory of God. The Baby Jesus confirmed this and added that I was his disciple.
The Most Holy Virgin also said: that this year there would be great political and social upheavals, for there would be wars and revolutions.
The Seer, José Garmendia.
A request: We would like to thank everyone who obtains any grace by the mediation of the above seer to communicate it either to the seer himself or to him who writes this, for "the Most Holy Virgin said that until now Garmendia has been very criticized and looked down on, but from now on he will be very well known and appreciated."
This was too much even for the credulous García Cascón, who advised Garmendia "not to tell anyone since it will do you much harm." And Cardús thought that "Garmendia might be the victim of a ploy of the devil to discredit the apparitions." But Cardús did not doubt Garmendia's good faith and kept passing on requests to him.[17]
Request for outcomes: Garmendia to Cardús, Legazpi, 15 February 1932; declaration (SC E 544-546) sent 8 January 1933; García Cascón wrote Garmendia 28 January 1933.
Cardús made, forwarded, or witnessed 17 petitions for cures, 7 for the verification of other apparitions, 6 for conversions, 4 for blessings, 3 for information on the afterlife of dead relatives, and 6 that remain unspecified. The most dramatic case of sickness, one that lasted throughout the period of Cardús's interest, was the boy with symptoms of autism. The parents approached the Virgin of Ezkioga through both Garmendia and Evarista; later they approached the spirit of Gemma Galgani through Magdalena Aulina. Despite what Evarista said, the child did not get better. The girl with a heart condition took seven months to get better, and when she did improve, her family was saying a novena to Madre Rafols. She sent alms and a notice of the favor to the pious magazine of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Anne. This made Cardús indignant, for he was sure that the Virgin of Ezkioga had played a part in the cure ("As if the Virgin could not have done the cure by means of Madre Rafols!").[18]
SC E 207-209. For the favor, M. C. C., in Manantial de Vida, (Vic), June 1932.
In other cases of illness the Virgin's answers were more ambiguous: "It is taken care of." "He should bear with saintly patience the calamities and she will keep him company and he should pray every day seven Hail Marys for the Seven Sorrows and she will visit him some day." "She gave her blessing." "Let him remember her and be very devoted to her and she too will remember him." At times seers merely said they had prayed to the Virgin for the sick person. Believers took even the mute blessings and ambiguous phrases as positive signs.
Three events provoked requests for clarification or verification of possible divine interventions. One father wanted to know if his young child, who was behaving unusually, had seen some kind of apparition or had had a vision. None of the three seers consulted provided an answer, but the third one, Benita Aguirre, put the matter to rest by writing: "The Most Holy Virgin did not answer anything about the child since it is not appropriate to answer." The second was the result of rumors of visions near Sant Llorenç Savall, in the mountains north of Sabadell.
When a group went to Ezkioga in April 1932, Cardús and the group leader asked three different seers—Ramona, Evarista, and Recalde—separately whether the visions were true. In no case did the seers come back with an answer. Cardús and another couple went to the town afterward and found a shepherd who had seen in the mountains what looked like busts of a male and a female saint. The shepherd said a couple of other people had glimpsed them. He concluded, "Signs from the heaven, travails on earth."[19]
Benita to Cardús, Legazpi, 27 November 1932; SC E 448-451, quote from the seer Joan Guiteras i Roca, 23 April 1932. His visions occurred shortly after the communist uprising in Alt Llobregat and shortly before an anarchist one in Terrassa itself in which dozens of workers were killed.
Only one request for clarification brought a definite answer. The request came from a Catalan couple who were firm believers in Ezkioga. The night after they had returned from Ezkioga, they were driving from Barcelona to Terrassa. They watched a strange light follow their car and at the outskirts of Terrassa shoot off toward Montserrat. Later, at Ezkioga, they told Benita Aguirre they had seen something unusual and asked what it was. Benita said the Virgin had shown her the light and that it meant the Virgin was with them.[20]
SC E 389-396; the couple saw light 8 April 1932.
It is surprising Cardús did not make even more of these requests for verification. By 1933 Padre Burguera was spending most of his time in Ezkioga putting questions about some seers to others in his effort to separate the true from the false. And Cardús himself was busy following up stories of visionaries in Catalonia. These included Madre Rafols's relative Teresa Puig-Ràfols in Vilafranca del Penedès, Anna Pou i Prat in Tona, and Magdalena Aulina in Banyoles.In towns like Terrassa and Sabadell with many families divided between Catholics and unbelievers, requests for conversions were not surprising. Through Ramona the Virgin asserted that a young man on the trip, unconvinced by the visions and skeptical in general, had converted. Cardús later learned the youth had indeed changed his ways. Atheism became an issue when people asked for blessings. A young woman who was the sole support of her aged parents and younger siblings and who had had to leave her job when she took ill, went to Cardús to get help from the Virgin of Ezkioga. Garmendia wrote back that the Virgin had not answered "but gave her blessing weeping bitterly and told me to tell that family that it is not enough to say they believe in God and the Virgin with the tongue, for they have to believe in their hearts." Cardús noted that while they were not practicing Catholics, at least they were not unbelievers. But he added a marginal note saying that, after all, the girl's father had died refusing the sacraments.[21]
Garmendia to Cardús, Legazpi, 15 February 1932; SC E 322-325.
Requests about the afterlife of relatives arose from the same divided families as the requests for conversions. For many people in industrial Catalonia, it was not at all clear that their loved ones had met requirements for paradise. But here the Ezkioga seers gave unequivocal answers, which no one could disprove. All three persons about whom Cardús forwarded requests were, according to the seers, in heaven.
The petitions as a whole bear out the general principle that people made requests more for others than for themselves, at a ratio of about 2:1. Those for
whom people made petitions included the dead, unbelievers, and children. The petitions themselves—requests for help put to a factory worker by a captain of industry, to a farm boy by a lawyer, to a servant girl by a grande dame—are testimony to the language and system of spiritual exchange these very different people shared. The people differed culturally—from farm to urban, Basque to Catalan, functionally illiterate to educated—as well as socially. They shared a language of interpersonal exchange, of favor and of thanks, and the knowledge of a joint religious system. In that system the wealthy and the powerful were as helpless as the poor before the power of God and the mercy of the Virgin. Through the vision state, a newfound key to an ancient mystery, these rural seers could obtain precious information denied their social superiors. And for the first time in their lives in the wider society the lines of persuasion and of thanks went to them and they provided the favors and the help.
13.
The Living and the Dead
The Household Dead
From the first days at Ezkioga the dead appeared in the visions. Those who appeared were almost always close family members, whether of the seer, of those around the seer, or of people in the seer's town. Rarely were the dead unidentified. In spiritist sessions the dead of other nations, races, or religions turned up, but at Ezkioga the deceased were those for whom the seers or their followers were responsible.
As with the visions as a whole, so with visions of the dead: more than two-thirds of the seers were women and girls. But the dead persons the female seers saw were likely to be males. As in other religious matters, women or girls were representing their families when dealing with the other world. Slightly more than half of the dead relatives seen were brothers, sisters, spouses, or children of the seers; so they were seeing those who had died relatively young, not parents or older relatives. Eventually the seers progressed from reporting on the dead to interceding for them. And after Ezkioga
became an underground cult, some of the seers helped the dead to heaven as a profession.[1]
Dead persons seen or learned about in Ezkioga visions, 1931-1950:
Relatives of seers: 19 (grandparents: 3; aunts: 2; parents: 4; spouse: 1; siblings: 6; children: 2; others: 2)
Relatives of believers: 22 (parents: 7; spouses: 2; siblings: 4; children: 3; in-law: 1; other or unspecified: 5)
Other: 30 (members of village: 13; someone connected with an onlooker: 6; seer's associates: 3; deceased seers: 4; deceased believers: 2; deceased notables: 2)
Gender of the dead seen: total males: 42; total females: 26; males and females together: 4; gender not specified: 6. Women and children tended to see children; men tended to see (or be asked about) adults. Ezkioga seers who learned about the dead, 1931-1950, by gender and age:
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For the first two months of the visions the seers tended to see their own dead, especially those who had died prematurely. On July 18 a gentleman from Madrid saw next to the Virgin his only child, killed in a railroad accident. On July 30 a girl from Bergara, aged fourteen, learned that her father and little brothers and sisters were in heaven and she would join them there. On the same day Benita Aguirre saw her baby sister as an angel, and the next day José Garmendia followed the trend, learning that his mother was in purgatory and needed two masses to get to heaven. In August a seven-year-old boy from Zumarraga saw his baby brother in heaven and a teenage girl from Albiztur saw her brother carrying the flag of his sodality at the foot of a crucifix. The youth had died recently from a fall from a moving truck when he was returning from a meeting of the San Luis Gonzaga sodality.[2]
All 1931: Madrid man: Manuel Sánchez del Río, ED, 21 July, p. 8; Bergara girl: N., "Anduaga-mendiko"; Benita: B 486-487, and LC and PV, 31 July; Garmendia: PV, 4 August; Zumarraga boy: García Cascón, "Algo más"; Albiztur girl: Luistar, A, 23 August.
At the end of August, as the crowds dwindled and individual seers were reduced to helping their own loyal followers, the visionaries began to see the dead of others. During her first vision at Ezkioga María Agueda Antonia Aguirre, aged forty, a poor farm woman living in Bidegoyan, had been cured after being partially crippled for four years. The Virgin instructed her to say the rosary daily and go to Ezkioga every week. She did so with a stable group of friends and neighbors. Her third vision, on August 31, included the dead:
When reciting the second rosary, she saw an intense brightness between the trees of the woods on the left side and the tree that holds the cross. In the midst of this brightness appeared the Most Holy Virgin in a black mantle and a white tunic with her hands crossed in front of her. At her feet there appeared three little angels and three more were above her head. She is sure that of the three little angels who were at the feet of the Virgin, two were her own deceased children and the third was a two-month-old girl who died eight years ago on a farm near hers. These three children were looking at the Most Holy Virgin. Their robes were the same as the angel costumes in which they had been buried.[3]
AC 22: "Relato por la interesada de la curación prodigiosa y primeras visiones de Doña María Agueda Antonia Aguirre Aramendía, domiciliada en la casería 'Berantegui' de la villa de Vidania" (4 pages, written after 20 September 1931, possibly typed and titled by J.B. Ayerbe after fall 1932 from an account written down in 1931), p. 3.
She returned on September 15 and identified the other three angels as well.
At the feet of the Virgin were the three angels she saw August 31, and above the Virgin's head three more angels whom this time she recognized. She is sure that they were three children who were her relatives, one six years old, another six months old, and the third two months old. These too wore the same angel clothes in which they had been shriven. At the feet of the Virgin she saw as well, dressed as San Luis Gonzaga, a son of Señor Lasquibar of Albiztur, who died twenty-two years ago at age twenty-three.[4]
Ibid., p. 4, sixth vision, 15 September 1931.
The dead were just one element of María Agueda's visions. Like other seers she also saw the crucified Jesus and Saint Michael and other angels with swords.
María Agueda Antonia Aguirre in vision
at Ezkioga, 1932. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
She worried about the political situation in Spain, and the Virgin said she would appear in many places and work signs that all would experience. The dead were not the highlights. Rather, seeing them seemed to show that the partition between earth and heaven was down. It was no great surprise to María that her young children were there; she had shrouded them as angels because she knew that they would inevitably go there, baptized as they were and below the age of sin. The important news of the visions of the dead was that the Virgin stood with the living as well as the dead in the seer's family, clan, cuadrilla, locality, and nation.
María Agueda reported no contact with the children—it was enough to have recognized them with the Virgin. She would have known already that they were interceding for her. As the church bells tolled when they were dying, she would
Children as angels around the Ezkioga image made in 1932. Photo by
José Martínez. Courtesy Arxiu Salvador Cardús i Florensa, Terrassa
have recited the Bidegoyan prayer: "If for any sin committed in this world you find yourself suffering in purgatory, let the beloved Jesus receive you now free of suffering, and when we ourselves are in need, be our intercessor."[5]
Mendizábal, AEF, 1923, pp. 104-105. Martín Ayerbe gained credibility from his detailed descriptions of five dead Zegama children as angels. He also saw his baby sister and, exceptionally, she spoke to him, telling him that he would see her often and she would help him (visions, 13 and 15 October 1931, B 624-625).
Young Lasquibar was the deceased son of the wealthy town secretary of Albiztur (the seer's place of birth). He was not the only dead person a visionary saw dressed as San Luis Gonzaga. About the same time, in one of a series of visions in and around the town of Ormaiztegi, seven-year-old Matilde saw her
grandfather like the saint in a black habit, a surplice, and a clerical hat, holding a crucifix. That is how the family had laid him out in 1900. The grandfather was but one of the dead Matilde and a friend identified for those around them.
[The girls] say they see a very wide road. In the center is the Virgin. On both sides there are long lines of dead persons. Those on the right are already in heaven; those on the left, in hell. The girls read the name on each coffin. Among them are many from Ormáiztegui, some of them recently deceased, but others who died many years ago, before the girls could have known them…. Finally the angels take to heaven the dead on the right and those on the left disappear in flames as if in a great hole that opens in the earth.[6]
Visions of about 1 September 1931, as told to Matilde's parents and Luisa Arriola and recounted by them to Rodríguez Ramos, Yo sé, 21.
The file of coffins with identifiable dead going off to hell reflects both what children might surmise about the Last Judgment and what they knew for sure about Ormaiztegi. The town had both church people and a Republican minority; the Republicans had a social center, sent articles to La Voz de Guipúzcoa, and complained about the power of the parish priest. Beatriz of Unanu also identified the dead of her town as they went by in procession.[7]
Juaristi, DN, 25 October 1931.
Just which dead the seers saw seemed to depend on their listeners. In Navarra, where children performed before neighbors, news of the town dead was a central feature of the visions. The names of the dead meant something to everyone present. The visions were a devout nightly spectacle for the townspeople, for whom the children narrated a kind of heavenly theater of the town dead. A boy in Arbizu exclaimed in surprise when he saw the deceased wife of a neighbor up in the sky, "Coño, aquí está la Bárbara! [Hey, here's Barbara!]"
In contrast, at Ezkioga each vision cuadrilla would be surrounded by onlookers who did not know the core people or one another. The seers might see the dead they knew, those of the core followers. But they generally did not see the dead of onlookers, whom they would not have recognized; instead, they heard about them from the Virgin. The Catalan Salvador Cardús described how a woman from Terrassa learned that her father was in heaven. The seer was the girl from Ataun.
The wife of my friend Joan, who was there on Monday, October 5, told the seer to ask the Virgin about the fate of her father, who had died almost instantly and for whom they were worried. The seer went down to the road after the rosary and waited until she saw the woman, to whom she said that the Virgin had told her that her father had been saved. And she added, speaking to the couple, "The Virgin told me to tell you that she is very pleased with the life that you lead, and that you should continue the same way."
Six days later Cardús heard from Ramona Olazábal that his father too was in heaven. In both cases the fate of the dead, unlike the fate of the child angels, was
seriously in doubt, and this news gained the seers loyal followers. There must have been pressure on others to provide similar information.[8]
Vision for Terrassa woman: 5 October 1931, SC E 14-15; for Cardús, SC E 53-57.
The members of the first Gemma trip in mid-December 1931 also made these requests.
Some ask [the Virgin through José Garmendia in trance] about dead persons. Sometimes she makes no response, other times she smiles, and sometimes she weeps. One man asked about a dead person. The Virgin wept as her only response. When the man asked Garmendia what her reply was, Garmendia could not bring himself to disappoint him. "The Virgin said nothing and simply gave a blessing." He did not say the whole truth, and he had a scruple about it, so in another vision he asked Mary, in his simple and rustic manner, "Did I sin, Mother?" She told him no, since he had done it out of charity.[9]
Gratacós, "Lo de Esquioga," 13-14.
By 1932 the Catalans' habitual seers—Benita Aguirre, María Recalde, and José Garmendia—were helping the dead to heaven by specifying which devotional acts the survivors should perform. Benita would often ask for masses. When I asked her brother if any money came into the house because of the visions, he said none at all, except that occasionally Benita would ask her mother to solicit money for a mass for a given soul in purgatory, saying, "So-and-so is suffering in purgatory and asks that you order a mass."[10]
Jesús Aguirre, Madrid, 4 April 1994.
Benita would see the souls ascend. A French journalist described the audience response to one such vision:
Often the pilgrims want to know the fate of the soul of a deceased person. They exclaim when in a collection of yellowed pictures [by this time the Catalans routinely brought photographs of deceased relatives to help the seers with their identifications] a little girl picks out one, saying she recognizes someone she had noticed in the flames of purgatory. Little Benita astounded in this way a group of Catalan pilgrims by specifying exactly how many days one of their dead relatives had been awaiting pardon. The relative had been dead 72 days, and the date was easy to verify. Those present said the Our Father that he needed to enjoy eternal peace, and the seer made his entire family break out in transports of joy when she guaranteed that she had seen the deceased go up to paradise in her séance.[11]
Ducrot, VU, 16 August 1933, p. 1292.
On 17 May 1932 during a vision with eight or ten believers, Benita
suddenly said loudly, "Pray three Hail Marys for each of the souls who are about to leave purgatory." With utmost devotion those present prayed what the seer had ordered, and she exclaimed, "They are entering heaven." One of them was the Cura Santa Cruz, well known in the region, a combatant in the Carlist Wars who died in Latin America as a tremendous and exemplary missionary.
This was no run-of-the mill soul. Manuel Ignacio Santa Cruz y Loidi was a local Carlist hero and a nationwide symbol for clerical involvement in reactionary rebellion.[12]
ARB 144; Olazábal, Santa Cruz.
For the Ezkioga defender Mariano Bordas, Benita Aguirre's vision of a particular soul entering heaven was proof for the apparitions as a whole. At Ezkioga in April 1932 the Terrassa wool merchant Rafael García Cascón had learned that one of two relatives in Extremadura had died, but he did not know which. He told Benita and Recalde, and later at the vision site while the two seers were in vision, he asked for an Our Father for the deceased. After the prayer
the little seer transformed her face in an expression of angelic happiness and spoke in Basque that her countrymen, especially her mother, translated; apparently the Virgin told her that the deceased had died at 4:00 A.M. and that at that very moment (it was 5:30 P.M. ) [the Virgin] had taken Marcelino out of purgatory. The girl saw an angel put a halo on his head and saw him enter heaven dressed in the habit of Saint Francis and belted with a Franciscan cord. A little later during the vision of the girl Marcelino appeared again, and Benita said that Marcelino thanked Señor García Cascón and all who accompanied him in the Our Father.
María Recalde backed up Benita, saying the Virgin had told her the soul had entered heaven at the moment of the Lord's Prayer.[13]
Bordas Flaquer, La Verdad, 35.
Heaven, the Believers' Reward
When believers and seers themselves died, other seers saw them in purgatory or heaven. In September 1932 those around Benita asked her to ask the Virgin if the seer María Celaya, who was gravely ill, would recover. Benita seemed to see María in purgatory.
I saw the seer but only her head. Her face was very disfigured, and she seemed to be suffering a lot. I do not know where she was, since the place was so dark. After the vision, which was about six o'clock in the evening, they told me that she had died that morning.[14]
B 491. Boué, 143, gives a more complex version.
José Garmendia reported that the servant seer Carmen Visa, who died two weeks after María Celaya, spent only a few moments in purgatory before going to heaven.
In January 1934 Martín Ayerbe learned that the sister of the parish priest of Zegama was in heaven. Three weeks later Conchita Mateos in vision spoke to the dead woman, before about twenty people in Beasain. Juan Bautista Ayerbe described how Conchita made the connection.
Next, and with the desire I had not mentioned to anyone, not anyone, to know if the late Ramona Oyarbide, a very fervent devotee of the Holy Aparitions
of Ezkioga who died in Cegama last January 21, was in heaven, I gave the girl a death card I had received from the parish priest of that village, the brother of the deceased. The girl, without opening the card, became very excited, "Is that Ramona? You must be better there than here! You left this earth, for you were so sad, and now you are in delight for eternity! How many times would you say, 'When will I be in heaven?' Well, now you are in the heaven you so desired. There you are together with Gemma and Mama [Amatxo , referring to Mary]." (When the vision was over the seer responded to my questions by saying she had seen the deceased together with Gemma and the Most Holy Virgin, and that she had never met her in real life.)
Then in the same trance the girl replied in writing to three letters, one of which, with four questions for the Virgin, was mine. Her answers fit the questions EVEN THOUGH THE GIRL HAD NOT READ THEM . She distributed flowers as directed by the Most Holy Virgin, had certain objects blessed, and began to dictate to me the following while not losing sight of the vision.
The Virgin's subsequent message as relayed by Conchita put the vision of Ramona Oyarbide in perspective, for in fact it did not refer to the woman at all. The Virgin told those who still believed in Ezkioga (it was only ten days after the Vatican backed Bishop Múgica's September 1933 decree denying that the visions were supernatural) how lucky they were. Through Conchita the Virgin asked those present if they led better lives since they learned of the apparitions. When they answered that they thought they did, the Virgin praised their loyalty and pointed out that when she first appeared many thousands came by bus, train, and on foot, and "many of the little angels came down from heaven as well."
The Virgin described for the believers the spirit in their little community, a spirit I still felt in the 1980s and 1990s when speaking to its last original members.
"Look how happy you are together at this moment! How many such happy moments you have had together since I appeared! Above all, how often you get together to tell stories to each other! Even if they are always the same, you never tire of hearing them. You are told them, you are told them, and you always want to hear them. You ask each other if you have more stories. And if you do, you are all happy; and if you don't, then you go back to repeating the previous ones!"
Conchita said to the Virgin, "You must laugh at us, Mother! Because what can we do? We like your things so much! We are always talking about you, so we are always wanting you to come so we can hear your stories. Keep on, keep on, for we do not tire of them!"
Juan Bautista Ayerbe's sister-in-law made an aside to him, "Others from Urnieta would have wanted to be here." Whereupon the Virgin said something
to Conchita, who replied, "Yes, Mother, that is true, and many who are nearby do not want to come and hear you. Jesus says, 'I come to you and you reject me.'" Finally, after a vision that lasted forty-five minutes, the Virgin departed.[15]
Juan Bautista Ayerbe, "Visión de la Niña Conchita Mateos, en Beasain 10 Fbro. 1934," 2 pages, dittoed, signed by Conchita Mateos, AC 307 and 308.
This account shows us two phases of the presence of the dead at Ezkioga. In the first the dead came down with the Virgin as little angels while the great public visions were taking place, and the angels were one more factor among many that authenticated the visions. In the second, with the visions discredited and the believers on the defensive, heaven was a reward for continued belief. By the end of October 1931 the Catalans knew that those who came from far away believing in the apparitions would go straight to heaven without passing through purgatory. In this phase appearances by the dead helped maintain the morale and loyalty of the living. Believers led lives of heavenly joy, enriched by heavenly stories brought to them by the Virgin. In both phases the dead were benign spectators at the visions.[16]
For Catalans see García Cascón to Vallet, 31 October 1931, AHCPCR 10-A-27/2. Garmendia told García Cascón, José María Boada, and Manuel Esquisabel on 9 December 1931 that if they kept on as they were then [leading a good life], they would not go to purgatory (SC E 237).
But there was an obverse, dark side to the believers' assurance: doubters would go to purgatory, unbelievers to hell. Seers saw some people in purgatory for not believing enough—the brother-in-law of a fervent believer in Ormaiztegi, because he was skeptical about the visions and did not attend the local sessions, and Juan José Echezarreta, for giving in to government pressure and removing the image from the holy place. José Garmendia warned a man from Sabadell who had asked for a blessing that the Virgin of Ezkioga had said "they have to believe in her, and if they do not believe now, at the end they will not have time to believe in her. It will be useless to ask for forgiveness at the last hour. He who does not believe in her does not believe in God Our Lord." Hell was considered a sure punishment for those active in suppressing the visions.[17]
Garmendia in SC E 241-242. Condemnation of nonbelievers: López de Lerena to Burguera, 26 July 1933, private archive; B 690-693; Albiztur girls told Gregorio Aracama, Juan Celaya, Albiztur, 6 June 1984, pp. 29-30; Pío Montoya, San Sebastián, 7 April 1983, p. 13; of governor of Gipuzkoa, PV, 4 November 1932.
The people of the Goiherri at this time took sudden death when not in a state of grace to be divine punishment and almost certain damnation. Writing about Ataun in 1923, the Basque ethnographer Jose Miguel de Barandiarán observed: "We have never had a homicide, but we have had deaths by accident at work. In these cases one of the things that most torments the family is that the deceased was not able to receive the last rites."[18]
Barandiarán, AEF, 1923, p. 113; Patxi Goicoechea of Ataun claimed to see in hell a worker who had once been his friend and who had died suddenly (Boué, 143). For long history see Schmitt, Les Revenants, 257.
When the vicar general Justo de Echeguren died in an automobile accident on 16 August 1937 without last rites, Ezkioga believers felt the dire prophecies had come true (as did believers in the visions at Garabandal in Cantabria when the bishop Vicente Puchol died in a traffic accident on Saint Michael's Day 1967). But by the same token others read Patxi's sudden death in a fall from scaffolding as proof that the visions were not authentic. The most frightening aspect of the chastisement seers predicted for unbelievers is that death would be so sudden as to preclude repentance.But believers could be sure of their place. Conchita Mateos, who had witnessed other believers in heaven, was seen there herself after her death. Esperanza Aranda saw a host of deceased seers and believers in heaven, including Tomás Imaz, Soledad de la Torre, Juana Aguirre, Juliana Ulacia, Patxi, Cruz Lete, and
a number of relatives of her followers. In a vision message narrated by Juan Bautista Ayerbe on 8 December 1950 Aranda was given a glimpse of heaven, and at the request of Conchita's mother, who was present, the deceased Conchita even spoke.
Now [Aranda] feels herself transported to heaven, and she exclaims, "But Mother, where am I, in heaven or on earth? What music! The angels and saints are singing as a choir 'Tota Pulcra est María.'" At this moment something surprising happens, for one of those present, the mother of the former Conchita Mateos (who died in a Franciscan convent as Madre Sor Ana María), exclaims, "Since today is her saint's day, let Conchita speak to us."
And then the seer says, "I see a dwelling where the glorious souls are carrying what seem to be palm fronds, and one of them comes forward. It is Conchita! Now she prostrates herself at the feet of the Mother and Queen of Heaven and kisses her hands and feet. Conchita is now about to speak: 'Two words for my parents. Mother and father, now you see that I am in heaven. I wait for your arrival here soon. So continue to be models of sanctity, setting a good example everywhere … The same goes for my brothers. Be holy, which is the only thing you should desire in this world. In heaven I never forget you. I intercede so you will be happy not bodily but spiritually, which is much greater. You will never be in need of bread, and as until now, peace will never be lacking in your household. From heaven I contemplate you and help you, and I see you are happy, for which I give thanks to my Lord and Master. Do not worry. You will get the warning that in due time I will bring to you. You will be protected against all harm by your dear Mother until one day we will be able to see each other and embrace each other for always, dear parents, in the heavenly land.'"[19]
"Mensaje de la Stma. Virgen. 8 Dic. 1950 ¡La Inmaculada! Grandiosa vision. Consoladoras manifestaciones de nuestra amorosísima Madre del Cielo. Al final, sorprendente mensaje familiar de una alma gloriosa, que fué vidente y murió en un convento en olor de santidad," 2 pages, AC 159.
From heaven Conchita could provide a valuable service, a warning of impending death so that her relatives could prepare themselves, and could live in the meantime without anxiety.
This vision, however rudimentary, of a heavenly space was unusual for the Ezkioga seers. Another seer who described heaven was connected only indirectly with Ezkioga. Anna Pou i Prat was a servant about twenty years old on an estate in Tona in the province of Barcelona. From Tona two bus excursions had gone to Ezkioga in November 1931, and two women from nearby Vic had had visions on the Aulina trips.[20]
A salesman from Vic happened on the crowd at Ezkioga 17 October 1931: Vigatà, Gazeta de Vich, 22 October. The first trip from Tona and Vic went October 19-23 and another was planned for a week later (Gazeta de Vich, 24 October; EM, 8 November). There was a favorable lecture in Vic by Joaquim Soler i Tures on 11 April 1932 (Gazeta de Vich, 9 and 13 April; EM, 13 April).
Pou i Prat was orphaned at a young age. On 31 January 1933 she experienced what seemed to be a miraculous cure of an infected ankle. The cure occurred during a novena to Our Lady of Lourdes and after prayers at a local shrine to the Virgin. An Ezkioga enthusiast described the cure in a local newspaper, possibly enhancing the matter for Anna herself, and she saw the Virgin for the first time a week later.[21]
SC E 555-777 (22 February to 10 June 1933) and Cardús's correspondence with the enthusiast Paulí Subirà of Vic, the Galobart family of Mas Riambau, and Miguel Fort of Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer (21 February 1933 to 5 October 1933, ASC). Subirà, Gazeta de Vich, 6 February 1933; there was a Lourdes chapel next to the estate; Anna Pou had prayed at Our Lady of La Gleva.
The Vic enthusiast alerted Cardús, who visited the new seer on February 26. Subsequently Anna's visions became more complex and tortured. Although her employers first believed her, they fired her on March 20, and she went back to her aunt's house, where she claimed to suffer the Passion on Fridays and receive mystical Communion. She also felt the devil was after her. One of her aunts believed that Anna was mentally ill and that reading Galgani's Letters and Ecstasies, a gift from Cardús, had made her worse. No one besides Cardús and his friends heeded the girl, and even they stopped coming in June 1933 after threats from Anna's neighbors.
Five days after her first vision Anna claimed to visit heaven. In the presence of other servants she fell on the floor as if her soul had departed and she had died, and later she said the Virgin had taken her up higher than the stars. As Cardús told it:
She entered heaven, and the Virgin let her see her mother, who was very resplendent, and then the Crucified Jesus, from whose wounds blood dripped. Heaven seemed to her like immense, grandiose vaults, with a very brilliant, slightly bluish, light. After a little while there, the Virgin said to her, "Come, go back to earth, for your body [left behind on earth] will get cold."[22]
SC E 581-583.
Like most of the Ezkioga visionary dead, Anna Pou's mother did not speak. When Conchita Mateos spoke from heaven, Juan Bautista Ayerbe was surprised, because it is virtually the only time that a seer relayed to him a dead person's words.
Ama Felisa, Courier for Souls
The connection between the living and the dead was especially strong for children whose mothers had died young (the case of Anna Pou), for mothers whose children had died young (the cases of María Agueda and the mother of Conchita Mateos), and for those whose close relatives had died suddenly in accidents (the cases of the girl from Albiztur and the man from Madrid). These deaths came outside the normal pattern of things and interrupted intense relations, which were left unresolved.[23]
This kind of vision has many parallels elsewhere, from the dream visions of Giovanni Pagolo Morelli in fifteenth-century Florence (Trexler, Public Life, 161-186) to my acquaintances in the present day.
After the church banned public vision sessions, people's ongoing desire to maintain contact with the dead permitted some of the seers to work as intermediaries with the other world. In 1944 Juan Bautista Ayerbe described the seer Marcelina Mendívil: "No longer does she beg door-to-door for her house, which burned down in such an unusual fashion, but she does circulate a lot, we have learned, to take messages from the Virgin and from the souls in purgatory with whom, above all, she is much in contact."[24]
J. B. Ayerbe to an abadesa, 1 July 1944, 10 pages, p. 3, AC 423.
Mendívil formed part of an extensive consulting service about the dead which depended largely on the incessant activity of one woman. For many in the Goiherri Felisa Alcorta Goenaga, variously known as the Bread Lady from Zumarraga, Ama Txikixa [Little Mother], or Ama Felisa [Mother Felisa], came to personify the Ezkioga cult from the late 1930s until her death in 1954. Born about 1882, Ama Felisa operated a bakery from a farm to the north of Zumarraga. For four years her family employed as a servant the woman whose children were later the first seers at Ezkioga, so Ama Felisa took a special interest in the visions. We see her in photographs raptly observing and caring for seers and proud at the ground-breaking of the chapel. After the cult went underground, she led prayer sessions at Ezkioga at night. It may have been through her that several other bakers in the zone converted and attended visions in Ordizia and Ormaiztegi.[25]
The first seers' mother was the niece of a neighbor in Ama Felisa's hamlet. For Ama Felisa see her son Domingo Plazaola Goenaga and wife, Zumarraga, 8 April 1983.
Believers, including her own family, thought Ama Felisa had a gift of second sight that enabled her to see things happening elsewhere—she saw the youth from Azkoitia who was posted elsewhere in the Civil War, and she saw one of her own sons in Jaca. She also seemed to foresee events—that a farm building would burn down if its owner did not install an image of the Miraculous Mary in a window, that an anti-Ezkioga priest would be deposed (he went crazy in late 1934), or that Spain would once again be a monarchy. But she herself saw neither the Virgin nor the souls in purgatory, and so she had recourse not only to Mendívil but also to Luis Irurzun, Cándida Zunzunegui, Juliana Ulacia, and above all María Recalde.
Ama Felisa circulated among a regular network of clients, gathering questions for the Virgin or the dead, delivering answers from seers, and collecting alms. Leaving the bakery to her family, she would be gone on foot, by bus, or by train for weeks at a time, staying in the homes of believers. Her regular route included the towns adjacent to Zumarraga as well as Azpeitia, San Prudentzio, Legazpi, Oñati, Aranzazu, Durango, Ordizia, Zaldibia, Tolosa, and San Sebastián. Occasionally she went to Bergara and Mondragón. Her son told me that nothing stopped her, including the Civil War. One nonbelieving observer claimed to me that she or the seers she spoke for coerced peasants into giving money with threats that their houses would burn or their cattle would die. Be that as it may, initiative also came from the believers, who had sons missing in action, problems with farming in hard times, and dead who needed care.
Accompanied by her sister-in-law or other friends, Ama Felisa also paid regular visits to the church of Santa María in San Sebastián and the shrines of Our Lady of Liernia in Mutiloa, Saint Martin of Loinaz, and Saint Anthony of Urkiola in Bizkaia. She would enter the shrine of Our Lady of Aranzazu with a lighted candle and leave many lighted candles behind her. A friar of Aranzazu remembered her visits on the first Saturday of each month and said the students referred to her and her friends as "las iluminadas." Women described her to me
"lighting rolls of wax [for the souls in purgatory], mortifying herself with prickly holly under her knees as she prayed, and on the orders of the Virgin wearing the Passionist habit of Gemma Galgani."[26]
For visits to San Sebastián, Juan María Amundarain, San Sebastián, 3 June 1984, p. 4; for her route, Juana Urcelay, Pamplona, 18 June 1984, p. 2; for Aranzazu, Franciscan keeper of San Martintxu, Beasain, 4 April 1983; older women, Zumarraga, 29 May 1984, p. 8.
Ama Felisa also played a prominent role in the vision sessions in Ordizia. A Passionist who attended one of them described her in 1950:
There is a female apostle, dressed something like a priest, with a shoulder cape and everything, in the old style of rural clergy. She is advanced in years [by then she was in her late sixties], and they call her "La Ama X." She displays a white silk handkerchief, on which are seen big dark-red spots, which she claims is the blood of Christ.[27]
Beaga, "O locos o endemoniados," 155. He may be describing a session Juan Bautista Ayerbe attended on 29 October 1947: Ayerbe to "Felipe" (probably his brother in Bergara), Urnieta, 27 November 1947, AC 424.
We get a glimpse of how Ama Felisa worked from a local doctor. Curious about her system, he asks her about the afterlife of a brother who, he said, had died in Bizkaia in the war. She returned after several days saying that a seer had learned that the brother was in purgatory and would go to heaven if the doctor received Communion for nine days with Ama Felisa present. The doctor was a daily communicant anyway, so they went together for nine days. She then checked again with the seer, who claimed to have seen the brother leave purgatory and go straight to heaven while the doctor and Ama Felisa were receiving Communion in the ninth mass. In fact, there was no dead brother.[28]
Dionisio Oñatibia, Urretxu, 7 April 1983, p. 1.
Ama Felisa cannot have had time to sit in on all the believers' masses and novenas. But by all accounts she was dedicated to helping others and kept none of the alms. Antonia Etxezarreta, the milk-lady, told me that once when she was sick Ama Felisa came to visit, predicted that Antonia's son would have the grace of the Virgin, and seemed to have a vision looking out a window. Ama Felisa was like a pastor to the believing community, looking after their physical and spiritual needs and caring for their souls after death.
There was general agreement that the money Ama Felisa collected went to the needy. Her role as collector of alms and votive money corresponds with an ancient one in Basque and European society—that of the questors for shrines. The woman shrine-keeper (serora ) at the little shrine of Our Lady of Liernia circulated in a wide area. Much of what she collected would have been pledges for prayers that people felt the Virgin had answered. In the years 1928–1929 she gathered about eight hundred pesetas per year in money or in eggs, chickens, or other produce; she could keep half for herself. Questors also circulated for the construction of churches, like that of Urkiola. With portable images that all members of a farm would kiss, questors provided a home delivery of grace probably related, like home delivery of bread, to a multiplicity of sacred places and competition between them. Ama Felisa, the bread-lady, was delivering personalized grace that the Virgin or the holy dead had certified.[29]
For Our Lady of Liernia see ADV Denuncias, Mutiloa, 1928-1929; for questor visits see Sukia, "El ambiente religioso," 364.
Ama Felisa's son and daughter-in-law told me that she sent some of the alms to a convent in Palencia, where masses for the dead were especially cheap and
she could liberate more souls. Ama Felisa would redistribute some of the alms to the sick and the poor on her route. But believers could also choose to have their money go to missions; she brought this money to María Recalde, in sums of five hundred to one thousand pesetas. María told Ama Felisa that angels took this money away at night from a bedside table for use in a place where missionaries never went. By one account it was a place where people dug for potatoes with their hands. Another believer told me the money was "for places where there was no religion, for example, for the missions. Away. Like to India. For you know there are many places where there is no religion." In 1983 older Zumarraga believers were wondering whether that remote place might have been the moon. In any case where the Ezkioga money went was a mystery.[30]
For the place of potatoes see Juliana Urcelay, Pamplona, 18 June 1984, p. 1; for India: elderly woman, Zumarraga, 10 May 1984, p. 8; for moon: older believers, Zumarraga, April 1983.
María Recalde was secretive about financial matters, even with her husband and children. She would closet herself with three or four women believers to pray in an improvised chapel. The family knew that Ama Felisa came with the alms, but no one knew what María did with them. On different occasions in Madrid and Mexico, however, María's granddaughter, Mariví Jayo, met people who, when she said she was from Durango, remembered her grandmother well. It seems that María, who belonged to a Basque Nationalist family, generously helped the family members of prisoners in the Durango jail for enemies of the Franco regime. The Durango prison may have been "the place where missionaries had never been." Before she died in 1950 María told her husband that she had twenty thousand pesetas still unspent, a fortune at the time. Mortified, her husband told no one, until on his deathbed he had his children give the money to the Durango priests for masses.[31]
Lorenzo and Mariví Jayo, Durango, 31 December 1984 and 23 July 1986, and Tafira Baja, 15 June 1985 and 8 December 1989.
Other seers continued to provide news of the dead. As far as I know, the last two of the seers from the 1930s to do so were Luis Irurzun, who settled in San Sebastián, and Rosario Gurruchaga, who settled in Bergara. A believer from Bergara told me, "If they brought a photograph, she would answer where the dead person was." She would also deliver messages or tokens from the dead to the living. In 1980, for instance, she gave flowers to Leonor Castillo from Leonor's deceased brother, Vidal, the operator of the Ezkioga souvenir stand. These semiprofessional intermediaries with the dead were not new with the Ezkioga visions. Specialists in many parts of Spain, known as ánimas or animeros and in Languedoc as armièrs , had long claimed to be able to make such contacts.[32]
Bergara believer, 12 June 1984, p. 8; Leonor Castillo, Bermeo, 7 May 1984, p. 5; for similar specialists Bethencourt, Costumbres populares, 285-288, at the turn of the century describes a man in Icod de los Vinos (Tenerife) and a woman on the island of Hierro; for Asturias see Cátedra, This World, Other Worlds, 264-268, and for the armièrs of Languedoc see Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 60.
Old Ghosts and New Spirits
For the Basques dying was a communal enterprise—families needed neighbors to help the dead through the afterworld. Just eight years before the Ezkioga visions started, the Eusko-Folklore Society made a survey of death beliefs and rituals. For most of the rural Basque-speaking area, apparitions of the dead were
well known and there was a pattern and an etiquette for dealing with them similar to that in use in medieval France. The report by the society's correspondent from Bedia (Bizkaia) laid out the pattern.
The village believes the apparition of the dead is a real and frequent phenomenon. They appear in the air just above the ground and dressed with the same garments in which they were buried. Their purpose is typically to reveal that they have some unfulfilled promise that keeps them from entering heaven. The dead appear in any place or time, and always to persons they know (ezagunai ); but those to whom they appear must be in a state of grace.[33]
William Douglass has carefully described the communal aspect of death in rural Bizkaia in Death in Murelaga. For Bedia see Ispitzua, AEF, 1923, pp. 17-22.
While other reports for other towns gave instances of apparitions in the more distant past, that for Bedia recounts one whose seer was still alive. The apparition led many in the community, including the parish priest, to go to the shrine of Begoña for a mass to liberate a soul in purgatory. A beggar woman, they believed, had died when a relative had had a mass said in order to kill her. The beggar's spirit had approached a good woman, Francisca de Muguertzu, to request a mass at the shrine of Our Lady of Begoña, near Bilbao. After the mass the spirit offered Francisca her hand. Counseled by the priest, Francisca extended her handkerchief instead, and where the beggar-soul touched it, the cloth was marked with the oily imprint of fingers. "Even today," the report from 1923 concluded, "Francisca de Muguertzu keeps this handkerchief in a little bottle."[34]
A girl saw a ghost who left burn marks on a handkerchief in Itziar in the mid-1940s, according to Rodríguez Ramos, PV, Bilbao, 12 May 1949, and Joseba Zulaika, personal communication.
The Eusko-Folklore survey uncovered similar patterns elsewhere in the Basque Country: the dead always took the initiative and the living consulted the parish priest about how to respond. As at Ezkioga, what the dead wore varied because different towns had different customs for shrouding—habits of different religious orders for the married, uniforms of sodalities for the unmarried, wedding clothes or simply the deceased's best clothes for adults, and white for children. The dead in hell who wore religious habits appeared to the living to request that their habits be removed, because with them on they suffered more.[35]
Gorrochategui and Aracama, AEF, 1923, p. 111; Sáez de Adana, AEF, 1923, pp. 59-60.
Such apparitions did not happen just to Basques. That the dead needed help was church doctrine and that they occasionally asked for it was general knowledge. In the seventeenth century Spanish theologians Onofre Manescal and Juan de Palafox collected similar evidence. And in 1915 the Jesuit from Mallorca Juan Mir wrote: "It is not open to doubt that God permits the souls of purgatory to visit people in order to show their terrible punishment … asking for help and thanking for prayers."[36]
Manescal, Miscellanea, 160-187; Palafox, Luz; and Mir, El Milagro, 2:692.
The dead had left signs on handkerchiefs and other objects for hundreds of years. In 1894 an enterprising Missionary of the Sacred Heart, Victor Jouët, began to collect instances of these visions and their relics as evidence that purgatory existed and the supernatural could be tangible. In Rome he founded a brotherhood to help the souls in purgatory and a museum for evidence of their
marks. In 1904 Pius X went to see an initial group of twelve objects from France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Among the many apparitions of the dead Jouët reported in his bulletin was one in Deusto, not far from Bedia, where another spirit left the imprint of a finger on a handkerchief.[37]
Koch, I Contabili dell'Aldilà, 132. The Deusto apparition was reported in the August 1909 issue of Il Purgatorio visitato dalla pietà dei fedeli. The bulletin had a Spanish as well as French and English editions, but there were few members of the brotherhood in Spain.
The clientele of the bulletin understood two kinds of dead. The first kind, like those in the Basque survey, actively provoked encounters with the living in order to alleviate suffering in the afterlife. These dead needed the help of the living, and for them people prayed and ordered masses. These dead, however, although they might mean well, were considered dangerous. Evarista Galdós fled her first vision of the Virgin, she said, because at first she tought it a soul in purgatory, presumably of the frightening variety. But the bulletin is also filled with news of the beneficent dead, those who on demand interceded for the living. Grateful clients listed their favors—cures, jobs, apartments—in every issue. In Spain it was common for people to pray to the souls of the dead as intercessors, and in prayer manuals there were novenas and prayers not for the dead but to the dead on behalf of the living.[38]
Koch, I Contabili dell'Aldilà, 80. In 1969 three out of the fourteen villages I surveyed in Cantabria had as their active patron saints the souls in purgatory: see Christian, Person and God, 68, 93-96, 142.
Although the Ezkioga visions include few instances of the dead interceding for the living, the dead that the seers saw were generally this benign kind.In the Eusko-Folklore survey a Meñaka (Bizkaia) man told of a farmer in the old days who lived near the church and cemetery and witnessed a nocturnal procession of the dead holding candles. In the 1931 visions only child seers in Ormaiztegi and Unanu admitted to seeing processions of the dead. In 1923 the priest of Galarreta, a hamlet in Alava, wrote, "In the old days people commonly believed in the apparitions of the dead; today only children talk about them." It could be that by then people believed in apparitions less in areas like Alava where traditional beliefs were not protected by a special language. In contrast, people in Basque-speaking zones still gave credence to visions of the dead, and most Ezkioga seers who saw the dead were Basque speakers.[39]
For Meñaka see Marcaida, AEF, 1923, pp. 35-36; for Galarreta in Alava see Sáez de Adana, AEF, 1923, p. 59. For antecedents of these ghost processions, see Schmitt, Les Revenants, 115-145, Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 58-60, and Redondo, "La Mesnie Hellequin." People remembered such processions at Oliveto Citra in 1985: Apolito, Cielo in terra, 71-73. In Galicia in the 1960s adults as well as children saw the dead in processions; there language protected the belief as well (Christian, "Apparitions and the Cold War").
Rural people consulted azti , diviners, in the larger towns and the cities to find lost animals, objects, and missing persons, as well as to learn the fate of the dead or the outcome of disease.[40]
Etxeberria, AEF, 1923, pp. 94, 98. In the 1930s there was a woman from Girona operating in Irun (VG, 21 December 1934, p. 8) and a famous woman diviner in Mundaka (see Erkoreka, Medicina popular, 302).
Probably some people in the Goiherri also consulted mediums, who in most Spanish cities were also seeing the dead at this time. Spirit mediums who served rural folk in Spain were a modern form of azti. For the mid-nineteenth-century folk traditions of ghosts and philosophical and religious speculation about reincarnation took a new turn as spiritism progressed from city to city in Western Europe. The new technique offered contact of an active, verbal kind with the dead. In France spiritism promoted "personal immortality, reincarnation on earth, and the transmigration of souls to other planets." In Spain specialized publishing houses put out the works of major French authors. And as in Italy, spiritism became a specialty of the bourgeois commercial class, often in tandem with Freemasonry. The mediums, however, could be from the servant class and, like Eusapia Paladino in Italy, could have relations with promoterssimilar to those we have seen for the most convincing visionaries at Ezkioga.[41]
There is no good history of spiritism in Spain. For spiritism: at origin, Braude, Radical Spirits; in France, Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 143-162; in Italy, Gallini, "Eusapia."
Whether or not Ramona acted as a medium, as one reporter claimed, there were spiritist sessions at this time in San Sebastián, Pamplona, Bilbao, and Irun.[42]On Ramona as a medium (she denied the charge), see Juan de Urumea, El Nervión, 21 October 1931. Maritxu Güller and others told me about spiritism in Pamplona: one middle-class commercial family held small, private séances; a butcher woman from Sangüesa did divining at night; adepts set up ad hoc sessions for visiting mediums. Even after the war priests and prominent citizens held experiments in thought transmission in the residence of a new religious institute.
Spiritist ideas also circulated in the countryside. About 1909 a man from Ataun returning from Argentina tried to spread spiritist doctrines with pamphlets arguing against Catholicism and the clergy. And in 1924 fishermen from Santander brought spiritism to the Basque seaport of Bermeo. There people sat around tables that replied to questions by knocks. Those present would begin with prayers and then call up a deceased person and ask questions like those put to ghosts in the region—how long had they been dead; where were they (almost always in purgatory); did they need alms; did they have promises pending and if so to what shrine; did they want masses and if so how many. Some who went to such séances were not regular churchgoers, and some questions indicated that the procedure, as in France, cut out the established church. When asked, the Bermeo soul said there was no hell and it was not good to give money to priests or order masses. People also asked where to fish, but fishermen following these tips tended to come back empty-handed.[43]
Barandiarán, AEF, 1924: for Ataun, pp. 216-217, for Bermeo, pp. 197-199.
Catholic experts on spiritism disagreed on how to explain the phenomenon. A few thought spiritist phenomena real and the effect of good, but as yet unidentified, spirits. Others thought them outright fraud. Many thought them real but diabolical. This was the position of the parish bulletin of Pamplona, which described for its readers a typical spiritist session. But whatever spiritism was, by the time of the Bermeo outbreak the church had forbidden Catholics to engage in the practice. Printed examinations of conscience might include questions like "Have you consulted diviners, hypnotists, or spiritists?" or "Have you gone to meetings of hypnotists or spiritists?"[44]
For positive opinion of spiritism see Thurston, Spiritualism, and his "Communicating with the Dead"; for a measure of the confusion in France, see the exchange between Louis Gérold and O. Kardec, La Croix, 25 October 1931, p. 3, and 29 December 1931, p. 3. For fakery see Heredia, Los Fraudes. For devilry see Mir, El Milagro, 3:473-514, and La Verdad, 13 March 1932, p. 2; Ugarte de Ercilla suspended judgment on spiritism in Razón y fe, 1923, pp. 105-108. For church prohibitions see Koch, I Contabili dell'Aldilà, 98, and M. D. Griffin, "Spiritism," New Catholic Encyclopedia 13 (1981): 576-577; the Congregation of Inquisition on 30 July 1856 condemned the evocation of departed spirits. On 24 April 1917, the Holy Office (and two days later Benedict XV) forbade attendance at sessions even if no medium was present. Questions in Rayos de sol, n.d., nos. 148-149.
The first to compare the Ezkioga visions and spiritism in print was Agapito Millán in El Liberal (Bilbao) in September 1931. After a skeptical account of three seers he had watched, he set out his own idea of the spirit world. There were, he said, natural or high apparitions, which were those that occurred at the initiative of ghosts, suffering souls, and "high entities of the astral world," and also artificials or low ones, which humans initiated. The high, natural apparitions, he held, always occurred for a good reason, one important either for the spirit or the visionary. For the spirit they might serve to attain liberty, tranquillity, or even happiness in the other world. For the living they might serve as a warning of imminent danger. Here we seen a congruence between the traditional belief in the apparitions of the dead and the new beliefs of the spiritsts. Millán merely added to traditional notions the idea that "higher astral bodies" might appear. He claimed that low, artificial apparitions were
provoked by experimenters by means of hypnotism, magnetism, and somnambulism, who put their subject sensitives to sleep, and once they are pro-foundly
A photograph of Agapito Millán Estefanía pasted on a souvenir
of his Masonic lecture, "My childhood, my life, my ideal," 1934.
Courtesy Archivo Histórico Nacional, Guerra Civil, Salamanca
so, double them and project their "double," or astral body wherever or as far as they want. In 1918 a good "subject," put to sleep in Bilbao, sent [his or her] double, in a few instants, to Paris and places on the French front, where it talked with soldiers and was visible to them.
This kind of experiment was going on throughout Europe and the Americas in an attempt to apply positivist methods to the spiritual realm. Scientists like the Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal had participated in Spain, and Millín though the sessions could explain what was going on at Ezkioga:
Why could this same result not be produced now, having a "double" with the appearance of a Saint, the Virgin, or a farmer appear in Ezquioga or anywhere else, so that those present would see and even hear them?… The Ezquioga events appear to be sessions of low spiritism.[45]
Millán, ELB, 9-10 September 1931; J. V. Ibarz Serrat, "La Psicología en la obra de Santiago Ramón y Cajal," doctoral thesis, Facultat de Psicologia, Universitat de Barcelona, 1988 (I thank Antonio Cano for this reference).
Interest in the afterlife, sensitives, and astral projection was not unusual for
republicans. For instance, El Heraldo de Madrid reported in August 1931, when it was ignoring the visions at Ezkioga, that a waiter in a Madrid café who was a "seer, astrologer, and a reader of palms" claimed that his body "doubled" while he was asleep or in trance and traveled across the world and into the future. Similarly, the republican Voz de Giupúzcoa , which mocked the Ezkioga visions, found a book entitle Revelation of the Mystery of the Beyond "impressive" and recommended enthusiastically a "wise professor of occultism and spiritism." The professor, Hadji Agaf, had settled in Irun where he received about two hundred letters a day requesting his help in matters of "luck, health, love, business, etc." Even the Voz de Navarra accepted advertisements from a personal magnetist.
Agapito Millán epitomized this cultural experimentation. He was born in 1893 and as a child in the minefields of eastern Bizkaia peddled clothes, made scapulars for sale in religious fiestas, and cleaned ore. A novel by Tolstoy inspired him at age seventeen to join a revolutionary republican party in Bilbao and struggle against "the oppression of the regime and of the sinister clergy." But he soon turned from violence toward "more humane and spiritual" pursuits. During World War I he tried to interest the French and British embassies in his esoteric powers. He became a vegetarian, a Freemason, and a leader of theosophy. In his travels throughout the north as the salesman of heavy machinery, camomile, and postcards, he handed out broadsides about spiritism and against the death penalty and promoted a sideline as professor of occult science who could find buried treasure, locate lost relatives, give business advice, and avoid the attacks of enemies. In June 1931 he was also a leader of the Radical Socialist Republican Party in Bilbao.[46]
Marqués, HM, 18 August 1931; Meromar, Revelación, reviewed in VG, 17 May 1933, p. 6; for Hadji Agaf, who came from South America, see VG, 13 September 1934, p. 4. Millán moved from Bilbao to Eibar in the early 1930s. For his letters, broadsides, and essays, see AHN GC Teosofía 25/851 and Masonería 174/A/27 (pseudonym Tolstoi), wherein the 1934 speech, "Mi niñez, mi vida, mi idea," I cite in text. In 1943 a Franco court sentenced him in absentia to twelve years in prison for Freemasonry.
In 1934 Spaniards read about the duende of Zaragoza, a female voice that answered questions through a stovepipe. From the first days attention centered on a servant girl, Pascuala Alcobet, who observers suggested might be a spiritist medium. Both the head of the Zaragoza insane asylum and the son of Ramón y Cajal gave credence to the capacity of mediums for psychokinesis. For two weeks in late 1934 the press of all stripes, even the Times of London and Fox Movietone News, featured the Zaragoza spirit. Famous psychics visited the site; theosophists went from Madrid and Barcelona; priests sprinkled holy water; the residents of the building went to the shrine of El Pilar to confess, just in case; and a whole busload of observers went from Bilbao. The civil governor eventually judged that the servant girl had produced the voice as "unconscious, hysterical ventriloquism." El Pueblo Vasco did not fail to compare the Zaragoza duende with the apparitions at Ezkioga. "The spirits in each case take a different form and use a different technique. But almost never does it turn out that the spirit exists."[47]
All 1934: the duende was fully reported in PV, VG, and ED from November 23 until December 8; for psychokinesis see PV, 24 November, p. 3; for visitors in November see VG, 25 November, p. 5, and PV, 27 November, p. 3, and 30 November, p. 3; for governor see VG, 4 December, p. 5. La Voz de Aragón and the flat's owner thought the servant girl was not involved at all (PV, 8 December, p. 2); for duende and Ezkioga see Axari-Beltx, PV, 15 December. For similar poltergeist in Italy, see Gallini, "Storie di case."
But just as freethinkers made fun of Catholic apparitions, Catholics mocked the esoterica of the freethinkers. The correspondent of Euzkadi from Orio liked the enthusiasm Ezkioga aroused and contrasted the piety of the Basques with the
"dissolute ideas, hatred of the church, impiety, and irreligion" of the Spaniards. The impious, he wrote, "pretend not to believe in God or his church, and at the same time lower themselves in their beliefs and practices to the most absurd black magic and the most extravagant monstrosities and aberrations." Similarly, Rafael Picavea in El Pueblo Vasco pointed out the inconsistency of an anticlerical who opposed the Ezkioga prayer sessions yet attended the spiritist séances of a barber in Irun.[48]
EZ, 19 July 1931, p. 9; Picavea, PV, 11 November 1931.
Both Catholics and spiritists were searching for meaning in death as well as contact with dead relatives and friends. Both believed in apparitions of the dead and both admitted access to higher entities. According to a Spanish Dominican, spiritism was popular because of "the natural desire to explore the mysteries of the afterlife and to communicate with dear ones that death has taken away." The English Jesuit Herbert Thurston pointed to the convergences, citing persons who converted to Catholicism after séances with saints as spirit guides. Spiritist writers held that what passed for seers among Catholics, including Christ himself, were powerful emissaries who came to help the living from the land of the dead. A French spiritist held that Jeanne d'Arc was a medium and a messiah, one of those who "always come at moments of crisis."[49]
For Catholic attitudes, Koch, I Contabili dell'Aldilà, 100; Dominican quote from Barbado, "Boletín de psicología"; Thurston, Spiritualism, 16, 54-55, 368-384; Denis, Joan of Arc, 214, citing one of his spirit guides, "John, disciple of Peter," June 1909.
The similarity between Catholic and spiritist beliefs meant that spiritism was an easy way either to explain the Ezkioga phenomena or to dismiss them. A priest in rural Catalonia thought that Salvador Cardús and his wife were spiritists, "very bad people" who had "magnetized" Anna Pou i Prat. Villagers vandalized their automobile for provoking the girl's madness. Another priest lumped spiritists and Masons together with Ezkioga and Soledad de la Torre as part of a conspiracy. When Padre Burguera was forced to address the question, he distinguished the willful tapping of the devil's powers in spiritist or Masonic sessions from the almost routine, unbidden tempting of the seers by the devil in the course of their visions. He invited those who believed that Ezkioga was spiritism to compare the spiritist sessions at the Club Náutico in San Sebastiín with an Ezkioga vision.[50]
On accusation of spiritism see Cardús notes, 27 June 1933; for spiritism and Masonry see Tusquets, Masonería, 65-66. B 105-107.
The assertion of the Bermeo soul in 1924 that there was no hell points up a basic change in ideas about the other world. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic there was a concerted challenge to rigorist notions of a vengeful God. The spiritists denied that hell existed at all. Generous Catholic theologians argued that God was merciful and good and sent very few people to hell. The Sacred Heart of Jesus itself was at its origin a message that God was merciful. Marie Thérèse Desandais, "Slamitis" placed love at the center of her revelations.[51]
For the appeal of spiritism to the more optimistic American Protestants, see Braude, Radical Spirits, 34-55. For the shift toward optimism in France, from Paris in the 1830s to the countryside in the second half of the century, see Kselman, Death and the Afterlife, 82-83; for a generous theologian, Alonso Getino, Del gran número, first published by Urbano in Rosas y espinas and Contemporánea.
Liberal commentators reacted sharply to the dire and grim side of the visions at Ezkioga. And the people of the Goiherri had radically differing reactions when told by child seers that so-and-so was in hell or would go there. A split between followers of a relatively severe deity and followers of a relatively benign deity
seems to have run right through Catholic society from top to bottom. A disposition toward mercy or justice, generosity or rigor, was probably one of the key ways people were (and are) different from one another. Juan de Olazábal of La Constancia published a notorious editorial explaining the disastrous floods of 1934 as God's punishment on farmers who worked on Sunday. He was a kind of captain of the rigorist side; Rafael Picavea of El Pueblo Vasco could not believe that "his" Virgin would frighten people in visions. He was a leader of the more liberal contingent. Antonio Amundarain was on the former side, his assistant Miguel Lasa on the latter. Padre Burguera was clearly a rigorist, but Raymond de Rigné and Marie-Geneviève Thirouin, who advertised her poems as "dedicated to all the souls who seek God in love and not in fear," were on the generous side.[52]
Olazábal, LC, 17 June 1934, and subsequent polemic, especially LC, 24 and 28 June, 1 and 2 July; VG, 18 June; ED, 20 June; and PV, passim.
14.
The End of the World
The future of mankind as a whole, the end of the human adventure, and the merging of heaven and earth greatly preoccupied elderly believers in the Ezkioga apparitions in the 1980s, but these themes were entirely absent from the visions in July 1931. The ancient apocalyptic tradition entered the Basque visions only gradually. The vision messages at Ezkioga seemed to evolve according to four principles: (1) they became more universal and less local; (2) they became less fixed in time; (3) they became more dire as the visions became less popular; and (4) they converged on preexisting prophecies.
The apocalypse was the vision theme linked least to time and place. This theme emerged at the end of a sequence that had begun with meanings bound to the social and political climate of the Basque Country and the summer of 1931. The same process occurred at Limpias, where people understood the Christ's motions first as the sign for a shrine for Cantabria, then as a Lourdes for Spain, and then briefly as a new Jerusalem that heralded the social reign of Christ. In both cases, as time passed and people came from farther
and farther away, messages and meanings had to accomodate timelessness and serve distant believers.
For all its dark drama, the apocalypse emerged at Ezkioga only after the church and the great majority of Basques had rejected the visions. In the balance of human hopes and fears among supplicants to the Virgin of Ezkioga in 1931, the healing of a retarded boy, the danger of a civil war, the peaceful afterlife of a sinful father, and the excitement of new movements of piety outweighed notions of catastrophic divine punishment or the imminent arrival of heaven on earth. By isolating apocalyptic messages in this chapter I necessarily distort the variety in any particular vision session. The indications seers provided about last times came along with others about the here-and-now.
Experts at Ezkioga influenced the content of the apocalyptic messages. They did so by asking questions, by giving the seers books, and by transcribing in their own way what the seers said. We can determine when the messages began, which seers produced them, and which believers influenced them. What emerges is a pattern for one particular way people recycle and renew high traditions.[1]
Apolito, Cielo in terra, 139, noted a similar process at Oliveto Citra near Salerno (Campania).
Believers induced millenarian projects in seers who at first felt they had substantially different missions. The inquisitors of the Early Modern period inculcated the peasants in Gipuzkoa and Navarra with learned ideas and converted these people into denouncers and confessants of lascivious, flying witchcraft. In both cases the intelligentsia transmitted their ideas unwittingly. In neither case, however, were those who absorbed the ideas passive. Consciously or not, children and subordinate adults quickly took advantage of the opportunities the new patterns offered.In both apparitions and witchcraft absorption of learned concepts was facilitated by prior beliefs in the receiving rural society. In the seventeenth century rural folk already had knowledge of the ways they could use sorcery to harm or to help one another, and the learned model of witches in covens who served the devil was an extension of that system. At Ezkioga the seers moved from the idea of chastisement of those opposed to the visions to the kind of chastisement of sinners throughout the world that they had learned in catechism and then on to details of the last times.
Apocalyptic Tradition at the Time of the Ezkioga Visions
The Last Judgment is a notion Catholics reaffirm in every mass: "I believe that Jesus Christ rose up to Heaven and is seated on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. I believe that from there he will come to judge the living and the dead." The catechism in use in the diocese of Vitoria provided a reason for the Last Judgement and distinguished it from the judgment of individuals
"He will come to judge the living and the dead." Catechism poster by
Ramón Llimona, Barcelona, 1919. Courtesy parish of Taganana, Tenerife
after death, but it provided no specifics about when the Last Judgment would occur.
143.
Q. When will Jesus Christ come to judge the living and the dead?
A. Jesus Christ will come to judge the living and the dead at the end of the world.
144.
Q. What is the trial called in which Jesus Christ will judge all men at the end of the world?
A. The trial in which Jesus Christ will judge all men at the end of the world is called the universal judgment.
145.
Q. Will there be, then, more than one judgment?
A. Yes, there will be two judgments: one individual, right after the death of every person, and another universal, at the end of the world.
146.
Q. Why will there be a universal judgment?
A. The universal judgment will be to confound the bad and glorify the good, and show the triumph of the justice of God.[2]Múgica, Catecismo, 22.
This vagueness about the timing of the Last Judgment, the sensible result of centuries of mistaken predictions, has been difficult for some Christians to accept. They have tried to reconcile the many references in the Old and New Testaments and assemble them into a program for the future. Additional prophecies by "holy" persons have complicated an already confusing task. Prophetic literature proliferated especially in periods of religious trial, political or social revolt, and military defeat.[3]
Carbonero, "Prólogo," vi; Thurston, The War, 189.
In the wake of the French Revolution, prophets in nineteenth-century France like Mlle. Le Normand, the farmer Thomas Martin, Eugène Vintras, the children of La Salette, and Joseph Antoine Bouillan revived medieval traditions of the coming of a great monarch, thus comforting ultraroyalists looking for a return to the Old Regime and ultra-Catholics looking to the pope as a temporal power. Visionaries from other countries like the Lithuanian Pole Andrzej Towianski, the Italian David Lazzaretti, and the Spaniard José Domingo Corbató found comfort and inspiration in France.[4]
For late medieval and Early Modern prophets: Niccoli, Prophecy; Frijhoff, "Prophétie et société"; for nineteeth-century prophets: Caffiero, La Nuova era; Griffiths, Reactionary Revolution; Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies; Boutry and Nassif, Martin l'Archange; Lazzareschi, David Lazzaretti; Peterkiewicz, Third Adam, 63-66. Thurston, The War, lists prophetic literature from the 1870s.
The Voix prophétiques of the Abbé J.-M. Curicque had great success in France because of the fall of the Papal States and the French loss of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The prophecies in this book were the main source for similar collections in Spanish by Corbató, in 1904 and the Chilean priest Julio Echeverría in 1932. Padre Burguera used Corbató, and Antonio Amundarain used Echevarría. The Corbató work in turn was the basis for Enrique López Galuá's in 1939, which in turn provided material for the work of Benjamín Martín Sánchez in 1968.[5]
Corbató, Apología; Echeverría Larrain, Predicciones; López Galuá, Futura grandeza; and Martín Sánchez, Los Últimos Tiempos. Curicque himself used the collection Recueil des prophéties les plus authentiques. A Spanish translation of Voix prophétiques with some additional material was published in 1874. For Spanish background on Antichrist see Caro Baroja, Formas complejas, 247-265. Raymond de Rigné used Elie Daniel, Serait-ce vraiment la fin des temps? (Paris: Téqui); for Rigné's other reading see R 104-108, and for that of Burguera see B 469-471.
One strain of this prophetic tradition, the reign of the Sacred Heart, was particularly respectable in twentieth-century Spain, perhaps because the Jesuits
promoted it. Its origin lay in "promises" the French nun Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had received in vision between 1672 and 1675, especially: "This Sacred Heart will reign in spite of Satan and of all those whom he convokes to oppose it." The "social reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus" became a central theme of the pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The idea of this reign spread through international Eucharistic congresses. Padre Bernardo de Hoyos in 1733 had connected this expected reign more specifically to Spain. At the time of the visions of the Christ of Limpias in 1919, commentators inside and outside the country speculated that the Christ's movements were a sign that the reign was approaching. In the twenties and thirties the notion gave a sharp focus to the phrase in the Our Father "thy kingdom come." Amado de Cristo Burguera was counting on the arrival of the reign of the Sacred heart; he had received the idea for his great work at Alacoque's vision site at Paray-le-Monial. And the reign of the Sacred Heart Played a central role in the false prophecies of María Rafols. In the prophecy that María Naya discovered in January 1932 the Sacred Heart himself told Rafols that the document would be found "when the hour of my Reign in Spain approaches." So it is not surprising that Christ's reign—just what that meant was unclear—became part of the Ezkioga visions and the scenarios the seers described for the end of time.[6]
Alacoque was beatified in 1864. Pius XI considered the feast of the Sacred Heart a bulwark against liberalism and made it universal in 1856. On the promises see Ladame, Paray-le-Monial, 237-266. On the reign of the Sacred Heart see Cinquin, "Paray-le-Monial," 269-273; and Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 109-116. For prophecy, Zurbitu, Escritos, 56.
The end of the world was of particular interest for many Integrists or Carlists. La Semana Católica of Madrid recalled that the energetic archbishop and founder of the Claretian order Antonio María Claret had said the world would end around 1930. The magazine also cited an alleged apparition of Pius X in which he said there would be calamities within ten years. In 1923 a canon of Jaéen, who agreed with Claret, thought the growing ascendancy of the devil and the apostasy of nations, including wise men, politicians, writers, spiritists, and "twenty million socialists and communists in international collusion," were signs the end was near. He speculated on the different phases that would take place after the coming of Christ—his reign, the millennium, the Last Judgment. And he hoped the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera would delay the apocalyptic catastrophe so that the rest of the world felt its effects first. Writing in January 1931 about an impending worldwide cataclysm, Antonio Amundarain saw the Aliadas as victims who offered themselves to God to avoid the end.[7]
Predictions in Sarrablo, "Verdades," and La Semana Católica, 4 August 1923, pp. 142-143, and 8 March 1924, p. 306; Morrondo (the canon of Jaen), Proximidad and Jesús no viene; citation from Morrondo's article in La Semana Católica, 8 September 1923, pp. 302-303; on Primo de Rivera see La Semana Católica, 29 March 1924, pp. 402-404. After more on the end of the world in July and August 1924, readers of the magazine were told to disregard the predictions on 6 September 1924, p. 299. Burguera read Morrondo (De Dios a la Creación, 83). Amundarain, LIS, 1931, pp. 9-10.
Short-term prophecies came in tracts, broadsides, and leaflets, such as the prophecies related to World War I and the Spanish military setbacks in Morocco. This literature—the Rafols prophecies are prime examples—received a fresh impetus in 1931 with the burning of convents and the separation of church and state. Apparitions of the Virgin, however, provided a more direct way to know the future. The Integrist newspaper El Siglo Futuro thought that the Virgin appeared at Ezkioga as at La Salette to warn of a civil war that was a chastisement from God: "Here too the Most Holy Virgin prophesied catastrophes, here too,
by means of her faithful servants, male and female, she preached penance to the Spaniards."[8]
On World War I prophecies see Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 185 n. 102. La Semana Católica, 26 July 1924, p. 111, cites a pamphlet by Gil Zarco, Los Milagros y profecías en el momento presente, about the seer/prophet/healer Bernardo Carboneras, who operated in Valencia and Cuenca, and his success in finding soldiers lost in Morocco, El Siglo Futuro, Madrid, 16 January 1934.
The supposed secrets of Mélanie of La Salette, first published in 1871, circulated widely in Spain. The Ezkioga apocalyptic visions eventually converged on this text. The most relevant passage is as follows:
Paris will be burned and Marseilles swallowed by the sea. Many great cities will be leveled and swallowed by earthquakes. It will seem that all is lost, you will see only murders and hear only the sounds of weapons and blasphemies. The just will suffer greatly; their prayers, their penance, and their tears will rise to heaven, and all the people of God will ask for pardon and pity and will ask for my aid and intercession.
Then Jesus Christ, through a miracle of his justice and his great mercy for the just, will order his angels that all my enemies be put to death. Suddenly, the persecutors of the church of Jesus Christ and all the men given over to sin will perish, and the Earth will become like a desert.
Then peace will be made, the reconciliation of God with men. Jesus Christ will be served, adored, and glorified. Charity will flower everywhere. The new kings will be the right arm of the Holy Church, which will be strong, humble, pious, poor, zealous, and imitate the virtues of Jesus Christ. The Gospel will be preached everywhere, and men will make great advances in faith because there will be unity among the workers of Jesus Christ and men will live in the fear of God.[9]
Texts in: Corbato; Curicque, Voces proféticas, 82; R 105; López Galuá, Futura grandeza, 70; and Martín Sánchez, Los Últimos Tiempos, 42-43. For critical issues regarding Mélanie's secret, see Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary, 183.
These macrothemes filtered into the Ezkioga messages in the following sequence: (1) a great miracle; (2) a chastisement, which seers predicted first as local, then as universal; (3) an ever more elaborate program for the end of times that subsumed both miracle and chastisement.
The Miracle
Some observers associated the first visions with the apocalypse because of the bright light around the Virgin and the number of stars around her head. Many seers saw twelve. In October some witnesses mentioned a moon under her feet. The relevant passage is Revelation 12:1: "A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed in the sun, with the moon beneath her feet and a crown of twelve stars above her head." But the resemblance with the woman in Revelation went no farther than this. The woman the seers described at Ezkioga was not pregnant and crying out with the pains of childbirth. The elements they saw were widely available, especially in prints derived from the paintings of Murillo.
Nevertheless, republicans presumed very early that the visions would take an apocalyptic turn. In this assumption they turned out to be better prophets than many of the seers. Writing in his national column for July 19, Antonio Zozaya pointed out that in order to be credible the visions at Ezkioga would have to
develop a general message, as at La Salette or Lourdes. Three days later the deputy for Logroño, Isaac Abeytua, warned that the clergy would manipulate apocalyptic imagery to rouse the peasants:
If we pay heed the preaching of contemporary prophets—Jeremiases and Isaiahs … the end of Spain and the end of the world are at hand. Every day the terrified "rubes" [jebos ] claim this in their pulpits, the Basque social center, or the street. We must be prepared for the day of the apocalypse. The Antichrist is already, now, on the way to the Basque Country, and you have to be armed against him, or against his allies, who are the civil governors, the town councillors, the provincial deputies or those of the Cortes, and all the authorities of the Republic.
The Basque-Navarrese prophets place little trust in the traumatic effects of the angelic trumpet. They need and ask for the protection of fanaticized country folk, the grandsons of those who fought on the Carlist side.[10]
Abeytua, ELM, 22 July 1931.
In late July and August at Ezkioga the visions of angelic hosts holding bloody swords or fighting on the mountain ridges toward Castile did indeed have an apocalyptic flavor. But as Abeytua suggested, this was an apocalypse of a local variety for the benefit of Spanish and Basque Catholics; the seers mentioned no consequences wider or more lasting than the reconquest of Spain from the Second Republic. Nor was there any hint of the end of time in the miracle the seers announced for July. What people expected on July 12, 16, and 18 and into August was the Virgin's sign that the visions were real, a "proof of her power" for all those present. The alternatives people suggested were a vision of the Virgin that everyone could see, some act of God that was counter to nature, or a miracle through a given person.[11]
All 1931: quote is from two girl seers July 17: PV, 18 July; group vision: PV, 14 July, ED, 21 July; act of God: PV, 18 July; miracle through person according to a female seer on July 25 (in Santander, ABC [Madrid], 13 August) and José Garmendia on August 15: autograph, private collection.
Not until early October did the seers offer a more complete scenario for the miracle. Patxi Goicoechea explained the scene first about October 1, and the girl from Ataun repeated it to the Catalan Salvador Cardús four days later.
The Virgin will appear with three angels and with a half moon at her feet and an extraordinary light that will light up everything around, the entire mountain. Twenty meters away will appear walls and from all four sides (or directions) the Virgin will be seen. Saint Michael will come down on a white horse and explain the reason for the appearance in this place. The miracle will begin at a quarter to five in the afternoon and will end at eleven at night. The walls will remain as a sign for what has to be done in this place.[12]
R 14; SC E 13; García Cascón to Vallet, 31 October 1931, AHCPCR 10-A-27/2.
In El Pueblo Vasco Rafael Picavea made fun of the white horse, suggesting that Patxi had confused Saint Michael, patron of Basque Nationalists, generally depicted on foot, with Saint James the Moorslayer, the aggressive equestrian version of the patron of Spain, a disquieting thought for Basque patriots. Raymond de Rigné pointed to another alternative, the first of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: "I saw, and behold, a white horse, and its rider had a bow; and
a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer" (Rev. 6:2). But here too the allusion seems forced, as the seers did not speak of a bow, a crown, or the other three horsemen. Whatever apocalyptic imagery the miracle included was more decorative and dramatic than substantial.[13]
Picavea, PV, 6 and 8 November; R 14n.
The Chastisement
When Patxi began to have overtly political visions at the end of July 1931, he reserved some of what he saw. A Catalan priest at Ezkioga the next week wrote that Patxi "was the keeper of great secrets." Other seers began to have secrets as well, perhaps because after August 1 the priests asked them, "Did she tell you to keep any secrets?" The girl from Ataun "says she speaks with the Virgin, keeping all the secrets to herself." On August 7 Patxi "asserted that he knows many things but will tell them to absolutely nobody." Benita was keeping secrets by mid-August. And by the end of the month the practice was general.[14]
All 1931: for Patxi, ED, 29 July, and Elías, CC, 21 August; Ataun seer, August 6 to 8 in Elías, CC, 19 August; Patxi, ED, 8 August; Altisent, CC, 9 September, with Benita, August 18; García Cascón, La Creuada, 12 September; other children with secrets, PV, 18 October.
My initial reading of this secretiveness was that the seers' reticence was simply a strategy to avoid having to give vision messages and an easy way to gain importance. Seers at La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima also had secrets, and by August at least some of the Ezkioga seers would have known this. But secrets in visions starting with La Salette were not only "a locus of power" but also "carriers of apocalyptic expectations." It could be that some of the seers were already incubating more apocalyptic themes in the summer of 1931. In any case the mere existence of secrets whetted the appetites of those who hoped to find out about the proximity and dimensions of eternity, and their questions alone would have pushed the seers along.[15]
Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary, 165-244; for one priest the very fact that the seers had and kept secrets, given recent apparitions, was enough; J. B. Ayerbe, "Las maravillosas apariciones," AC 2:6.
Patxi Goicoechea of Ataun was the chief innovator in 1931 for political messages, for physical behavior in visions, and in creating a sacred landscape. He was also the first to put into words the divine chastisement implicit in the vision tableaux. After all, the blood he saw on the swords of the angels belonged to somebody, presumably the wicked people who burned churches. But by early August he was predicting "great calamities for the sins of mankind." A writer for the Pamplona Integrist newspaper was the first to tease this statement from him. The title of the article, "The seers of Ezquioga; are we approaching the beginning of the end?" left ambiguous whether the end was that of the visions or that of the end of the world. Other seers, however, did not follow up this theme immediately. What chastisement they foresaw in the first month seems to have been divine punishment in the form of a civil war or the striking down of individual sinners, not some great winnowing at the twilight of mankind.
Patxi does seem to have been edging toward the larger theme. In his vision on September 5 he saw the Virgin with a sword in one hand drop a ball from the other "that struck against the earth, throwing up sparks when it broke; the angels shuddered when they saw that the Virgin let the ball drop."[16]
Lassalle, PN, 9 August 1931, at Ezkioga August 6 to 8.
He told areporter in late August or early September that within six months some people would be burned to a crisp (carbonizados ) at Ezkioga. Cardús was quick to pick up on this, and when Ramona Olazábal told him people "should have their bags packed" (tener la maleta preparada , in this case meaning be spiritually prepared) at the time of the great miracle, he deduced that the great miracle would involve some kind of punishment for those disbelievers present. In her vision of September 20 María Agueda Aguirre understood that some more general signs—the darkening of the sky, the spinning of towns, and earthquakes—were a part of the miracle, proof of the reality of the apparitions.[17]
Patxi in Delás, CC, 20 September 1931; for bag packed, Rodríguez Ramos, Yo sé. Cardús had heard the rumor of predicted chastisement by October 13 (SC E 72). For María Agueda Aguirre, "Relato por la interesada ...," p. 4, AC 22: "el girar los pueblos en su derredor."
Particular, specific chastisement would befall diocesan and government opponents. Some seers also used these threats against disbelievers in their towns. The town secretary Pedro Balda gave me a rundown of people killed or injured in and around Iraneta in what he considered chastisements for opposing the local seer Luis Irurzun. It included the parish priest, family members of two Iraneta seminarians, and the parish priest of Ihabar.[18]
Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, p. 11.
But, especially after the church rejected Ramona's miracle, some seers began privately to announce a more general punishment. The Catalan García Cascón wrote on October 31:
Some female seer has said that the Most Holy Virgin has announced a tremendous chastisement of three important cities in Spain, if they do not change their ways. It will consist in the total disappearance of the three cities. That is, they will be reduced to ashes in a moment, in an instant, in a flash. One of these cities appears to be improving, and there is the impression that it may be freed from the punishment. But for now the others will not escape.[19]
García Cascón to Vallet, 31 October 1931, AHCPCR 10-A-27/2. See also visions in Lizarraga, late November, B II 628.
When the Aulina/Gemma group went to Ezkioga in mid-December 1931, virtually all the seers they talked to predicted a more general chastisement. For instance, they found Rosario Gurruchaga pleading to the Virgin in Basque to spare her town, Urrestilla. Cruz Lete was the most insistent.
He told us that the chastisement was imminent; that it hangs by a thread. He told me that it could even begin at that very moment, and he and I could be designated to die. But that for those in the grace of God it will not be a chastisement, but rather a reward, because to go to heaven is always a reward.
Lete pleaded to the Virgin to allow people time to repent and confess, but he implied they would not be so lucky. This lack of a sign was in line with a shift to a chastisement that would come before rather than after the great miracle.[20]
Gurruchaga vision of 14 December 1931, ARB 11; Gratacós, "Lo de Esquioga," 18; Lete vision, 15 December 1931, ARB 12-13.
Lete also said that the entire earth would wear mourning. This was the first hint of another shift: the chastisement would now be worldwide, and hence the
Virgin meant her messages for the world, not just the Basque Country or Spain. There will come a day, Lete reported the Virgin as telling him,
if we do not want to hear her voice, that we will find corpses and more corpses, and I say to you that what makes me most sad is when I think that so very many souls will be damned. As on a day when the snow is falling hard, so will the souls fall into hell.[21]
On mourning, Lete vision, 28 December 1931, SC D 22; quote from Lete vision, December 1931, ARB 64, SC D 11.
Circumstances that favored this dire message included the worsening relations between church and state, the discrediting of the seers in the general public and the church hierarchy, and the presence of a more homogeneous Integrist or Carlist following with a taste for cataclysm.
But the idea was hardly new. Basque verses of the nineteenth-century poet Xenpelar and others about the terrors of the Last Judgment provided a resonance with and perhaps a source for some of the seers' imagery of destruction. People sang these verses during the shucking of corn in the winter. Missioners in sermons described God's chastisement and judgment vividly. There was also a certain amount of loose apocalyptic language in devotional literature, even that destined for children. Writing in March 1931 in the children's magazine that later reported the Mendigorría visions, an educator warned of a chastisement because of lipstick and close dancing:
If these boys do not become more manly and these girls do not make themselves more virginal … to cure and redeem them God has at his disposal fire, plague, famine, and bolshevism, which are scourges to welt the flesh of these wild virgins and to make the eyes pop out of so many degenerate males.[22]
For quote, Siurot, "La Inmaculada," 34. For Xenpelar see Lecuona, Literatura oral, 53-54; Lecuona, AEF, 1924, p. 21; for missions and especially Capuchins see Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 29-50, 142-143, 194 n. 9.
Moreover, there were Basque traditions about the end of the world. The accepted signs were that there would be a store in every house, the roads would all cross, and the threshing board would be in the oven. That is, everything would be out of place. No doubt this is how some people felt things were after the burning of religious houses and the expulsion of the Jesuits. During the Carlist Wars there was a prophet named Hilario de Intxausti in the town of Mendata (Bizkaia). A mysterious old lady revealed the future to him: a victory of the Liberals, a war with the Moors, a civil war, a subsequent war with the Moors, the river of Bilbao red with blood, Bilbao destroyed, the general abandon of Christian doctrine, and then the re-Christianization by rural people led by the pope. Intxausti also announced that the end of the world was at hand with the Second Coming. In 1877 a prophet in Durango proclaimed the Last Judgment imminent and told people to abandon worldly goods and do penance. He said he was Saint Joseph, his wife was Mary, and his boy the child Jesus and he had frequent communication with the angels. His substantial following accompanied him in rosary processions. All of these sources prepared people for the messages
of chastisement at Ezkioga in the winter of 1931–1932. The Catalans quickly mathced the messages with the prophecies of Madre Rafols, which said that 1932 would be a year of persecution and 1933 a year of triumph.[23]
For Basque traditions see Barandiarán, AEF, 1924, pp. 178-183; for Rafols see Pare Rimblas to Cardús, Tàrrega, 25 January 1932, in SC E 286.
In December and January seers began to see particular ways the chastisement would occur. Not surprisingly, it was Benita Aguirre who first drew these elements together. She did so in a matter-of-fact conversation after dinner with a Catalan expedition in the Hotel Urola of Zumarraga on 8 February 1932. When those present pointed out the gravity of her words, she "declared solemnly that the Mother of God expressly authorized her to make this statement."
THE CHASTISEMENT DECLARATIONS OF BENITA AGUIRRE
Viva Jesús
The Virgin does not send the chastisement; rather Jesus does. There will be earthquakes, beginning abroad and then occurring in Spain. During the earthquake in Santiago de Cuba seven persons were martyrs, that is, they offered up their lives. This does not mean that the rest were not saved, but they were not martyrs. Fire will destroy the crops. In the first year, that is, the first stage, there will be famine, in the second year, more famine, and in the third year many people will die of hunger and many will be damned. In the fourth year, that is, in the fourth stage, there will begin to be harvests, and then things will begin to get better.
The smallest children will die in their mothers' arms before the famine. The bad people who do an act of repentance in the moment of death will not be helped—it will not be an act of contrition because it will not be done out of repentance but because of fear of eternal punishment, and if previously they would have gone to purgatory, then they will go to hell and be damned eternally, because in another period which was not the chastisement, that act would have been one of contrition, but now it will be one of attrition [atrición ].
The Virgin has said she will concede everything asked of her, except [that she will not stop] the chastisement, because without chastisement the world cannot be saved.
The day will come in which when we take a step we find a corpse, and when we take another, another corpse, so that they will make paths among cadavers as they make paths when there is snow.
This is the last century.
Paris will be carbonized, Marseilles swallowed by the sea, Barcelona has upon it charges [cargo , here meaning indictments for crimes against God] worse than San Sebastián, so that if the Catalans had not gone to Ezquioga, now the inhabitants of Barcelona would be in heaven, hell, or purgatory, because Barcelona would already be leveled. Catalonia has upon it many charges, Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastián, and Málaga are those with the most charges. The smallest towns are those that have fewer charges than the big ones.
There will be a war bigger than the European one, in which Saint Michael will cut off the heads of the wicked.
The chastisement is for the good of the good people and the punishment of the bad ones. During the chastisement, the rich will be poor, and the poor richer than before, but no one will be very rich.
There will be a great disease, like a plague, and many people will die, and many friars will take care of the sick and some will die. We should ask to die in the first chastisement.
There will be less than half the number of people that there are now. During the chastisement men will be very bad, will forget God, and the few who are good can be easily counted. Then Christ will reign.
During the chastisement there will be no purgatory.
There will be three chastisements and three great miracles.
The Virgin said, after the chastisement the first sword that pierces my heart will make the earth tremble.
Benita says, "He who dies in the first chastisement will be lucky, and I hope to be one of them."[24]
ARB 243 gives the circumstances of Benita's declaration. These versions are virtually identical: ARB 243-244; SC D 106-111; and the undated printed page "El Castigo" in the papers of Laburu; B 489 is a shortened version. Conchita Mateos memorized the declaration and repeated it verbatim in a vision on 11 December 1932, AC 6, AC 292. Cardús first cited it 2 March 1932 to Pare Rimblas, "One of the seers has said that the chastisement has already begun."
A Catalan present wrote that her "grandiose revelations were in sharp contrast with the learning that a girl nine years old could have, so ingenuous, innocent, and simple." By then it should have been clear that Benita was not to be underestimated. But even for her this was a new turn. This was not a message delivered in trance but a kind of prophecy quite like those in published collections. Benita said to give this message only to believers. Nevertheless, a one-sheet printed version was circulating during Lent. The Jesuit Laburu received one from a family member, who wrote, "I send you this sheet so you can see how they try to frighten the fools who are stupefied by what goes on at Ezquioga."[25]
ARB 243; handwritten note to Laburu undated, unsigned, accompanying vision page in FL.
With its emphasis on the Catalans, Catalonia, and Barcelona, Benita's prophecy reflects her audience. In it the notion of a miracle was almost vestigial. The potpourri of chastisements was made especially grim by sudden death. According to Benita, Jesus, not the Virgin, sent the chastisement. In the Rafols prophecies, spoken by the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it was not Christ who chastised but his Eternal Father. The principle was the same: the divine spokesperson was benevolent; someone else did the punishing.
The secret of La Salette was the source of Benita's phrase "Paris will be burned, Marseilles swallowed by the sea." If the seers did not know about La Salette already, they would have learned about it from pilgrims, such as those from France who in 1932 asked Benita and Evarista if the Virgin had really dictated Mélanie's secret. (Benita said that the Virgin did not respond; Evarista said the Virgin said yes.) There must have been other sources, particularly for the notion of four years or stages. The analogy of corpses with snow reappears in the visions of other seers and may derive from a common origin.[26]
For French pilgrims see Boué, 67; one suspects in the conversion of years to "stages" a scribe trying to head off disprovable propositions.
The message clearly referred to the world as a whole. A world war, not a Spanish civil war, was to be part of this chastisement, and the earthquakes would
begin elsewhere and only later hit Spain, in accord with the idea that Spain had earned a reprieve. The Santiago de Cuba earthquake had occurred six days earlier (2 February 1932), leaving twelve dead. The notion that some of these were martyrs fit the seers' stance as sacrificial volunteers atoning for the sins of the world and preventing the deaths of others.
Benita's prophecy had great impact, and other seers in February, March, and April 1932 began giving specifics of the chastisement as well. Luiz Irurzun offered a variety of chastisements. Most included a military battle led by a sanguinary Saint Michael. One of Luis's versions will stand for many. In this one it appears that the Virgin is speaking.
First there will come darkness, which will last for three days…. People will wear mourning these days … Following the darkness a terrifying huricane will blow out of the northwest, [and] an image of Jesus will appear with a great splendor that will light up all the earth, and great gusts of wind will knock against each other, bringing a storm that will lift people up in the air. That day will be desperate for the bad people, while for my people it will be happy. I will come down with many followers to repent [sic ] those who do not believe and settle things. The hurricane will ravage the earth. People will come out of their houses and go from one place to another as if lost. What will become of those who mock and persecute the faith? The power of Jesus with the sword of Michael will smite the evil and the persecutors of religion. The earth will open for many kilometers to cover and bury the persecutors. Millions will fall crushed like snowflakes in the burning hole. Afterward, the world will be in peace, the people content and blessed, because prayer will reign.[27]
Vision of Luis Irurzun, 11 March 1932, B 657 (ellipses in B).
As the predictions increased in number and variety, listeners and patrons rewarded some and ignored others. Some motifs appeared only once, like this resplendent image of Jesus in a storm, much like that on the masthead of El Siglo Futuro . The hurricane itself was relatively rare as punishment. Conversely, the three days of darkness, which derived from the La Salette secret, the wider apocalyptic tradition, and the Bible itself, became standard content for the chastisement. A rent earth that engulfs the wicked showed up in the visions of other seers; it corresponds to contemporary lithographs.[28]
For hurricane see B 243. The candles were specified by Inés Igoa, 3 December 1932, B 622; poster in Balcells Maso, Manual de la enseñanza gráfica.
One of Irurzun's sources was a French seer known as Bug de Milhas (d. 1848). He had predicted an apocalyptic battle along the Tajo river in Spain, a prediction that Irurzun repeated in February 1932. Luis also had access to a Bible in Spanish. One night in September 1933 a bearded man (barefoot, with red cloak, cold and tired, about sixty years old) supposedly dictated a letter to him. The letter turned out to be the Epistle of Saint Jude, lifted from a Bible complete with the commentaries of the translator, Félix Torres Amat.[29]
For Tajo battle see visions of Luis Irurzun in February 1932, B 658. For Bug see López Galuá, Futura grandeza, 199-221. J. B. Ayerbe later circulated the Bug de Milhas prophecy. José Luis Manzano García (b. Toledo, 1972), who says his visions began in Palma de Mallorca in 1985, claims to be the "Great Warrior of the Tajo." He has established a shrine in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo); see Carrión, El Lado oscuro, 78-100. For bearded man see [Juan Bautista Ayerbe], "Un Caso ináudito," 1 folio, dittoed, n.d., AC 234. Burguera, B 247-248, gave the date of the dictation as 20 November 1933, pointed out the Torres Amat connection, and indignantly asserted that Christ never appeared old or with a red cloak. He concluded that the old man was the devil in disguise. Balda wrote to Ayerbe 21 May 1934: "San Juan in his Apocalypse, what does he say? Many times Luis has repeated in his visions, 'Let them look well at the Gospels and the prophecies and there they will find these warnings'" (AC 247).
Ezkioga seers singled out Paris and Marseilles for special punishment, but also San Sebastián, Madrid, Barcelona, Catalonia, Seville, and Málaga. Here we
"Suffering in hell." Catechism poster by Ramón Llimona,
Barcelona, 1919. Courtesy parish of Taganana, Tenerife
hear the voice of the rural people of Gipuzkoa, particularly the Carlist or Integrist variety. Theirs would be the notion of the virtue of the smaller towns and the damnation of cities. For the Carlists Paris was Babylon, the "scourage of France." Paris was not just a mythic place. Basques went there. Dolores Nieto's parents bought her bicycle there, and the freethinking neighbor of the first seers worked as a waiter there. Paris was the quintessential city. Much of the chastisement Benita detailed was from a rural perspective. Like that of La Salette, it had to do with femine and harvests. Her reference to healing friars was particularly appropriate coming from a rural culture that produced friars and felt even closer to them than to the priests it also produced. As in the Vendée rebellion in 1793, these antiurban themes were sharpest at the boundaries between the rural area and newly prosperous towns. In the 1930s the reactionary editorials of the Integrist Juan de Olazábal in La Constancia fueled the same antagonisms.[30]
Garmendia, Ideología carlista, 39-40, 191, 215, 246, 259, 453-459; Blinkhorn, Carilism and Crisis, 17-18.
For the Ezkioga seers the local equivalent of Paris was, without doubt, San Sebastián, "focus of evils," epitome of "a life of corruption, vice, and luxury." The seers saw foreigners with red banners invade it, fire ravage it, the sea sweep it away, and a hurricane cleanse it of corpses. Within the generic evil city certain places were especially evil. First and foremost were the beaches. One seer saw Saint Michael "searching the beaches for souls; he has come back without finding a single one." Luis Irurzun accorded special treatment to theaters and cinemas; he saw Saint Michael destroy them with his sword. The Pamplona seer Pilar Ciordia saw the casino of San Sebastián, "cradle of vices and sins … swept out by the water to the angry sea." Another woman saw a dance hall on Mount Igeldo burn ("What screams! Look what is going on there!"). But seers also saw the elegant church of Buen Pastor collapsing in flames at high mass, "because it is nothing but a lot of luxury, and people do not go to mass for God, but for show."[31]
On San Sebastián see vision of Luis Irurzun, 24 February and 12 March 1933, B 657, 659. For beaches see vision of Asunción Balboa, Urnieta, 10 September 1934, 2 pages, AC 211. For theaters see Irurzun vision, 12 March 1932, B 657; for casino see Ciordia vision poem, ca. June 1933, AC 218. For Mount Igeldo see vision of Asunción Balboa, Tolosa, 23 December 1934, 2 pages, AC 213. For Buen Pastor Cathedral: conversation with Ezkioguista women on train recalled by María Angeles Montoya, San Sebastián, 11 September 1983, p. 2.
Seers also singled out Soviet Russia. Even respected churchmen like Canon Carles Cardó in Catalonia were speculating at this time on the role of Russian communism as an agent of divine chastisement of Spain's frivolous and selfish capitalists. María Recalde said the Virgin told her the bad people of France and Russia wanted to destroy the faith of Spain. And in May 1933 both Benita and a seer in Tolosa foretold Red armies invading the country. But the Soviet Union would fall. Saint Michael took Luis to the "immense plains of very fine grass" of the USSR to see it destroyed.[32]
Rimblas to Cardús, Tàrrega, 14 March 1932, reported a talk by Cardó a week before. For Recalde, 8 May 1932, SC D 81; Benita, 22 September 1933, B 516 and B 587-589; Tolosa seer, 30 November 1933, AC 278; Irurzun, 19 March 1932, B 657-658, and Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, p. 6.
Benita asked for prayers for the conversion of the Jews, but she (or her version of the Virgin) seemed to consider that atheists were the enemy, not Jews.[33]
Benita visions, 22 and 23 October 1932, SC D 116-118. Unlike La Constancia, which carried anti-Semitic articles by Emilio Ruíz Muñoz and others, the seers mentioned Jews infrequently. José Garmendia's vision of 14 January 1934 is an exception ("Yes Mother, why are they so strong? Take them away Mother, take away those Jews. Why not, Mother?) ("Visión del Vidente José Garmendia ...," 1 page, typed, private collection).
The seers barely mentioned Freemasons, the other bugaboo of the clergy. Jews and Freemasons seem to have been far from the experience of our rural seers and do not seem to have struck their imagination, as the USSR did. The United Kingdom and the United States appear to have been completely off their mental map.The last Rafols prophecy said that entire cities would be eliminated but did not say which (at least, the Vatican did not release the names). Many believers badly wanted to know which cities were doomed and asked the Ezkioga seers. Burguera wrote disparagingly of their fascination.
All questions come back to the chastisement—which, and how many, and how, and when, and where they will take place. We laughed at a certain wealthy Catholic of a northern city who, when he asked about the chastisements, was told that the Virgin had announced that the city would be flooded and swallowed by the sea. With deep sorrow he replied, "Now that I've just bought a chalet on the Concha!"
In 1932 worry about the chastisement may have kept people coming to Ezkioga and kept the visions going.[34]
B 480.
News of the coming chastisement did not reach the newspapers. The notion was too unlikely for the general public, so believers were discreet. Only in May 1932, after the last Rafols prophecy had rendered chastisement more plausible, did Cardús, for instance, begin to spread the idea in his letters. As he wrote to his Jesuit friend in India: "All this [the chastisement of Spanish cities, Paris, and Russia] we have almost not been able to speak about, because the people would have been scandalized and would have believed even less in the apparitions of the Virgin."[35]
Cardús to Pou i Montfort, 13 May 1932.
The Reign of Christ
At first the chastisement was an incidental aspect of the great miracle. Seers gradually elaborated more and more on the divine punishment as people showed interest. In the same manner notions of what would happen after the chastisement gradually evolved. The first such statement came from the student seer Cruz Lete when, in late December 1931, almost as an aside, he introduced the notion of an eventual holy regime, telling a Catalan: "The only flag there will be after the chastisement will be the banner you have in your hand [a crucifix]."[36]
Cruz Lete vision, 29 December 1931, SC D 22.
In Benita's and Luis's statements of February and March 1932, the notion went little farther: Christ or prayer would reign.But when Evarista Galdós delivered her "finished" version of the chastisement to the Catalans on April 5, she had clear ideas of an apocalyptic sequence, including the arrival of the Antichrist, which would lead by a given date to the end of time. Unlike Benita or Luis, she was also able to include in the sequence the great miracle the seers had predicted since the summer of 1931, which she adapted to follow the chastisement. Her audience, like Benita's, was a Catalan expedition in the Hotel Urola.
The day of the great miracle, at five in the afternoon, the Virgin will appear on the mountain with a half moon at her feet that gives off light
Image removed -- no rights
Evarista Galdós in vision at Ezkioga, early 1932. Photo by Raymond De Rigné, all rights reserved.
in all four directions. Saint Michael will appear as well and will explain why the world is so lost, who the seers have been, and what it is they have seen. And this vision which began at five o'clock will last until eleven at night. And Saint Michael will appear on a white horse, though people laugh when they hear this. The Virgin told me that four walls will remain on the mountain, which will be those of the basilica, which will have four towers, and this wooden cross that is on the mountainside will be at the altar.
Of those who are at Ezquioga on the day of the miracle, some will see the Virgin, others only her shadow, and others nothing at all. All will see Saint Michael. In the moment that Saint Michael appears, the Virgin told me, everyone will fall down in terror. The miracle will be seen at Ezquioga but will be noted in the entire world.
On the day of this prodigy Saint Michael will bring a statue of the Sorrowing Virgin, which I have seen and which is about one meter high, and will leave it at the place I will show you this afternoon so it will be venerated in the basilica.
The chastisement, the Virgin told me, will be before the miracle. There will be a rain of fire and a cloud of snakes and sudden deaths. The wicked will be as if carbonized, there will be many dead, and the more one walks, the more one will find. This will be in the entire world, and in Spain less than other places. Saint Michael will cut off many heads. He usually carries two swords, one of fire and the other of blood. What a voice he has! It scares me to hear it.
Many of the wicked will die. Between the chastisement and the miracle there will be little time. The Virgin has told me which day the chastisement will be and which day the miracle, and I have declared it in writing to my confessor in sealed letters that he keeps, and on the envelope is indicated the day he may open them. I have permission from the Virgin to tell people eight days in advance. The Virgin told me that in Barcelona there are many people who believe in her apparitions, and in Madrid the chastisement will be terrible.
The Virgin told me how I will die, but not when. She told me that a person will come from Madrid who has already been here once and will kill me right on the platform. This person will also kill María Recalde and other seers, many of whom will die in María Recalde's arms, and when he kills us, a light will appear above the platform, and as a result of this prodigy he and many other souls will be converted. The Virgin told me that almost all of the seers would die martyred.
She also told me that there will be two hundred fifty seers. There are priests who are seers, although they keep quiet about it. The Virgin told me that here in Zumárraga there is one who has seen her, and there are two in Navarra. The Virgin has said that she appears in fourteen places in Spain. In Navarra she appears in four: Bacaicoa, Iturmendi, Lacunza, and Echarri-Aranaz.
The Virgin also told me that there are twenty-six years left until the end of the world and that the Antichrist is at present eight years and eight months old. That is approximate because she told me about two months ago and I do not remember the exact date. The Antichrist will live for thirty-three years and when he is twenty-six he will begin to work miracles. The Virgin told me where he is from, where he lives, and who he is the son of.
The Virgin says that she has come to convert people and give signs that the end of the world is coming. The end of the world will happen after the miracle. And after the miracle Christ will reign until the end of the world.
The text concludes: "Listening to this statement, in addition to about twenty-five people, were the seers Jesús de Elcoro and the child Benita Aguirre, who added, 'The chastisement of Russia and Paris will be more severe than in other places, and in Spain, that of Madrid.'"[37]
ARB 241 gives the setting. I have used the text from SC D 64-69. Not surprisingly, Burguera left this prediction, far too specific and disprovable, out of his book.
In Evarista's statement there are five themes: the miracle; the chastisements; the martyrdom of the seers; the number of seers and vision sites; and events leading to the end of the world. She laid out a chronology perhaps too precise. The world would end in 1958. But before that there would be a chastisement, which would include the martyrdom of the seers; then the miracle, which would confirm the visions, identify the true seers, and leave an image and the walls and tower of a basilica; then Christ would reign; then in about August 1949 the Antichrist, by then twenty-six, would start working miracles. He would die at age thirty-three, that is, about 1956, or two years before the world ended.
Note the similarity between Evarista's chronology for the Antichrist and that which a canon of Mallorca, Rafael Pijoán, and others deduced from the secret of La Salette:
I do not want to recall here all of the revelations of the Most Holy Virgin, which have been coming true, just that which pertains to the end of time. The revelations of La Salette have the Antichrist born about 1924; and as we know that the Antichrist will start his conquest of the world aged about twenty, and that he will take six years to subdue the earth, and that the persecution of the infernal monster should last three and one-half years, it gives us the total of 1953 [and] one-half, the approximate era of the end of the world, and almost exactly the same as Saint Malachy.[38]
Pijoán, El Siglo XX, 194-195. Burguera used the second (1920) edition of El Siglo XX in De Dios a la Creación, 85. Pijoán's pamphlet, "El Gran Triunfo de Leo Taxil" (Biblioteca Antimasónica, Cuaderno XIV, Barcelona, Tip. y Lib. de la Inmaculada Concepción, 1889, 30 pages), ended: "Tu nombre, ¡Oh Taxil! / se cubre de gloria / tu hermosa memoria / eterna será."
Evarista adopted most of the themes in Benita's prophecy but included original aspects like a cloud of snakes, an assassin from Madrid who would kill seers, and María Recalde's care for the martyrs. She continued in this vein with her visions of black corpses and serpents strangling people.[39]
Visions of 15 and 17 April 1932, B 718-719.
The radical expansion of the Ezkioga message to foretell events ever more portentous and grandiose seems to obey an inner dynamic common to other apparitions. The messages at Fatima and Garabandal were a graduated sequence
of ever more consequential and terrible outcomes. At Ezkioga the seers accompanied ever more frightening messages with ever more heartrending and lengthy crucifixions in a kind of emotional escalation; ever stronger feelings seemed necessary to hold onto believers. And a kind of plot tension depended on the Virgin revealing ever more of her program.
By terrorizing people with the prospect of death without the sacraments, by acting out the crucifixion and provoking their compassion and tears, by predicting massive chastisements, Evarista, Benita, and the other seers also performed a service time-honored in Catholicism: they stimulated the feelings required for repentance. In the Early Modern period public flagellants and penitential processions aroused these feelings in a kind of purposeful sacred theater that onlookers welcomed. The seers at Ezkioga did the same thing for their believers. They evoked changes of heart and love of God, and priests heard the results in confessionals throughout the region. If the seers strayed into calculated theatrics, they may have done so in the belief that the cause was good. While they were elaborating scenarios for the end of time, the Jesuit José Antonio Laburu was gathering material to discredit the vision. But although he had a copy of Benita's statement, he never spoke of the psychology of terror or the apocalypse. The apocalyptic predictions of the seers would have given him powerful arguments against them.
The Great Monarch and the Crucíferos
From Girona in the summer of 1933 Benita Aguirre revealed new aspects of the end of the world. By that time she too was speaking of the Antichrist (she too said he was born in 1923). But she introduced elements from the prophecies of José Domingo Corbató. Some Spaniards thought that the Great Monarch of the apocalyptic tradition would be the pretender Carlos VII. In Paris around 1900 Corbató, who had fought in the last Carlist War, became certain that he himself was the Gran Monarca and that his court should be in Valencia. While still in Paris, he and his cousin formed a secret society of priests and laymen, the Hermanos de la Milicia de la Cruz, or the Crucíferos. This group was to be a kind of militia for the struggle against the Antichrist. Mélanie of La Salette had her order of "apostles for the last times," the Italian prophet David Lazzaretti proposed the Milizie Crocifere in 1868, the French ultraroyalists had the Chevaliers de la Foi, and most especially San Francesco di Paola (1436–1507), the founder of the Minims, wrote about the Holy Crucifers. Based on the rules of Third Order Dominicans and that of the Minims, Corbató drew up a detailed rule for his order. When he arrived in Valencia, he published the rule in Latin and Spanish. He also issued an organ, Luz Católica , for the order.[40]
For the Carlist Great Monarch, Garmendia, Ideología carlista, 506, 631, mentions the prophecies of a nun, Sor María Antonia del Señor, and gives references published in 1869. For Mélanie see Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary, 184; for Lazzaretti see Lazzareschi, David Lazzaretti, 59, 83, 119, 181-196; for Martin, Boutry and Nassif, Martin l'Archange, 214. For Corbató see his Regla de la milicia de la cruz, Regla Galatea, and Apología, 2:214-18, and García Miralles, "El Padre Corbató," 361-400.
Corbató soon ran into trouble with the archdiocese, which placed his book El Inmaculado San José on the Index in February 1907 and suspended him from
saying mass in January 1908. It also banned two other of Corbató's journals, La Señal de la Victoria and Tradición y Progreso . When Corbató died on 23 May 1913 at age fifty-one he had numerous followers. They included parish priests in the provinces of Huesca, Castellón, and Girona, some of whom believed, I think mistakenly, that he would rise from the dead. They studied and restudied the apocryphal Fourth Book of Esdra; for three more years those in Blanes (Girona) published another journal, Cruz y Españolismo .[41]
For archdiocesan ban: Boletín eclesiástico de Valencia, 15 March 1907. García Miralles, "El Padre Corbató," 454, 472-487. Corbató may have influenced the La Salle Brother Estanislao José (Olimpio Fernández Cordero, 1903-1926), who had revelations that he himself would be pope and that there would be a Eucharistic kingdom based in Spain with a Eucharistic army. His superiors did not allow him to deliver a secret message for Alfonso XIII, and only his close friends took his visions seriously: Rodríguez, Un Joven heróico, 100-111.
Benita may have met Crucíferos, read their literature in Girona, or obtained Corbató's books from Burguera.At any rate, in July Benita began to refer to the Great Monarch and in early August to the Crucíferos. She was in some confusion as to when they would become active. She said that at the time of the chastisement the believers would go into the desert, where they would meet a great man who would be the king-general of the world. He would be the Great Monarch and would impose the reign of Jesus. The Antichrist, however, would interrupt this reign. Then there would be another period of the faithful in the desert, followed by the end of the world, which would be at hand, she said, "when women cannot be distinguished from men by their manner of dress." After the end of time would come a period of a thousand years of peace in which the saints would live with the just on the earth. In this period there would be no sin, a kind of paradise on earth.[42]
Visions of Benita Aguirre, 23 to 28 July, 7 and 8 September 1933, B 488, 502-503, 513.
She introduced the Crucíferos into this program as follows:
After the chastisements have passed, there will be a single religious order, called the Crucíferos, which will save the entire world by preaching the true faith and conquering souls. The head of the Crucíferos will be a very holy man who, after his apostolate, will die crucified at the gates of Bethlehem. In the last times everyone will speak the same language.
The Crucíferos were the militia of the Great Monarch.
O Holy Crucíferos, you will destroy the damnable Mohammedan sect, you will put an end to all kinds of heresies and sects in the world, and you will be the end of all tyrants; you will impose silence with perpetual peace for the entire universe world; you will make men holy by force or by will. O holy people! O people blessed by the Holy Trinity! The head-founder will be the great captain of holy people, called the Crucíferos of Jesus Christ. They will obtain dominion over the entire world, temporal as well as spiritual. These servants of God will cleanse the world with the death of an infinite number of rebels. The Chief and Founder of this militia will be the great Reformer of the Church of God.
The first members of the order, she said, would come from the city of Seville, "in which there is much iniquity, vices, and sins." Benita's vision of 20 August 1933, much of it bearing on the Crucíferos, betrays her debt to Corbató. She lifted one
section from a prophecy made in 1849 by the Catalan Franciscan, Jacinto Comà, which Curicque published in 1872 and which Corbató took from Curicque.[43]
Benita Aguirre
La Italia, regada con la sangre de tantos mártires, es la esclava de una demagogia diabólica, que ha llegado a constituirse
en consejera del Poder.
Y la pobre España, que, palmo a palmo, ha sido conquistada por la Cruz, se ha convertido en un pueblo de ilotas, que corre al precipicio y lucha por romper con sus tradiciones ysu propia manera de ser.
P. Comá, from Curicque
L'Italie, arrosée du sang de tant de généreux martyrs, est l'esclave d'une démagogie diabolique, qui est arrivée à se constituer
la conseillère du pouvoir....
Et notre pauvre Espagne, qui a été conquise pied à pied par la Croix, est devenue un peuple d'ilotes, qui court au précipice et lutte pour briser avec ses traditions, son histoire et sa propre manière d'être.
Visions of Benita Aguirre 6, 20, 30 August 1933, B 504, 508, 511; Curicque, Voix prophétiques, 2:383. See Staehlin, Apariciones, 109-120, for similar borrowing by Gemma Galgani in 1902 and by the Madrid mystic Josefa Menéndez (1890-1923) in 1920.
None of the other Ezkioga seers mentioned the Crucíferos. But Juan Bautista Ayerbe circulated to the Ezkioga believers messages sent to the Crucíferos from Hermano Pedro, the "Jefe-Fundador" of the order. The earliest date on the messages I have is December 1932 and the last is October 1936. They announce chastisements like those the Ezkioga seers predicted. In one message from September 1934 a visionary addresses "Dear brothers in the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary": "As this enterprise [Obra ] is all very spiritual and secret, you will have to do it in spirit. All under this oath of agreement (which is the equivalent to solemn vows) will be blessed, and if you do not fulfill what you promised, you will be HORRIBLY PUNISHED ."[44]
Ayerbe distributed "¡Cuanto nos ama Jesús! (Relaciones del hermano Crucífero Serafín)," excerpts of four letters from Serafín to Hermano Pedro dated from December 1932 to July 1933 (AC 373-375); another letter to "Mi querido P. from Serafín de Jesús," 5 September 1933 (2 sides, AC 377); and two undated texts (AC 383). The citation is from a page copied by Ayerbe, 18 September 1934, AC 378, beginning "Queridos hermanos en los Sagrados Corazones de Jesús y María" and is part of a message on 1 September 1934 from "el Divino Maestro" via a seer for Hermano Pedro.
Some sort of group apparently existed. In one message Hermano Pedro reported that he had been enlisting soldiers under the banner of Christ the King at Calle Murrieta in San Sebastián. On 16 October 1933, in terms similar to those of the Ezkioga seers, the Chief-Founder announced that the chastisement had begun. He was in correspondence with Ayerbe, who was sending him the vision messages of Luis Irurzun and doubtless those of others as well. There may have been a female seer who guided the group and passed on orders from Christ to the Chief.[45]
Recruiting on 27 August 1935, from "Extracto de una carta a los crucíferos" in ARB 253, with another message dated 13 October 1936; for chastisement see "J. M. J. De una carta del fundador-jefe de los crucíferos 16 octubre, 1935," 1 page, dittoed, AC 380 and ARB 253; and "De Una carta del Hno. Pedro 29 abril 1936" 1 folio, dittoed, AC 381; for female seer María, see "Mensaje de Jesús a sus predilectos Crucíferos" 2 sides, n.d., AC 383.
Before the Civil War Hermano Pedro lived in Barcelona, where he acted as a kind of inspired spiritual director among the same kind of people who believed in Magdalena Aulina and the Catalan mystic Enriqueta Tomás. He induced at least one follower, a woman, to give away her belongings and lead an ascetic life.[46]
According to Josefina Romà, personal communication.
Ayerbe obtained photographs of Hermano Pedro from a Sister of Charity in 1949 and sent one to Sebastián López de Lerena. In this correspondence Ayerbe called himself Hermano Buenaventura and López de Lerena Hermano Nicodemus. It is possible that they had become Crucíferos.[47]Ayerbe to nun, 15 November 1949, AC 427. López de Lerena began his letters with a symbol associated with the Crucíferos, a C with a cross inside it, in mid-1941.
A secret group with a Traditionalist slant or base may have continued after Corbató's death under prophetic leadership in Barcelona through the 1940s. Or, given that Hermano Pedro styled himself the "founder," he may simply have borrowed the name from Corbató and started a new group. The women who cared for Benita in Girona knew about Enriqueta Tomás and may well have known about Hermano Pedro.
In 1984 I asked Pedro Balda who the Crucíferos were. He said he had some of their messages, but he did not know who Hermano Pedro was. He understood that the organization was secret. But he and Luis Irurzun both knew the Crucíferos were a kind of apocalyptic force.
The Crucíferos are those who are ready when the time comes, with the angelic hosts, to confront the major enemies of God and the church.
Where are they?
Well, I do not know where they are. Personally, I do not place great importance in this. But in an ecstasy in 1933 in Huarte Araquil, the seer [Luis Irurzun] took my hand and said to me, "Crucífero. Today you do not have [power]. But the day will come when you will have power not against one nor a hundred, but against many more." And now, I do not even know where they are.[48]
Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 7 June 1984, pp. 1, 9.
Consumers and Interpreters of Prophecies
It is hard to know how many Basque country people were interested in the visions of the end of the world. But people like Padre Burguera, Juan Bautista Ayerbe, and Tomás Imaz dwelled more in the realm of prophecy than in the everyday. We can follow their interest in letters and see how they placed the Ezkioga prophecies in the wider and older tradition, on the one hand, and continually speculated about their applicability to current events, on the other.
Sebastián López de Lerena, the wealthy electrical engineer from Bilbao, wrote a defense of the apparitions in the summer of 1933. For him they announced the end of time:
There [at Ezkioga] and in various other places, the Most Holy Virgin truly appears with the main purpose of preparing the world for the Reign of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is imminent and will not come without enormous universal chastisements, apparently inevitable…. Ezkioga is the confirmation of innumerable ancient and modern prophecies of the greatest authority, and in consequence, it is the precursor … of the most transcendental and most moving events of human History…. Hence the unlimited variety of material in the visions: … [including] announcements of great chastisements, of miracles, of what they call the "Great Miracle," of universal application and which will be the occasion for a general conversion, the Great Monarch, an era of peace before the Antichrist, his reign, the end of the world.[49]
López de Lerena, "A propósito de Ezquioga."
A man in Madrid who was "a fervent devotee of the holy apparitions" wrote a long letter to Ayerbe, which I include in the appendix. It shows how these semiprofessional vision consumers, like modern semiologists, could organize into an apparently coherent pattern whatever ideas came down the pike. The letter reveals the subculture of religious excitement that maintained continuity and gave meaning to religious apparitions and linked them with the mysticism of the convents. This kind of audience needed specific dates connecting the general pattern to the here and now. One seer led Ayerbe to believe, for instance, that the Sacred Heart of Jesus would begin his reign on 25 April 1934.[50]
Ayerbe to Cardús, 9 November 1933.
So our seers and their patrons returned to the specific political-historical visions of the first summer of the visions, now rerouted through the complex chronology of the end of times.Some of the Ezkioga seers delivered a professional level of prophecy. Ayerbe circulated a prophetic update of the Chilean priest Echeverría Larrain, who was touring Europe spreading apocalyptic warnings and spoke at a church school in San Sebastián about 1933. It reads much like the output of Benita.
He said that the renovation is coming very soon, is imminent. He did not give the date, but he did say that by the year 1935 the world would be completely reformed, within two years or before. A third of the world will die. The Virgin will come with a legion of angels and many priests at her side will absolve those who want to convert.
That then only the good would remain in the world and there would be peace until the end of time. That the church would triumph more than ever. He said that soon there would be a war or a revolution and that in a moment all the communists and soviets would come out to destroy all the nations, trying to triumph by any means, and then would occur the chastisement that God has prepared for us, and in an instant the world would be transformed in peace with the good people until the end of the world.
He said that there is a prince in the desert doing penance who is the descendant of the ancient Bourbons. No one will know where he comes from and he will live and rule from France, but not from Paris, because Paris will no longer exist. It will be destroyed and burned for its great sins and crimes, and more cities as well. It will be a horrible chastisement never been known before, and it will be terrifying. France and Germany are going to get caught up in a war very soon, and soon after will come the terrible chastisement of this unfortunate mankind for the great sins it has committed.[51]
"Fragmentos de una Carta—Terribles predicciones" and "Profecías de Bug de Milhas," 2 sheets, dittoed, unsigned, n.d., AC 458. After the date 1935 there is a handwritten note: "It appears the chastisement has been delayed."
The similarity of Echeverría's conclusions to those the prophets of the Basque uplands reached deserves attention. López de Lerena contrasted the elevated concepts in the Ezkioga visions and the background of the seers:
These and other transcendent themes are the subject of the daily conversations of the Most Holy Virgin with the seers, very humble country people, all of them honorable, simple, sincere, and with no learning. God loves and takes pleasure in the humble. Nowhere is this so clear as in Ezkioga, and for us it is a new and evident "criterion of certitude."
Such wonder that a peasant or a child knows what she or he could not be expected to know is an ancient commonplace. Thomas Martin, Catherine Labouré, Mélanie, and Bernadette in France and David Lazzaretti and Eusapia Paladino in Italy were recent examples. With the high rates of literacy in contemporary Europe the wonder is often unjustified. Enthusiasts tend to present these adults and children as less tutored, less well-read, and less intelligent than they really were. In my experience persons who have religious visions have a great hunger to understand what is happening to them and they have to respond to insatiable
demands from those around them for more and more heavenly material. Those with little background in these matters can receive a rapid and substantial education by carefully reading the books and pamphlets that enthusiasts or spiritual directors inevitably give them.[52]
López de Lerena, "A propósito de Ezquioga." Staehlin, Padre Rubio, 109-110, for the voracious reading of the seamstress Josefa Menéndez.
At Ezkioga quick studies like Benita, Evarista, Cruz Lete, Luis Irurzun/Pedro Balda, Pilar Ciordia, and Patxi were the seers who could best satisfy those needing to know about the end of time.These messages of crusader-like crucifers and apocalyptic battles might seem to be guarded ways of talking belligerently about the internal enemy in Spain and preparing for a civil war. But the emphasis on the Soviet Union and international communism in the contemporary literature about Ezkioga and even a dozen years earlier in that about Limpias points to the deeper perception that a cataclysm was shaking the very roots of civilization. For many Catholics the Cold War began with the Russian Revolution. For them the threat of communism was nothing less than the devil's dominion of the world. This threat was on a different order of magnitude than that posed by Freemasonry or liberalism. Apocalyptic scenarios existed before, but communism gave them actuality on a global scale. For the Ezkioga believers the chastisement was not, in fact, the Spanish Civil War, and the reign of the Sacred Heart did not begin in 1939 with Franco. Indeed, even after the fall of communism the Ezkioga believers still wait for the chastisement of the immorality they see around them.
This prophetic tradition is the basis on which many people make decisions. Thus it is as important for a statesperson, political scientist, or historian to know this line of belief as it is for an economist to understand unlikely economic theories—not because they correctly predict or represent reality but because others use this tradition to take actions of lasting consequence.
For believers in the visions, especially those who stuck with the seers into 1932 and thereafter, these prophecies were deadly serious. I spoke to families of believers in Ormaiztegi, Urretxu, and Portugalete who for many years had special candles and matches ready for the days of darkness, and two families showed me typed or hand-copied instructions for what to do when the chastisement began. The instructions appear to have come from the Barcelona followers of Enriqueta Tomás, who through the 1930s and 1940s developed the cult of the Virgin of the Twelve Stars—alas, another story. Note the open involvement of Saint James as well as Saint Michael:
On the Dark and Stormy Night (Observations of Another [Female] Seer)
1. Daniel Clairin is the devil.
2. About eleven in the morning it will begin to get dark as if there were an eclipse of the sun.
3. In one or two hours the devils will go out.
4. Shut the doors and windows tight, and whoever gets caught in the street must stay outside. For the devil will take advantage of good
people, like family members who call at the door. If the door is opened the devil will come in with them, and all in the house will be lost. So that, without compassion, once the door is shut, open it for no one. The devil will even imitate the voices of people to gain entrance.
5. There will be sounds like an army on patrol, and it will be San Miguel and Santiago who will come down to earth.
6. With the blood of the dead Santiago will mark the doors that he finds closed, so that the infernal enemy may not enter, as with Moses and the Israelites on the mountain of the forefathers.
7. Prepare five candles and five pictures [estampas ] of the Virgin of the Twelve Stars, and keep them lit for the forty-eight hours that the slaughter, the screams, and the gases produced by the collision of stars that makes fire in the clouds will last.
8. On Sunday the sun will come out brightly, but because of so much death produced by the collision of the stars, one will not be able to go out.
9. On Monday there will be a strong wind that will clear the atmosphere, and on Tuesday people can go out, and they will see a great many dead.[53]
"Sobre la noche obscura y de tempestad," 1 page, dittoed, n.d., AC 14.
Many people I talked to recalled that seers predicted the worldwide triumph of communism. An older woman told me, "Our milk-woman said that there would be a river of blood from Izaga to Ezkioga, and that the Russians would be in control." Those witnessing the visions of chastisements remember them vividly:
They saw balls of fire; they wept; it was a spectacle.
They said there would be fire; they screamed; terrible things. We went away terrified.
They were always promising macabre, lugubrious, apocalyptic things … The Jehovah's Witnesses say the same things.[54]
For river of blood: woman about age seventy in Zumarraga, May 1984. Izaga, the section of Zumarraga closest to Ezkioga, was partial to the visions, and the seer Marcelina Mendívil spent her last years there. Quotes from (1) woman from believing household in Ezkioga, age about fifty, August 1982; (2) woman from Ordizia, age seventy-two, December 1983; (3) man from believing household, Urnieta, June 1984. The overlap of predictions with those of the Jehovah's Witnesses led at least one Ezkioga cuadrilla to defect. Arrinda and Albisu draw the comparison in Jehovatarrak (Jehovah's Witnesses), 11.
Persons in Zaldibia and Urretxu told the same story, which may be apocryphal. Once when seers announced a date for the Last Judgment, a farmer counted up his hens and ate them one by one, so that on the fatal day none would be wasted. The real-estate broker Tomás Imaz gave away all he had. The children of Juan Bautista Ayerbe grew up in Urnieta thinking the end of time could come at any moment. An uncle converted all his money into silver and buried it under a tree. Their mother expected an exodus of Catholics to the desert and had all her valuables in two suitcases ready to leave at a moment's notice. During the Civil War a thief walked off with them.[55]
Daniel Ayerbe, Irun, 13 June 1984, confirmed by his sister Matilde, in San Sebastián the next day.
15.
Aftermath
Just three weeks before the Civil War began, Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria sent a letter to the woman who tended the statue of the Virgin of Ezkioga. In it he condemned with characteristic energy the continuance of the cult:
As if the bitter tribulations that the Holy Church suffers from the impious were not enough, the so-called Ezquiogista Catholics, who think themselves better than others, year after year … continue to violate and scorn sacred dispositions and encourage by all means the presence of believers at the well-known field, theater of "visionaries," of superstitions, of rebellion against the Church….
Now more than ever many go to the field; perform devotions in imitation of those at Lourdes with crucifix and lighted candle; drink and carry away water from a nearby spring, calling it miraculous; carry the crucifix and lighted candles in procession down from the field to the "schismatic" chapel on the highway; make processions in the field with hymns; and pray, sing, and hold their rituals.
He went on to forbid the woman the sacraments, holy burial, or entry into any church as long as she cared for or went into the chapel or went to the field. He threatened to have the decree read in all the churches of the diocese and to excommunicate her if she persisted.[1]
Copy of letter from Mateo Múgica, bishop of Vitoria, 26 June 1936, in private collection.
After June 1934, when the Holy Office had backed up the bishop in condemning the cult, groups of believers continued to meet on the hillside, in the house where the image was, at the store in Ordizia, and in private homes. The priest Sinforoso de Ibarguren kept a sharp eye on the activities in his parish and reported all to the bishop. Believers hoped for a reversal. Against the advice of the Catalans, Sebastián López de Lerena, the wealthy engineer from Bizkaia, gathered 1,300 names that he sent to the Vatican in September 1934 in support of a protest he had sent in July. In the spring of 1935 he drew up plans for a basilica at the site; these plans were probably those the believers later showed to the Passionists.[2]
López de Lerena correspondence, private collection; for cathedral plans, Basilio Iraola, Irun, 17 August 1982.
During this period a handful of new seers emerged. Among his trusted friends the Urnieta town secretary Juan Bautista Ayerbe continued to circulate texts of visions. Whenever L'Enigme d'Ezkioga arrived by mail, the director of La Voz de Guipúzcoa protested indignantly; he blamed Raymond de Rigné for maintaining the cult and eventually precipitated Rigné's expulsion from Spain.[3]
Pedro Sarasqueta in VG 1934: 20 February, 22 March, 10 April, 11 July; in VG 1935: 24 January, 28 February, 15 October.
The Civil War
From April 1936 on the seer Luis Irurzun of Iraneta had been warning of an imminent military uprising. At the outbreak of the Civil War on 18 July 1936 Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia remained loyal to the Second Republic, but Navarra supported Franco. Luis was visiting believers in Gipuzkoa, but in late August or early September when republican militia began searching houses, Luis decided, allegedly on the advice of the Virgin, to leave Urnieta and cross the battle lines to safety in Navarra. A family accompanied him. Luis described to me how they walked by night and hid in farmhouses by day. They were most in danger after they crossed the front above Ataun and an officer ordered them shot. Luckily the parish priest of Lezaun, who was himself an officer, recognized Luis and vouched for him. Before these troops reached Urnieta, republican militia took Juan Bautista Ayerbe off to a prison ship in Bilbao.
Luis then had to report to Franco's army for conscription and explain where he had been. He told me he went to Pamplona and consulted with a friend, the priest Fermín Yzurdiaga, who was the head of propaganda for the paramilitary Falange. Yzurdiaga signed him up right away, and Luis eventually became aide to the Falangist military commander of Zarautz, José María Huarte. Huarte was a descendant of Iraneta people and believed in Luis's visions; every night at midnight they said the rosary. Luis was in Gipuzkoa in Zarautz (25 kilometers
west of San Sebastián) seven months, approximately from early April to November 1937.
Luis told me that after two months together, Huarte put the visions to work. I recount Luis's story here with the warning that I have no other authority for it. It has value at least as legend, for Irurzun had also told the Ezkioga cuadrillas. Franco's forces were having difficulty breaching the carefully constructed complex known as the Iron Belt that defended Bilbao. Huarte told the general staff of the army that maybe the Lord or the Virgin could point where to attack. Luis told me he agreed to ask the Virgin as a measure to save lives:
The preparations were made. One was General [José López] Pinto, another General [José] Solchaga, I think another was General [José Enrique] Varela, and one more also … And [Huarte] introduced me … They were there with their wives as well. We prayed the rosary. And indeed, Our Lady came. I know nothing of what goes on around me when I am in ecstasy. And the Virgin indicates to them, "At this point, at that, at that," They had secretaries there … When this was all over, four or five days later, just as she had indicated, they broke through all they had to break through; and that was it. It all fell; they took all Bizkaia, all Bilbao, everything.
After six months in Zarautz, Irurzun said, he was arrested by Francoist police in San Sebastián for being a seer. He was about to be taken away and shot when a believer intervened with a general to save him.[4]
Luis Irurzun, San Sebastián, 5 April 1983. Since the Cinturón de Hierro was broken in 1937 on June 12, with Bilbao falling June 19, by Luis's account this session would have taken place about June 7. Casilda Ampuero, who married the general Varela after the war, knew nothing of the episode but did not rule it out (Cádiz, 21 August 1986). A skeptical José Solchaga had visited Ezkioga in the summer of 1931 (Teresa Michelena, Oiartzun, 29 March 1983). Luis said it was a General Quintanilla who saved him.
There does seem to have been a crackdown on seers and believers in the first months of the Franco government in Gipuzkoa. Raymond de Rigné and Marie-Geneviève Thirouin had returned in July 1936, just as the Civil War got under way, but the Franco regime arrested them after Gipuzkoa fell. They spent forty-five days in the San Sebastián prison of Ondarreta in January and February of 1937, then the government expelled them once more to France. From France Rigné indignantly denounced Bishop Múgica and diocesan officials as Basque separatists and the Spanish episcopate as responsible for the war for not heeding the prophecies of Madre Rafols and the seers of Ezkioga.[5]
Believers in Zaldibia remember a set of arrests about 21 January 1937. Rigné, "Mes voyages," and Rigné, Verdaderos asesinos, 3.
The war affected a San Sebastián taxi driver in a different way. He had seen the Virgin twice at Ezkioga in July of 1931 and had had his photograph in the newspaper. When the Civil War started in 1936 he was a marked man among his fellow taxi drivers in Republican San Sebastián. There taxi drivers were generally working-class leftists who were in favor of the Republic and against the church. Anyone who saw the Virgin, they reasoned, would be a Catholic, a rightist, and on the side of the Francoist military that started the Civil War. At a meeting of the transport union, the seer-driver stood up and announced, "What I saw was nothing, and I will demonstrate it now." He fought bravely against the invading Franco troops and escaped to Gijón, going from there to Valencia.[6]
Interview with a retired taxi driver who was an official of the transport union and present when the seer spoke, San Sebastián, 19 June 1984.
The working-class seer from Guadamur, Nicanor Patiño, died fighting for the Republic.In Republican zones about 4,000 secular priests, 2,000 male religious, and 300 female religious were hunted down and killed under the automatic assumption that as clergy they were subversive. Among them, inevitably, were some of those who figure in our story, both those in favor of the visions and those opposed. The Capuchin Andrés de Palazuelo, who wrote favorably about Limpias and Ezkioga, was shot in Madrid on 31 July 1936, just twelve days after the uprising began. The canon of Lleida Juan Bautista Altisent was killed the same month in Lleida. Gregorio Martín, the parish priest at Guadamur during the apparitions in 1931, was killed in Ocaña on 14 August 1936. Luis Urbano, who opposed the visions of Limpias and Ezkioga, survived only a month in hiding in Valencia and was killed on August 21. On the night of August 22 militia executed seventy clergy and religious by the walls of the the city slaughterhouse of Toledo. Among them was the dean of the cathedral, José Polo Benito, who had written of Ezkioga as God's offensive. Many of Cruz Lete's companions at Ciempozuelos were shot at Paracuellos del Jarama on November 28. Bishop Manuel Irurita administered the diocese of Barcelona clandestinely from the house of a jeweler until he was found. He was shot on December 12. The archbishop of Barcelona has recently reactivated Irurita's cause of beatification.[7]
Montero, Historia, 242, 309-310, 330-331, 340-346, 416-421, 762, 834; for Urbano see Christian, Moving Crucifixes, 177; for Andrés de Palazuelo see Buenaventura de Carrocera, Mártires Capuchinos de la Provincia Castilla en la revolución de 1936 (Madrid: El Mensajero Seráfico, 1944), 17-40.
On 28 October 1931 Franco's troops, not the republicans, shot the priest Celestino Onaindía as a Basque nationalist. He was a believer in the Ezkioga visions and had been present at Ramona's wounding. The Republic had sent Bishop Mateo Múgica into exile for being a monarchist; now the fascist regime forced him into exile for being a separatist. He remained abroad until 1947 and never regained control of the Vitoria diocese. Among the priests the new military regime jailed or forced into exile and those the diocese reassigned for their Basque nationalist sympathies were some opposed to the visions, like Sinforoso de Ibarguren of Ezkioga, Miguel Lasa of Zumarraga, and the seminary professor Juan Thalamas Landibar, and others who believed in them, like the curate of Itsaso, Joaquín Aguirre.[8]
Talde, Archivo.
In Catalonia the Ezkioga enthusiasts who were followers of Magdalena Aulina survived the war fairly well. Aulina benefited from the opposition of the diocese of Girona, and her brother was a prominent republican. Her group sheltered Rafael García Cascón. Leftists in Terrassa considered Salvador Cardús an apolitical historian and archivist and perhaps remembered him as a class victim. He survived the war with all his papers intact. As secretary of the board of the public library and a member of the council of museums, he was able to save the town's notarial archives, most of the parish archives, and works of art in churches and in private hands. He helped many in danger, and priests hid in his house and said mass there. On occasion, he himself had to go into hiding. But leftists killed several prominent Catholics who had taken part in the trips from Terrassa and Sabadell to Ezkioga. As Francisco de Paula Vallet had hoped, many veterans of his spiritual exercises died as martyrs. One was Miquel Marcet, the
mill owner who had caused the suicide of Salvador Cardús's father. Marcet had been a local officer of the Parish Exercises movement. The left had long identified him as an enemy; he was killed after being tortured and forced to watch two of his sons die before him.[9]
Oriol Cardús, Terrassa, 19 October 1985, and letter to author with copies of confirming documents, 15 January 1994; among those killed who had gone to Ezkioga were Joan Salvans Piera, Antoni Barata Rocafort, and Montserrat Subirach Cunill; see Navarro, "La repressió."
The Post-Civil War Period in the Basque Country
The war barely interrupted the day-to-day devotions of believers. Ama Felisa was detained briefly on her rounds on the day rebel troops took Urretxu. And as we saw above, María Recalde was able to use alms from believers for prisoners in the Durango prison.
In November 1941 the Franco government made one last crackdown on the cult, exiling one female seer to Mallorca and ordering an elderly woman from Zaldibia to go to the Burgos town of Villarcayo (although she never actually went). Other believers were to go elsewhere:
The order is curious…. It says, "meetings take place in which mysticism is mixed with politics and things are done that are pernicious for public order even if they are not generally known." Then that it seeks to "cut short all political activity that is forbidden by the law, like Basque nationalism, which is at the root of these meetings."[10]
Letter from López de Lerena to Ezkioga believer, Bilbao, 14 November 1941, private archive.
The government ordered the incorrigible Juan Bautista Ayerbe of Urnieta to Alcaraz in Albacete. His son Daniel, then a priest in a village of Alava, went to police headquarters in Madrid to protest, for his father was being exiled as "an enthusiastic defender and publicist of Ezkioga, which has a clear separatist slant," and his father was anything but a separatist. In Madrid Daniel Ayerbe learned that the initiative had come from the diocesan administrator, Francisco Javier Lauzurica, and that to reverse the order he should go to Vitoria. He did, and the government rescinded the exile fifteen days later.[11]
Daniel Ayerbe, Irun, 13 June 1984, pp. 2-3, 7. It appears the government withdrew the other exile orders as well. Ayerbe remembered that the order was signed by Caballero, Director General de Seguridad, who had been the civil governor of Gipuzkoa.
Throughout the 1940s, in addition to meeting in private houses, believers went to the store in Ordizia on Wednesdays and to the annual mass on the anniversary of the visions in the Passionist church in Urretxu. There the preacher routinely condemned the visions, but the believers were glad to have any mass at all. Numbers were small. For instance, only fifty persons attended the anniversary mass in 1944. On this day the believers held prayers at the vision site and then in a home in Ormaiztegi.[12]
Basilio Iraola, Irun, 17 August 1982, p. 2; J. B. Ayerbe to abbess of Clarisas, 1 July 1944, AC 423.
The regular seers in this period included Esperanza Aranda, Luis Irurzun, Marcelina Mendívil, and María Recalde. The elderly seer Juana Aguirre of Rentería had died on 4 June 1939. Conchita Mateos entered a Poor Clare convent in 1942 and died there on 10 June 1945. Juliana Ulacia died in Astigarraga on 28 January 1949 and María Recalde in Durango on 10 October 1950. José Garmendia held periodic private visions in San Sebastián in the house of his stepsister; his niece thought some Catalans gave himmoney. He died about 1961. A few new seers emerged—a man in Bergara who married a seer, and children or adults from Vitoria, Antzuola, Aramaio, Legorreta, and Plasencia de las Armas.
In the mid-1940s a group of believers asked the Passionist Basilio Iraola, who had written a biography of Gemma Galgani, if he would go to Rome to prepare himself to evaluate visions. Strong, ruddy, authoritarian, Iraola was famous for his mission sermons on the Last Judgment. The believers told him they had a mass of material, including vision messages, cures, and photographs. He told Bishop Carmelo Ballester of Vitoria, who agreed to evaluate the material, and Iraola took it in a truck from Legazpi (where, Iraola recollected in 1982, Garmendia was keeping it) to Vitoria on condition that the diocese return it to the believers. Later Ballester told Iraola the verdict of his advisors: "There is one apparition of the devil with an admixture of communism, and no apparition that is true."[13]
Basilio Iraola, Irun, 17 August 1982, pp. 1-2. I found no trace of the documents in Legazpi, and José Garmendia's niece there thought it unlikely he would have kept the collection.
When Jaime Font y Andreu became the first bishop of the new diocese of San Sebastián, believers found him slightly more sympathetic. On 17 March 1952 Sebastián and Julián López de Lerena, Juan Bautista Ayerbe, Izmael Mateos (Conchita's father), and Felisa Sarasqueta (a witness to Ramona's wounding) took him twelve notebooks containing photographs of seers and more than eight hundred vision messages. Their six-page statement said that they spoke on behalf of the Virgin. They briefly described the history of the apparitions and mentioned in particular the good deaths of Cruz Lete and Conchita Mateos as religious. And they named fourteen Gipuzkoan companions whom Conchita had drawn to the convent by her example. The statement went into detail about Ramona's wounding, about a seer from Pamplona who had received a medal from heaven, and about the seer in Tolosa who had supernatural Communions. In closing it mentioned the tests of the seers by Carmelites and by doctors and asked that the diocese call for proofs of the visions and permit Catholics to go to the site.[14]
Sebastián López de Lerena, "Al Ilmo. Sr. Obispo de San Sebastián."
Sebastián López de Lerena described the interview:
We did not read [the letter] because what our friend [Juan Bautista] Ayerbe did was indescribable. He grabbed the papers out of my hands and against the will of all of us, he violently jabbered out the text, throwing in comments of his own that even he did not understand, not ceasing to speak in the two and one-half hours that the meeting lasted.
Nevertheless, to judge from the patience and the dizzied interest with which the bishop listened to everything that was said and his amiability when saying good-bye, we gained a very good impression; he was very different from what we were used to in the visits with Don Mateo [Múgica].
López de Lerena hoped for a positive result "because otherwise, the catastrophes that we seek to avoid will happen first." By then believers knew that neither the Spanish Civil War nor World War II was the catastrophe that seers
predicted in the 1930s; no longer did they consider, if they ever had, that Franco was the Great Monarch. Seers learned that Franco would die before the war of chastisement. López de Lerena wrote a friend, "'After the death of [here a blank space, for Franco] will come the world war' appeared in writing twice, and this means that the war will wait a long while because this gentleman is in excellent health, although there may always be unpleasant surprises."[15]
López de Lerena to an Ezkioga believer, Bilbao, 26 March 1952, private collection.
Although the bishop did not reopen the case, Font y Andreu allowed seers and believers to pray at the vision site and receive Communion.Juan Bautista Ayerbe's mad excitement when he met the bishop was not surprising. For twenty years he had put heart and soul into this unearthly enterprise, traveling around the province to transcribe repetitive, rambling vision messages. He dwelt in a secret, enclosed world of Providence and grace, but all the time he was one invisible step away from heaven or worldwide catastrophe. Civil and religious authorities had reprimanded him time and again. Finally, he could speak to the bishop, who could fulfill the Virgin's urgent instructions. At that time Ayerbe was sixty-five years old. Five years later, at age seventy, he died. He fell on ice when going out to mail letters about the visions.
After the war Luis Irurzun married and moved to San Sebastiÿn, where he worked in a factory. But in sessions with local believers he continued to have visions, and gradually in the 1950s and 1960s, as the others died, he became the main seer. A younger generation that could understand Spanish gradually replaced the Basque-speaking country people in the cuadrillas. And as the older Basque-speaking seers died out, their cuadrillas shifted their attention to Luis, who, though he understood Basque, had his visions in Spanish.[16]
New believer and worker Alberto, factory town, 13 June 1984, p. 1.
He was the last of the original seers who kept up semipublic visions, and he died on 5 February 1990.From Iraneta Pedro Balda continued to send letters about the visions around the world. At the annual dinner of town secretaries of Navarra, he succeeded in recruiting two other colleagues, Santiago Simón Orta of Berrioplano in 1953 and José Javier Martínez Sarrasa of Artajona. Both became dedicated followers of the visions. In their modest ways these men carried on the work that Burguera, Ayerbe, and others had started.
Widowed in 1954, Santiago Simón met his second wife, Juana Urcelay, a believer from Oñati, at the Ordizia vision store about 1956. He recorded the monthly visions of Esperanza Aranda in Ormaiztegi in 1956 and 1957. When I visited him in 1984, he was translating the visions of the Italian seer Maria Valtorta into Spanish.[17]
Santiago Simón and Juana Urcelay, Pamplona, 18 June 1984.
I went to see José Javier Martínez Sarrasa, known among believers as "the Pilgrim," in 1985 in Barcelona, where he was living with this daughter. He was then eighty-seven years old. During the visions and the riots in May and June 1931 he was the town secretary in Mendigorría, and he later went to Ezkioga
as a curious spectator. In 1954 he started a series of pilgrimages on foot to major shrines, first Zaragoza and then Lourdes. Santiago Simón put him in touch with Pedro Balda and Luis Irurzun. A kind of lay missionary, Valerio Babace Hernandorena, himself married to the daughter of a seer, took Martínez Sarrasa to a farm near an industrial town of Gipuzkoa where seven out of twelve children were seers and over thirty different celestial beings appeared. For many years Simón, Balda, Martínez Sarrasa, and five others had regular meetings in Pamplona to pray and to talk of the visions. Babace's brother, Eugenio, was one of the last priests the Ezkioguistas could count on, and when in 1973 Luis Irurzun called for a new picture of the Virgin at the Ezkioga vision site, Eugenio Babace blessed it.
Martínez Sarrasa told me that people built shrines on mountains because mountains are closer to God and that people living in the mountains had visions for the same reason; people in the valley towns were closer to the flesh. He had walked tens of thousands of miles on systematic pilgrimages—first to seven shrines in each diocese in the peninsula, then to a shrine in each village of Navarra, and then to every parish in Barcelona. And he had documented each trip with careful maps and typed accounts. At age eighty-seven he was still walking ten kilometers every day. Had it not been for the apparitions, he told me, there would not be a tree left on the earth. A direct, honest man with luminous eyes, he reminded me of Pedro Balda.
Alberto, a new recruit to the visions, visited these three men in Navarra. He worked in the factory of a small town ten kilometers from Ezkioga. There he met a group of rural believers, and in 1957 after a spiritual crisis he became interested in Ezkioga and attended sessions in San Sebastián with Luis Irurzun. His friends looked askance, as though he had adopted a new religion.
In the mid-1970s there was a bitter strike at Alberto's factory. At first Alberto joined the strikers, and the company fired him with everyone else. But through Luis Irurzun, the Virgin ("La Madre") recommended that he return to work. Eventually the management called him back to work and he went to the factory with two or three other believers, but the strikers stopped them. The management called again and said it would pick him up outside his house. Fortified by the Virgin's promise that he would come through unharmed, Alberto went out to wait in the street. He counted more than eighty persons, many of them longtime neighbors, some on the balconies of nearby apartments, who had turned out to call him names ("awful things that cannot be put in a book") and mock his belief in the Ezkioga visions. When the factory director did not come, Alberto walked his children to school and then continued to wait, peeling and eating two oranges and reading a newspaper under the hail of insults. When after forty-five minutes the boss finally came, women blocked Alberto's way to the car, and one who fell to the ground subsequently charged him with assault. The director had a toy pistol, but the people grabbed it, and civil guards in a Land Rover had to rescue
him. Eventually the company broke the strike, and for months afterward the townspeople ostracized and reviled Alberto and his family.
Alberto's is an extreme case of how devotion to Ezkioga could separate people from their neighbors. When he began to know believers and identify with them, he told his wife, "Either we are idiots, we are crazy, or it is everyone else who is crazy."[18]
Alberto, factory town, 13 June 1984.
But the converse of this gulf between believers and nonbelievers was the unity that existed among the believers. The notions of family boundaries broke down. The wider believing community had virtually become one big auzoa , the unit of rural neighborhood within which Basques help each other in work and prayer.[19]Douglass, Death in Murelaga, chap. 4.
The elderly seer Juana Aguirre died in the care of a wealthy family, one of whose members she had helped to cure. Two poor women seers stayed for varying periods at the farm of other seers in Zaldibia. Marcelina Eraso, desparately poor, passed from house to house, stayed for a while in the family of a seer in Albiztur, and lived for six years with the help of believers in a chapel in Legorreta. And during the war José Garmendia spent nine months in María Recalde's house in Durango. I know of at least three couples who thought that the Virgin arranged their marriages. And warmth and affection shine through the letters that the more literate believers sent one another.Forgetting, Remembering, Explaining
Other seers who stayed in the area did not keep up contacts with the believing community; instead, with varying success, they attempted to regain a measure of anonymity. In my progress from town to town I learned not to disturb them. In the Goiherri in the 1980s older people knew perfectly well which persons in their town had been seers, and they respected their privacy and silence scrupulously. In one place, at the start of my study, I asked if any of the seers were now living and people sent me to a man who was a seer's son-in-law. He was quite interested and took me to his wife, the seer's daughter. She was even more interested; it turned out that she had had no idea that her mother, who had been famous throughout the Basque Country in 1931, had been a seer at all. The entire echelon of older persons in the town knew this, but the younger generation, in this case even including the child of a seer, did not. Someone had told her husband once, and he had asked his wife about it, but knowing nothing, she had denied it. I told her what I knew about her mother, and we agreed to keep the mother's secret. I am sure I would have found similar situations elsewhere.
A kind of shame about the visions was general in the region. Before I visited my friend Joseba Zulaika in Itziar, he mentioned to his parents that I was studying Ezkioga. But it was only when I asked them directly that they said they had attended the visions and had known Ramona Olazÿbal. When in the 1970s I began to look into the matter, the shame had led to a kind of historical amnesia. Joseba, who had attended the Passionist school in Urretxu, next to Ezkioga, had
never heard of the apparitions, even though some of his teachers had initially been enthusiasts. Local monographs on the history of Ezkioga and the dozens of other towns where visions took place do not mention the events that made the places famous and drew a million visitors in 1931.[20]
Silvan, Los Pueblos, and other books in the series Pueblos Guipuzcoanos.
After the first general enthusiasm, people remained perplexed or ambivalent. Belief or disbelief is rarely absolute. More common are degrees of belief, degrees of disbelief. I asked older friends whether Ormaiztegi had been split between believers and nonbelievers. They said no, that the great majority of people were ambivalent—that at first everyone believed, and then people believed and did not believe simultaneously. I often found persons who began by dismissing the matter and by the end of a conversation were ticking off the prophecies that had come true. Most of the nonbelievers, after they relaxed with the subject, wondered out loud, "¿Quí era eso? [What was that, really?]"
Some people found ways to overcome their ambivalence and exorcise the memory of their own enthusiasm. One of the ways they did this was to invent simple, if improbable, "explanations" that cut through the complexity and doubt to a clear conclusion. (This kind of person found similar explanations for the unusual vision states.) Some of the more fetching, if far-fetched, explanations are technological. A contemporary anticlerical writer quite seriously charged that the apparitions at Knock in Ireland in the 1890s were magic-lantern slides that the parish priest projected on the church wall. So for the visions at Guadamur, El Liberal of Madrid proposed that the visions were "some apparatus of television which permitted from some secret place the projection over a long distance, by means of waves, the image in question." Similarly for Ezkioga a columnist in El Día reported:
There were those who say that with a great light placed far away, people make the Virgin seem to appear as in a movie. One of these inveterate film buffs said the other day, "How many fools, primitive and innocent, there are in these places. It is incredible that they cannot realize that they can do this with a great spotlight placed elsewhere on the mountains, and do not realize that these days electric power is very advanced and all these things can be done very effectively."[21]
McCarthy, Priests and People, 228-252; see also Nold, "The Knock Phenomenon"; Donnelly, "Knock," 55-57; ELM, 28 August 1931, p. 5; Larraitz, ED, 28 July 1931.
Pedro Balda told me that a general who stopped in the Iraneta tavern told the locals gravely that "they could do all those things by pushing a button in Madrid." And several people wondered to me whether it had been done with lights or was the effect of optical illusions, passing automobiles, or trains.
Other explanations people gave me in the 1980s ran toward "why" someone did it. The "why" explanations seemed to satisfy as well as the "how." The crudest version was that people cooked up the affair to make money. Suspects included local tavern-keepers, the landowner, the photographers, or the Catalans,
who would build hotels. ("In my opinion there were some Catalans who wanted to get involved so it would be a success and they could set up hotels and exploit Ezkioga; there was money involved, in my opinion, eh.") The republican press abounded in this explanation in 1931. A more inventive idea came from a local intellectual who wondered whether the visions had been a front so that Catalans could smuggle money out to France. The presence of certain priests led another observer to suspect that it had been "to advance the church, or so that the religion would not collapse." This explanation, with its mite of truth, was made immediately on 8 July 1931 by El Liberal of Madrid, which claimed the apparitions were set up by "the priest, of Ezquioga, of Orméiztegui, or of whatever." This explanation shades into the idea of a monarchist political plot. Believers too created their own reduction of a political nature to explain why the visions failed. Seizing on the explanation published in the magazine María Mensajera in 1970, they argue that because the Virgin spoke to Spain as a whole, the Basque nationalists and the diocese rejected what she said.[22]
For María Mensajera see Sánchez-Ventura, "Las Apariciones."
One way to dismiss the events without bothering to explain them was to refer to immoral behavior among the pilgrims and the seers. Older nonbelievers in the uplands in the 1980s made veiled references to seer pregnancies and couples who would take off into the woods. The saying, derived from a 1930s verse broadside, was still common: "Whether the Virgin Mary appeared at Ezkioga we cannot say, but it is certain along the way there appeared numerous virgins and later Baby Jesuses."[23]
Rev. Andoni Eizaguirre Galarraga, of Andoain, San Sebastián, 26 June 1984: Ama Birjiña Ezkio'n azaldu zan edo ez, iñork garbi ez dakigu; bañan bai bide baztarretan ama birjin ugari agertu zirala, eta ondoren amaika niño Jesus.
But the quickest way to dismiss the topic, the one most frequent among the less lettered, was to label the apparitions as a whole witch-stuff. Sorginkeriak , of course, explained nothing; in fact it was the vernacular way of saying the subject was taboo, a verbal mechanism for repression that left no room for argument. It may be that this mechanism goes right back to 1617, when by an edict of silence the Inquisition ended the witch craze in Gipuzkoa and Navarra.[24]
Henningsen, Witches' Advocate, 378-381.
Bishop Mateo Múgica did essentially the same thing. The final argument by Laburu in his lectures was that the Ezkioga visions were not true because the bishop said so, and who was anyone else to have an opinion: "[Padre Laburu] ended asking that in matters of God people not have private opinions or reservations." A dialogue in Basque printed in La Cruz and Argia ended similarly:
[Martín:] In the last analysis I do not know what to do.
No Martin, there can be no doubt what you should do. Our Lord Bishop has spoken clearly on the subject. Our duty as Catholics is to follow what he says.[25]
LC, 22 June 1932, account of Laburu speech in San Sebastián; Atxabalt, La Cruz, 8 October 1933.
The imposition of silence in 1617 ended public witchcraft accusations. In 1933 it ended public discussion of the visions. But it did nothing to explain either
phenomenon and Basques went right on wondering what witchcraft and the visions really were.
The Principal Characters
A year after withdrawing from involvement in the visions in the fall of 1931, Antonio Amundarain stepped down from his parish in Zumarraga; thereafter he dedicated his life to the Alianza. He died in San Sebastián in 1954. The initial phase of his cause for beatification was completed 19 April 1986.
Francisco de Paula Vallet had more difficulty founding his order for parish spiritual exercises. After returning from Uruguay, he settled in the diocese of Valence in France, and then, when threatened by the French Resistance, he moved to Madrid. There, to the serious detriment of his order, he attempted in vain to convince Cardinal Pedro Segura that the Rafols documents were false. He died in 1947 without returning to the Catalonia where he had been such a powerful leader.[26]
Mècle, "Deux victimes."
Carmen Medina met Magdalena Aulina around 1935. Carmen became one of Magdalena's patrons, spent long spells at the house, and in 1936 she brought the educator Manuel Siurot to visit. Aulina had even more trouble than Vallet. Manuel Irurita, the bishop of Barcelona, publicly reprimanded her movement, and in 1933 the bishop of Girona, José Cartanyá e Inglés, started investigating it. Because the Spanish republic allowed the organization at a time when there was wholesale killing of priests in the same area, rightists after the war accused the members of being Reds. One pro-Franco clergyman even charged that Aulina was part of a spiritist-Masonic plot to subvert the state:
At the start of our Movement [that is, at the start of the Civil War], Freemasonry kept a low profile; but the announcements and spiritist groups did not totally stop. The same occurs in Italy and Germany. We raised the alarm. We raised the alarm. Ezkioga and Banyoles have not yet lost their followers. They were not rejected by leftist intellectuals and politicians. These people sneak in through the walls. They are not noticed. First, they spread a false mysticism; then rumors; then, a lack of trust; and finally, rebellion. They sustain, with economic benefits, innumerable secret cells that are like gangrene in the social body and prepare the revolution.[27]
Irurita, "Sobre ciertos hechos"; for Red-baiting, Auguet Tort, Bañolas, and interview, Barcelona, 8 November 1984; for Medina, Siurfat, and general postwar history of Aulinas, F. Crous, Barcelona, 25 February 1985, pp. 3-4; quote is from Tusquets, Masones y pacifistas, 72-73, as cited in Ricart, Desviación, 380-381.
Matters came to a head when between August 1939 and 1941 Bishop Cartanyà denied Aulina and her followers the sacraments. During this period José María Boada died in Banyoles. On his deathbed he refused to renounce Aulina. The diocese would not allow his burial in hallowed ground, in spite of Aulina's appeal to the Falange (Boada's brother Tomás was a high official) and the Franco government. Eventually Bishop Marcelino Olaechea of Navarra became an intermediary between Aulina's Obra and the diocese, which lifted the ban
after Aulina publicly admitted her mistakes. Aulina established the first houses of her institute in Navarra in 1943. She founded more houses in Huesca (under Bishop Lino Rodrígo), La Rioja, and then in Valencia after Olaechea became archbishop there. Eventually Rome, in spite of resistance from the Catalan dioceses, approved the order as an all-female secular institute on 6 November 1962.[28]
Ricart, Desviación. The denial of the sacraments to Aulina and her followers was decreed 5 August 1939; See also Arxiu Vidal i Barraquer, vol. 3, parts 1 and 2, pp. 928-930. The institute issued booklets commemorating the founding ceremonies at Funes (1946), Zaragoza in the diocese of Huesca (1948), and Aldeanueva de Ebro (1949).
The fierce opposition Aulina aroused in Catalonia was akin to that Soledad de la Torre provoked in Pamplona. A Barcelona priest said squarely in El Matí : "The church never authorized women to act as directors of conscience." Hence the church limited both Madre Soledad's and Aulina's spheres of influence to women. The Aulinas identify their founder more with the battling Jeanne d'Arc than with Bernadette of Lourdes.[29]
Balcells, EM, 19 January 1934.
Vicenta Marcet had trouble retrieving her husband, Rafael García Cascón, from Aulina's Obra when the war was over. According to family members, it took another holy woman to do it. When the couple went to visit relatives in Bejar, Rafael's aged uncle, a Jesuit, spoke to a saintly nun, Madre Elvira, who people believed subsisted only on the host. He convinced her that the Banyoles Obra was the work of the devil. She told this to García Cascón and he subsequently left the movement. In later years he regularly paid for spiritual exercises run by Vallet's order.
Magdalena Aulina died in 1956 and controversy accompanied her even in death. Vicenta Marcet, who considered that Aulina had divided her family and turned her husband against her, insisted on going to the funeral. When the coffin passed, this normally placid woman stepped forward and shouted, "Witch! Witch! Witch!" For others Aulina was a saint. Anyone attempting a dispassionate biography faces a daunting task. In Catalonia in the 1990s Aulina's institution is just beginning to outlive its long fight for respect and the bitter memory of divided families.
Maria Maddalena Marcucci, the Passionist nun who corresponded with Evarista Galdós and Magdalena Aulina, spent the years 1935 to 1941 directing the construction of a shrine to Gemma Galgani in Lucca. She returned to Spain in 1941, stayed briefly with Magdalena Aulina in Banyoles, and went on to found the Passionist house in Madrid. After her death people learned she was the writer J. Pastor. The Dominicans of Salamanca have published her autobiography and letters. Her beatification is under examination.[30]
María Magdalena de Jesús Sacramentado to Sabino Lozano, Girona, 9 August 1941, in Marcucci, En la cima, 369. Marcucci may have visited Aulina again in Barcelona in 1957 (En la cima, 645). In San Sebastián in 1941 she stayed with a wealthy woman who had taken a great interest in the visions of Ezkioga, Sofía Olaso de Chalbaud (En la cima, 372, and Marcucci, Autobiografía, 531).
The Sisters of Charity of Santa Ana purged the cause for the beatification of Madre Rafols of its spurious aspects and, with the assistance of the historian José Ignacio Tellechea, reintroduced it on a sound historical basis. Pope John Paul II beatified Rafols on 16 October 1994. The complex at Vilafranca is just to the right of the superhighway linking Barcelona and Tarragona.
The bland revelations of Marie Thérèse Desandais (known as Sulamitis) were relatively successful. Rome never condemned them. Based on Desandais's
devotion of Merciful Love, the Spanish nun María Josefa Alhama Valera (b. Santomera, Murcia, 1893, d. Collevalenza, Italy, 1983) founded an order of nuns in 1927 and of priests in 1953. Alhama Valera started her religious life as a nun in a small order in Villena which was absorbed by the Claretians. While she was a Claretian, she experienced a miraculous cure and began to have visions. The Claretians brought her to Madrid, and there with some of her companions in 1927 she founded the new order, the Slaves of Merciful Love, in which she took the name Madre Esperanza de Jesús. Because of a vision, she had a large crucifix made, which people immediately considered miraculous. In the early 1930s she set up four houses in Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. In 1941 the Holy Office called her to Rome for observation. There she stayed on, opening a soup kitchen at the end of the war. People consulted Madre Esperanza as a holy woman and sent her over three hundred thousand letters asking for prayer and counsel. The church is considering her beatification. Pilar Arratia, the wealthy Bilbao supporter of the Ezkioga visions who visited Thérèse Neumann, gave the order all she had and moved in with the founder in Rome, where she died during World War II. The optimistic message of Merciful Love found more appeal in the 1960s, and Pope John XXIII himself visited the shrine at Collevalenza.[31]
For origins of Esclavas, Mondrone, "Madre Speranza," Pujades, Padre Postius, 336-342; for Pilar Arratia, Josefa Akesolo, Bilbao, 15 June 1993. Madre Esperanza unsuccessfully tried to get Doroteo Irízar, who had supported the Ezkioga visions, to found her order of priests. In 1941, after the archbishop of La Habana decided against the distribution of the Sulamitis leaflets in his diocese, many bishops got the idea that the devotion had been condemned; Arxiu Vidal i Barraquer, vol. 2, part 3, pp. 633-634, and Sáenz de Tejada, Bibliografía, 25. As late as 1950, however, there were six monthly masses dedicated to the devotion in six different churches in San Sebastián.
The Belgian Catholic activist Léon Degrelle went on to win notoriety as a commander in the Waffen SS on the Russian front. On the last day of the war he escaped by airplane to Spain, where he became a citizen. Though the Belgian government condemned him to death as a traitor, he led a relatively peaceful life in Fuengirola. He was periodically in the news for denying that the Holocaust ever occurred. He did not answer my letter about his trip to Ezkioga—surely a minor episode in a life filled with headlines; he died 2 April 1994.
Fernand Remisch and his friend Ennemond Boniface, the vision aficionados who in the mid-1930s centered their interest on Ezkioga, continued to visit the German mystic Thérèse Neumann until she died in 1962. Remisch died the following year. In 1983 his widow, dying of cancer in a Dijon hospital, gave me photographs by Raymond de Rigné of the Ezkioga seers, her husband's copies of Burguera's and Rigné's books, and the complete set of L'Enigme d'Ezkioga . She told me about her husband's life and asked why I had not come years earlier. No one else cared, she said.[32]
Widow of Fernand Remisch, Dijon, 17 December 1983.
Raymond de Rigné left hundreds of glass plates of the Ezkioga seers in the attic of the house he had rented in France and told his neighbor and friend Simone Duro to look out for them because some day someone would come for them. When I did come it was too late, for they had been broken up and carted off. But Mme. Duro gave me many of the couple's books, which would otherwise have been impossible to locate.
After the Rignés' imprisonment and expulsion from Spain in 1937, they had gone to a receiving center for Spanish refugees in Bayonne. The center placed them in Bidache, about thirty kilometers inland from Bayonne and an equal
distance from the Spanish border. There, on the eve of World War II, Marie-Geneviève Thirouin distinguished herself by publishing patriotic verse against appeasement of the Nazis in the national organ of Action Nationale. In 1942 she published a similar poem, reworked, in an anthology of miserable verses praising Marshall Pétain. The couple returned to the Ezkioga area in 1944 and then lived in Madrid from 1945 to 1947. Back at Ezkioga Thirouin completed a movie script and Rigné spent much of his time drawing and making sculptures. He claimed that the president of the United States was very interested in his Mutual Credit scheme and was sure to call him to test it in one of the states.[33]
Thirouin poem in L'Indépendant, 5 November 1938; poem, "L'Appel des Morts," 1942; for Mutual Credit scheme, letter from Rigné to a friend in Melilla, Ezkioga, 17 May 1949, private collection.
They returned to France around 1950, going first to the French Basque seaside town of Guéthary.Tracing Rigné and Thirouin in southern France was an adventure. In Guéthary I could find no notice in the town records. Finally I located a retired town employee who recalled that they had caused a lot of trouble. In 1952 he had identified Rigné by his handwriting as the person who had sent an anonymous letter to the town council at the time of the elections. He said Rigné was "twisted," not a bad person, but bad-natured. He sent me on to the Rignés' landlady and to a woman whose daughter had run errands for them in Bayonne, where Rigné had laid out large sums to print photographs.
The landlady thought that from Guéthary the couple had gone to Bidache. There I found the house where they had lived, Mme. Duro, their neighbor, her cache of books, and the sad tale of the glass plates. She said that when the Rignés first arrived, during the Spanish Civil War, people had pitied them. Rigné took a job as assistant to the notary public and Thirouin helped in the nursery school. But they were difficult people. Rigné got into trouble by leaking the notary's secrets—a rich family was secretly paying to maintain some children through the notary and Rigné let the secret out, so the notary fired him. It may have been at that point that the couple went back to Spain.
When they returned to Bidache in the early 1950s to live in a big house behind the church, they were a cross that the town became resigned to bearing. Thirouin spent spells in depression in various mental homes. Neither would stoop to working, so they were very poor. Mme. Duro, who had a kind of exasperated affection for them, says Thirouin did not even know how to sew a button. This impoverished couple nonetheless considered themselves superior to the villagers who were their only source of help, and this attitude did not endear them to the village.
Rigné died near Dax, on 20 September 1956, at age seventy-three. Thirouin wrote news of his death to her friends at Ezkioga.
On September 8 we had celebrated the twenty-sixth anniversary of our wedding. Twenty-six years … and twelve days! But, more than ever, I feel myself his wife, more than ever I must work for him, just for him, making
sure he survives in his work. It was his only ambition, and I must fulfill it…. This way this soul so beautiful will begin to shine on a world that is fast falling apart.
She had him buried in his family tomb in Touraine and then went back to Bidache. When she died sometime after 1958, an acquaintance from Bordeaux collected their goods. He was, however, totally uninterested in the Ezkioga material. Mme. Duro threw out the plates and cases of copies of the renamed version of Rigné's book about Ramona.[34]
Martin Halsouet and Mme. Estaló, Guéthary, and Simone Duro, Bidache, all 6 April 1983; and Simone Duro, Bidache, 28 June 1990. Quote from Maria Genoveva de la Ville de Rigné, Condesa de Morville, to friends at Ezkioga, Lanot-Dax, 30 November 1956, and Bidache, 27 December 1958.
During the Spanish Civil War the Valladolid priest Baudilio Sedano maintained Padre Burguera in Rome with money from a woman supporter. Sometime after the war Sedano recovered the copies of Burguera's Ezkioga book Los Hechos de Ezquioga from its hiding place in Elorrio and stashed it in the convent where he lived. In Valladolid the center of Ezkioga enthusiasm was the house of the organist of the cathedral, and Padre Burguera visited frequently. In the early 1950s, always alert to new visions and visionaries, Sedano took under his wing an eleven-year-old girl seer and her family and with money from wealthy contributors in Bilbao bought them an estate that was the basis for a new religious institute. This new project absorbed Sedano's allegiance and his small salary; once the Bilbao patrons withdrew he begged money from all and sundry and lived miserably himself in order to maintain it. One of his sources of income, however slight, was Burguera's book, which he supplied to a Catholic bookstore in Barcelona. He refused to enter a hospice until his papers were safely in the hands of another believing priest. He died a pauper on 12 January 1986.
After waiting in Rome for a response from the Vatican to his book, Burguera returned to Sueca in Valencia. In 1944 he wrote to the owner of the Hotel Urola in Zumarraga:
Believe me, María, as you would believe the Symbol of the Faith, that from mid-November 1931, when for the first time I was there and in your house, up to the present, I have done nothing but dedicate myself to the Virgin of Ezquioga. It has been thirteen years of intense work and I have written ten volumes. For the one I wrote there, they tried to offer me sixty thousand pesetas to destroy it . How horrible! And in October 1933 when I left your hotel, it was because I was persecuted and hunted to be killed, a death the Virgin saved me from, saves me from (for I am still persecuted), and will save me from (I am seeing and I will see the persecutors of the Virgin of Ezquioga go down disastrously to their graves).
I have been twice to Rome, and spent the war there, and the pope, to whom I declared the truth of everything, BELIEVES in the apparitions of the Virgin of Ezquioga, because he sees that everything the Virgin said has come true and is coming true. And to finish: Ezquioga will triumph. My book, which is that of the Virgin, will be approved. In Ezquioga a great shrine
will be built for the entire Catholic world. When? Soon. I know the date. You will see that I am right, and the enemies will be swept away.[35]
Burguera to María Josefa Maté, Sueca, 29 March 1944.
That Padre Burguera "knew" the date of the approval of his book suggests that he was still in contact with seers. I confirmed this supposition with his disciple Juan Castells in Sueca in 1983. Castells moved into Burguera's chalet/seminary in 1946. There he helped Burguera to guide a small circle of like-minded persons in the ways of "prayer and penance," as instructed by the Virgin of Ezkioga. By their example and prayers, they hoped to convince others of the truth of the apparitions. Castells asked me if I wanted to be a saint, "because if you want to be a saint, I can show you how; you will live better with fewer things."
His eyes glistened with tears as he told me that Padre Burguera, who had been like a father for him, died on 27 December 1960, at the age of eighty-eight. We were sitting in a prayer room; there were about a dozen chairs along the walls. When Burguera was in Rome, the republicans had burned the books in the house and used it as a school for children evacuated from Madrid. Castells told me there were prayer groups in several towns. After Padre Amado died, they had had other priest directors and priests had come to visit from elsewhere. They continued under visionary guidance.
Until her death Benita Aguirre continued to provide divine information to the group. After studying with women in Girona, she was also cared for by a noblewoman, "her godmother." This lady had houses in Toroella de Montgrí, Barcelona, and elsewhere and took her to see Magdalena Aulina and to visit Lourdes. Benita Aguirre also spent time at Padre Burguera's estate in Sueca and a few months at a school in La Laguna (Tenerife) where a priest from Legorreta was a chaplain.[36]
On Benita's later years see Juan Castells, Sueca, 6 December 1983; Benita's companion and her brother Jesús Aguirre, Madrid, 19 May 1984; her sister Victoria Aguirre, Legazpi, 6 February 1986. Her "godmother" appears to have been in touch with Cardinal Segura in Rome in 1933 (Cardús to Ayerbe, 11 October 1933).
In 1942 when Benita, about nineteen years old, decided to go to Paris, Burguera opposed the idea, even though she told him the Virgin wanted her to go. In her visions Benita had always emphasized that Paris was a place of perdition. This dispute caused a falling-out between them, at least according to Baudilio Sedano, who concluded that the devil had confused her.[37]
Baudilio Sedano de la Peña, Valladolid, 12 December 1983.
In Paris she attended classes at the Sorbonne and eventually married an architect and interior decorator, with whom in the early 1950s she had a child. Around 1955 she separated from her husband and moved to Madrid, found a nanny-companion to live with her, and settled into a comfortable apartment on the Paseo del Castellano. She received financial help and oranges, rice, and vegetables from Burguera's estate in Sueca after her husband died in 1964, and the little household led a quiet, pleasant life. Known as María, Benita took vacations in La Coruña, Vigo, Santander, Salou, and three times in Marbella. Several times she went to Fatima, once to Limpias, and occasionally to Sueca and Valladolid.From what Benita's younger brother and her female companion said, Ezkioga marked Benita for life. She was devoted to the Virgin and knew a lot about
religion. She enjoyed the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the works of Teresa de Avila. She went to mass, sometimes at the shrine of Santa Gemma, but not regularly. She did not go to the new apparition sites like Garabandal or Cerdanyola, but once, talking about people who doubted the El Escorial seer Amparo Cuevas, she said, "That always happens; why should she be saying lies?" Benita's brother and her companion agreed that she did not like the church or priests.
[Her companion]: About priests and the church she would say, "God did not say that. Jesus Christ did not send that. They are men like everyone else. They make mistakes as well."
[Benita's brother]: I heard her say many times: "I have known and I know priests who are authentic saints, who are setting an example wherever they are. And I have known others who with the example they have given and are giving have made it so the Church is where it is now."
She preferred direct contact with God and the Virgin and would sometimes stay up late talking learnedly and obsessively with her companion and a neighbor on the subject. She was also knowledgeable about art and literature.
All this time, according to Juan Castells, Benita supplied the Valencia believers with divine communiqués. When I said this, her companion was perplexed. Benita-María's remarkable self-control was such that in twenty-seven years with her companion she never mentioned anything about her past as a seer. One of her obsessions was the telephone: she always insisted on answering it herself, especially on her deathbed in the hospital. She explained the money from Sueca as coming from her father and godmother. Her companion remembers that one day, years before her death, she burned all her papers in the incinerator of the apartment building and watched to see that the fire consumed them all.
Benita spent some of her time painting, a pastime she picked up from her husband. But she also took a deep and continued interest in those around her. She helped the civil guards in Madrid just as her family had cleaned the clothes of the soldiers in a field hospital in Legazpi. From her window Benita-María could see the pair of guards stationed in front of the Soviet embassy, outdoors in sun, rain, or snow for hours on end. So she started taking them thermos bottles of coffee every day, and she wrote to ABC and El Alcazar (the latter printed the letter) around 1980, protesting that the men had no shelter in bad weather. The embassy finally put up a shelter.
On the night of the attempted coup of 23 February 1981, Benita was very upset because she was sure the Civil Guard would not do such a thing. The next day she took one of her paintings and asked to see the head of the force, Aramburu Topete. When she was finally allowed in, she explained that she felt bad for the guards, both because of what people were doing to them in her own Basque Country and because of their current predicament, and she wanted to
leave the painting as a testimony of her respect. When Aramburu later found what she had done at the embassy, he sent her a moving letter of thanks.
Benita was not afraid of death; many times she said she looked forward to it. On 2 June 1982 she died a painful death of leukemia. She thought she contracted the disease in the many times she donated blood by a primitive vein-to-vein method, for which she was on call at Madrid hospitals. No longer incognito, Benita once more, she was buried in Legazpi. Her mother had accompanied her day in and day out to Ezkioga and was present in many photographs taken during the visions but had let her escape to anonymity when the opposition of the diocese and the force of public opinion became too strong for the family to bear; she died just four months before her daughter.
16.
Questions Without Answers
The Questions
What will happen to me when I die? Why did disaster strike me? What will occur tomorrow? next week? in a thousand years? How did everything begin? How will it all end?
We all want to know more than we can know. From the moment the seers at Ezkioga connected with heavenly beings, people used the new circuit to ask questions. The questions they asked point to problems that the design of the Catholic religion, the political economy of Western society, and the human condition itself raise but cannot resolve. My father committed suicide; is he now in heaven, purgatory, or hell? My husband does not go to church; is he in a state of grace? My son is retarded; can he be cured? My sister is blind; can she regain her sight? Is God angry or pleased with me and my family?
The internal logic of Catholicism governed how people put these questions. And people asked them only after addressing prior doubts: Do the Virgin, the saints, the devil, and God exist? Is the Virgin here? or is this the
devil in disguise? Does the Virgin speak to humans? Is this seer really talking to her?
Religion gives order to people's emotions and meaning to their lives. The way any religion does so raises problems even as it solves others. This is the nature of a dynamic system. Normal procedures have unsettling by-products.
Like most religions, Catholicism left unclear where individuals went after death. The partial solution—a purgatory from which most people eventually went to heaven—was not solution enough. For those whose dear ones died suddenly or without absolution or in a dubious state of grace or totally out of the church, it was no solution at all. Survivors yearned for news about loved ones who were in danger of damnation. The apostasy of much of Europe in the Reformation and in the age of progress strained purgatory to the limit. The living knew they had to put the dead to rest. For the living purgatory raised as many worries as it resolved. The living could shorten the suffering of loved ones in purgatory, but only if they knew for sure that loved ones were there and only if they found out what to do. Ghosts came only rarely with this kind of news. Contact with the Virgin Mary was more efficient: she could answer questions about many different souls and could even intervene to help them.
Yet this uncertainty in final destination was to the immense advantage of the church. It could direct behavior by establishing rewards and disincentives with indulgences and jubilees in much the way modern states use tax codes. And uncertainty had an emotional and moral logic. The despair of a living relative at the sure condemnation of a loved one would be too much to bear, and theologians avoided stating categorically that any particular person was damned.[1]
Alonso Getino, Del gran número, 35-48.
Conversely, the salvation of egregious sinners, were it to be known, might reward or encourage sin. So the stipulation of an afterlife organized in thus-and-such a way without certainty of destination served the organization and helped maintain an ethical order.This gap between what people knew and what they wanted to know was especially troubling for rural Basques. Members of a Basque household were responsible not just for the family dead but also for the household dead. Neighbors had obligations to the dead of neighbors. The living formed a web of collective responsibility for the eternal repose of souls they might not even have known. But the problem is not just Basque, not just from the 1930s, and not just Catholic. People depend on one another and this dependency continues after one of them dies. We find it especially difficult to part with those who die before their time. Writing about a woman she knows, a Galician physician put it this way: "The official explanations about life after death do not satisfy her, and she continually wants to know about the destination and the state of the spirits of her dead."[2]
Personal communication, Ana González Vázquez, Santiago de Compostela, May 1993.
There are other dilemmas. The scrupulous can never rest easy. Was my confession complete? What did I forget, repress, silence, or half-explain? Was a
transgression major? Or was it minor? While priests can give absolution for sins, the possibility of new sins begins the moment you leave the confessional. Priests have various answers to these questions; it depends on which clergyman you consult. And the scrupulous worry that priests make mistakes. So finding peace with God can be hard for the living as well as the dead. Those for whom grace is a minute-to-minute struggle search for relief, and we find the devout wanting to know how they stand straight from the divine.
Is Spain, Catalonia, the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Zumarraga in a state of sin or a state of grace? It is even harder for groups to determine their spiritual standing than it is for individuals. For social bodies there is no sacrament of confession and no absolution. Yet the rhetoric of Catholicism, like that of many other religions, constantly refers to polities as responsible moral units. Since ancient times town governments have made vows, sacred contracts of obligation and allegiance, to particular sacred figures on behalf of inhabitants. The consecration of households, towns, and even nations to the Sacred Heart of Jesus revived this procedure. At El Cerro de los Angeles outside Madrid in 1919 King Alfonso XIII unilaterally consecrated Spain to the Sacred Heart. Some city governments erected oversize statues of Jesus in prominent locations. Non-Catholics and liberal Catholics hotly contested the revival. In 1932 and 1933 non-Catholic town councils removed these statues, most notably in Bilbao. In other places people bombed and defaced them.[3]
For Bilbao see BOOV, 1 March 1933, pp. 103-108; vivid description of destruction of image in a village in Jaén during carnival 1932 in La Verdad (Pamplona), 8 May 1932, p. 4, from Pueblo Católico, Jaén, 23 February 1932. When the Second Republic was proclaimed in 1931 some men allegedly tried to place a phrygian hat and republican banner on the Sacred Heart at El Cerro de los Angeles, according to Semanario Católico de Reus, 6 June 1931, p. 391.
In the long history of religious apparitions, saints addressed towns, cities, and nations as moral bodies, offering protection in exchange for devotion. In some apparitions the divinity made it clear that it was punishing the town for its immorality. But there were other visions in times of disease or battle in which the holy figure seemed simply to be providing celestial help and sharing in the travail of the human group. In the eighteenth century Bernardo de Hoyos heard the Sacred Heart voice a preference for Spain; in the nineteenth century Catherine Labouré heard Mary prefer France. Such appearances were rewards rather than punishments. Some Italians took the apparitions in the Papal States in 1796 and 1797 as a reward for massive public penitential processions. The apparitions started in Ancona when the troops of Napoleon were on the point of invading. Subsequently in over fifty towns people saw celestial signs of support—images opening eyes or smiling, candles lighting themselves, holy bodies revolving in their coffins to turn and face the town—all usually after prayers at mass.[4]
Christian, Local Religion and Apparitions; Cattaneo, "Gli Occhi di Maria."
Given the recurrence of apparitions as warning and as moral support, it is clear that at least in times of trouble many Catholics want to know the attitude of the divine toward human groups as moral bodies.Was the Virgin appearing to a virtuous Basque Country or to a sinful Spain? Were there sins enough in the Basque Country, with its working-class indifference and sybaritic beaches, to provoke her tears? Engracio de Aranzadi, a devout Nationalist, was sure that the apparitions were signs of divine support for
Euskadi. But the signs were ambiguous: after all, it was the Sorrowing Mother who appeared, and she was in evident distress. Hence the essential, anguished question Ramona Olazábal put to the Virgin on 23 July 1931: "Do you appear because we are good or because we are sinners?"[5]
"The Virgin did not answer, but the angels smiled" (PV, 24 July 1931).
Where do we stand?This yearning for certainty about the intrinsically uncertain applies to grace in another sense.[6]
Pitt-Rivers, "Grace in Anthropology."
Some people obtain more grace than others. Like the grace from a bishop giving a blessing or offering his ring to be kissed, the blessing from the pope for a well-connected wedding, the baraka available in holy bones or special sacred images, or the touch of holy water, holy earth, or a holy twig or leaf, this kind of grace is there for the asking. You can accumulate it. And there is no end to the enterprise: the cup is never full. Visions immediately become a way to garner personalized grace. Many of the Catalan pilgrims to Limpias returned to Barcelona with some kind of glance from the Christ; so too many returned from Ezkioga with a divine smile or a cryptic phrase a seer passed on from the Virgin. Every member of a seer's entourage in every session hoped for some heavenly attention. Those without reward experienced their exclusion with anguish. In daily life there was no way to know if you were accumulating blessings, but at Ezkioga you could know.Groups seek to know they have God's blessing as much as individuals do. Surely the Aliadas, the Parish Exercises movement, and the Obra of Magdalena Aulina were not the only organizations convinced they had found a special grace from the Virgin on the Ezkioga hillside. Other religious orders claimed a special relation to other apparitions: some Claretians and Dominicans to Fatima, some Jesuits to Paray-le-Monial, and some Capuchins to Limpias.
How will my illness turn out? On which day should I take a trip? Should I leave in the morning or in the afternoon? Some believers also wanted guidance in secular matters. For those of a providentialist turn, the kind that predominated at Ezkioga from 1932, every event, act, and sensation had deeper meaning. Providentialism was one of the main currents among Basque seminarians and priests in the 1930s.[7]
Baroja, El Cura de Monleón, 46-47; Apolito, Cielo in terra, 216.
The bishop Manuel Irurita and the parish priest Amundarain were prime examples. And Magdalena Aulina led her Catalan followers into a system in which Gemma governed every turn and might reward any act with perfume. Followers wrote Aulina for advice on the most trivial matters. So this was yet another dilemma: if all is providential, how can the individual discover what providence wants him/her to do? Such persons needed not just spiritual direction but secular direction as well. Through the seers, it seemed they could get such guidance directly from heaven.Some questions were more philosophical. Why do the wicked often prosper and the righteous often fail? Why is there injustice and inequality? Why is there sin? For those believing the apocalyptic visions the seers brought a solution to the existence of evil. The reign of the Sacred Heart would right the age-old signs of a bad world. The wicked would perish in the great chastisement, there would
be no more sin, all would speak the same language, and the dead would rejoin the living.
No human agency seemed to be concerned with these questions: the reigning rationalism could not bless or forgive social groups; it left chance, progress, and contingency in charge. And the church sometimes hindered more than it helped. For it stood between people and their dead and people and their gods, and it told people what they could or could not see or hear. At Ezkioga women and children challenged the male priests' tight control over the distribution of grace and access to the other world. With flowers, messages, and blessed rosaries the seers gave absolution, distributed grace, and answered the unanswered questions.
The apparitions were in part a rebellion by an agrarian world still close to the spirits against a system of explanation, a distribution of blessings, and an access to heaven people found unfair. In effect, seers and believers were rejecting the city and the world of commerce that devalued rural sharing and mutual help.[8]
Schneider, "Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism." Estornés Zubizarreta, "Las Apariciones de Ezkioga," 590, calls the Ezkioga phenomenon "one of the last gasps of Basque pre-industrial society."
But the mass response to visions in the twentieth century throughout the Catholic world demonstrates that the essential issues are not just rural. While Medjugorje and other prominent vision sites are in rural locations, the tens of millions of pilgrims who have gone there are largely urban residents who share a need for answers that their parishes and societies do not provide.Hope and Anguish
For many people the apparitions at Ezkioga were simply a great divine event. These people went to the site as they might go to see a solar eclipse. For them Ezkioga was part of a skein of divine intervention that ran back for centuries. In this skein trances, messages, and prophecies repeated and adapted themselves. Seers heard and read what had gone on in the past and what was going on elsewhere; they knew the religious orders and shrines that visions had inspired in the past and present, in Spain and elsewhere.
The skein took on meaning and maintained coherence in a more practical way. "Carriers" were at work before Ezkioga, persons dedicated to receiving, understanding, and propagating communications from the divine. In the last years of sixteenth-century Madrid connoisseurs quite like Padre Burguera elicited the political dreams of Lucrecia de León. The French prophet Thomas Martin had his expert Louis Silvy, Catharine Labouré had Père Aladel, the Italian David Lazzaretti had two priests of the Congregation of San Felipe Neri and the monarchist Le Vachat, and Anna Katerina Emmerich had Clemens Brentano. The type is entirely recognizable and surely goes back to the time of Moses.[9]
Kagan, Lucrecia's Dreams, 86-113; Boutry and Nassif, Martin l'Archange, 69-70, 93-94; Lazzareschi, David Lazzaretti, 102, 190; Staehlin, Apariciones, 347-349.
These carriers passed on meaning and enthusiasm like a torch, from one set of visions to another. Several of our protagonists connected Limpias with Ezkioga. Both Juan Bautista Ayerbe and Catholic activist María de Echarri had previously interpreted the visions of the Christ of Limpias. Juan José Echezarreta,
The Virgin of Fatima enters Terrassa on García Cascón's car, 13
October 1951. Courtesy Arxiu Salvador Cardús i Florensa, Terrassa
owner of the Ezkioga field, had gone to Limpias, had a vision, and wept there. Joaquín Sicart, chief photographer at Ezkioga, had been cured after a vision at Limpias in 1919, as had the priest Francisco Aguirre, who took down Evarista Galdós's messages. Remigio Gandásegui, the archbishop of Valladolid who encouraged Baudilio Sedano's interest in Ezkioga, had been the most assiduous episcopal visitor to Limpias. Raimundo Galdeano was a Navarrese farmer who linked Ezkioga both to Limpias and Piedramillera. By paying for parish missions by the Capuchins who stimulated the visions at Limpias, he unwittingly prepared a zone of Navarra for visions in 1920. He paid for a mission in the Barranca in 1931, when he accompanied a seer from Lizarraga to Ezkioga.
The skein runs forward as well as backward. Many of the major propagandists took their agendas from Ezkioga to subsequent visions in other parts of Spain and Europe. Raymond de Rigné wrote about the apparitions of Assisi and La Codosera. Several of the seers from Torralba de Aragón in 1931 went to Cuevas de Vinromà in 1947 for the great miracle, and Padre Burguera talked to the seer there. Salvador Cardús was in Solsona when to enormous excitement a traveling image of the Virgin of Fatima entered the town. He immediately bought an image to install in Terrassa. On 13 October 1951 the statue entered the city
on top of Rafael García Cascón's car. Three children dressed as the shepherd seers met it in the town square. García Cascón himself never ceased his frenetic visits to apparition sites, whether Fatima, Lourdes, La Codosera, Garabandal, Monte Umbe, or Cerdanyola. He always wanted the cars to go fast and he opposed rest stops. He brought the Utrera seer María Marín to his house in Terrassa and almost had a heart attack when a woman seer at El Palmar de Troya told him he held the Baby Jesus in his arms.[10]
Rigné to director of ABC (Madrid), Zumarraga, 27 February 1948, carbon copy, private collection. Cardús described the Fatima entry at length in an unpublished manuscript, ASC. For García Cascón: family member, Terrassa, 19 October 1985.
José Javier Martínez Sarrasa hunted out seers all over Spain. In particular, he made friends with those who had visions in La Codosera in 1945, but he also was acquainted with seers of Garabandal (Cantabria) in the 1960s. José Martínez Cajigas, a devout photographer who lived in Santander, took pictures for postcards at Limpias and Ezkioga; some of his descendants befriended the seers at Garabandal. Several seers from Gipuzkoa and many of their followers went to Garabandal in the 1960s. In turn busloads of Garabandal devotees visited the Ezkioga seer Rosario Gurruchaga in Bergara. I first heard of the Ezkioga visions in 1968 from my friend Jon Leemans, a Dutch devotee of Garabandal. He knew a Spanish diplomat who had been a correspondent of Juan Bautista Ayerbe and Pedro Balda and owned what was then, in 1968, one of the few copies of Burguera's book in circulation. In the 1950s and 1960s Padre Pio, the Italian Capuchin, served for many of these people as the same kind of spiritual fulcrum as Thérèse Neumann did in the 1930s.[11]
McKevitt, "San Giovanni Rotondo," and his doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics. For the worldwide aspect of the modern phenomena, see Stirrat, Power and Religiosity.
Some of the older surviving devotees in Gipuzkoa and Navarra went to the visions that started at Monte Umbe near Bilbao in the 1970s. The Basque believers are in touch with newer Catalan groups, like one in Barcelona called the White Army.[12]Basque believers in Ezkioga showed me a number of mimeographed sheets, for example, Felix Sesma, "Ejército Blanco de María Madre, Circular," Barcelona, 6 January 1970, 1 page, announcing special grace for a select few who resist the devil's dominion over the world as apocalyptic events approach, and Félix Sesma, "Consideraciones, Marzo 1971: El Ejército Blanco como tremendo anuncio de Dios y como Ilamada de la Reina de Cielos y Tierra," 5 pages, mimeo.
Juan Roig Gironella, a Jesuit who counseled the seers on the outskirts of Barcelona in the 1970s, told me his mother had been one of the Catalan pilgrims to Ezkioga in the 1930s. His opinion was that all apparitions start out being authentic and then because of a lack of spiritual direction almost all get on the wrong track.Visions spawn devotions. Devotions lead to cures. Cures elicit visions. Some persons cured miraculously feel they have special grace, much as survivors of lightning bolts are thought to have a gift for healing. Thérèse Neumann, Magdalena Aulina, La Madre Esperanza, Anna Pou i Prat, and María Agueda Aguirre began their visions after cures. Pepita Pugés, a visionary who started a shrine in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near Barcelona, in the 1970s, had been cured at Lourdes.
Starting in the early 1970s a specialized magazine, Maria Mensajera, and a publishing house, Editorial Círculo, have brought seers and believers of different Spanish visions in contact. The owner of both, Francisco Sánchez-Ventura y Pascual, has promoted certain apparition sites—to the point of buying land and erecting chapels. Since the end of compulsory church approval of religious literature, similar publishing houses and magazines have sprung up throughout the Catholic world. A growing body of Catholics consumes this literature avidly.
The ephemeral nature of any particular event should not distract us from the vital, routine way grace makes credible and freshens ideals, dogmas, and rules. Any organization that is highly adaptive continually renews itself. Each of the Catholic church's established holy places, persons, times, and institutions was once fresh and exciting. The church depends on successive layers of creativity. In the constant process of renewal, grace plays a role similar to that of oxygen in the bloodstream or new water in a tide pool. For many Catholics grace is an energy that reawakens interest and provides hope and direction.
Contact with new grace in heavy concentrations can be intoxicating. The Spanish Jesuit Carlos María Staehlin judged it unhealthy and called it marvellism.[13]
Staehlin, Apariciones, 72-91. Carlos Maria Staehlin and the English jesuit Herbert Thurston were exceptional in their careful attention to contemporary "marginal" religious enthusiasms and devotions in Catholicism. Kenneth L. Woodward's Making Saints is a more recent, sensitive study.
Visions, stigmatics, prophets, new devotions, new institutes, and new sources of grace in trees, soil, stones, and water make up a kind of ever-changing (yet never changing) world. It is a world unto itself, and some devout persons like Burguera and Ayerbe dwell almost entirely within it, moving from one hot spot to another.For those who are a part of this inspired environment, a kind of luminous community develops.[14]
Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage.
I experienced this gentle, generous mood vicariously when I lived in the town of San Sebastián de Garabandal in the late 1960s. The remote mountain village was then paradoxically a crossroads for Catholic enthusiasm in the Western world. Many of the pilgrims who turned up there in search of divine help and love were open and vulnerable. They shared their experiences and their sorrows and listened well to those of others. The cuadrillas of Ezkioga believers were rather more intense, but we have seen the joy they found in penitential prayer.Sacralization is a process, but institutional religions like to understand the sacred as inherent. A place is either sacred or profane; it cannot be part-sacred, part-profane. Such an attitude toward places applies as well to persons, doctrines, visions, and organizations.[15]
See Christian, Sr., Doctrines of Religious Communities.
Because this attitude limits what evidence the public can have access to, it affects the thinking even of outsiders. Traditional church history—until recently the only history of these matters—tends to exclude the outer margin of enthusiasm. We have many documents for apparitions to which the church has granted credence, but few for those the church shunned. It discreetly files away its careful compilations about persons it judges insufficiently saintly, places it deems unworthy of cult, devotions it holds dubious, stigmatics it considers to be fakes, prophecies it judges spurious. Virtually all we know from the church about persons, visions, and orders are success stories. The failures and half-saints, the orders and obras and institutes the church culled—and these are surely the vast majority—are unavailable.Yet, as at Ezkioga, much religious excitement occurs precisely during the ambiguous period prior to church action, in the margins of what people know and what the church approves, around persons whose works, visions, or organizations the church has not yet judged, at places that are in doubt.[16]
Zarri, Finzione; Kleinberg, Prophets.
Part of theattraction of the not-yet-approved is precisely its novelty, its dynamic, changing nature, its very fragility. The believer can add little to approved, official devotions. By praying at new places, by venerating uncanonized holy people, by joining groups not yet approved, Catholics make a statement about the way heaven ought to be.
The church channels and domesticates religious enthusiasm by organizing memory. Here I understand the church to be a decentralized, collective, articulated process that serves the spiritual needs of Catholics and perpetuates itself, a community of memory with a particular purpose. The mass is a remembrance of the Passion of Christ, a remembrance in the body that entire societies learn by bending knees, by making the sign of the cross with the hands, by hearing a solemn story at the moment of consecration thousands of times over a lifetime, by ingesting the body and blood of Christ. Holy Week brings this memory alive. Those carrying the crosses and floats carry the weight of the cross to Calvary, and still in places there are those who flay themselves and prolong the physical memory of the flaying of Christ.[17]
Connerton, How Societies Remember; Mitchell, Passional Culture.
This exaltation of memory applies to the lives of saints. Religious orders, dioceses, and sodalities all depend on the enthusiasm of their members and their clients for survival and fruitfulness. By remembering particular people these societies define their mission. For the believer holy acts in the present show that God is inspiring individuals now; historical holy lives and holy acts demonstrate that God's wisdom and the Holy Spirit dwell in the organization and its rule.
My inquiries in dioceses and in religious orders about persons involved in the Ezkioga apparitions revealed a certain sensitivity and reticence. I found this difficulty to a lesser or greater extent in regard to memories about Amundarain, Aulina, Degrelle, Vallet, de la Torre, Irurita, Corbató, and Naya. Some—like Corbató, Naya, and Degrelle—their dioceses or orders would prefer to forget. Others had an involvement with Ezkioga that their communities now consider embarrassing.
But these people's stories, and that of Ezkioga as a whole, are necessary and useful. The selective memory that removed this story from church history, Spanish history, and Basque history removed the opportunity for us to learn from the phenomenon. Only through reflection on historical events in all their human detail can we understand a process and avoid the same tragic result. In 1931 Basques, Catalans, and Spaniards seized on people to voice collective hopes. For some of the children especially, the episode hopelessly distorted their lives and confused their family relations. Some lived with fear until their death.
Tens of thousands of older people in the Basque Country were left perplexed by what they saw and heard. The silence the bishop imposed left them ashamed of their own enthusiasm. They too need a historical explanation that makes these events understandable. Hundreds of families of the seers throughout Navarra and Gipuzkoa, especially the rural and small-town families who have not moved,
have borne the stigma of Ezkioga in total silence for sixty years. Whatever variations the seers themselves introduced, the visions at Ezkioga were a collaborative enterprise of hundreds of thousands of people in search of meaning and direction. At the turn of the century psychologists suggested that crowds responded to skilled persons who manipulated them, the meneurs . At Ezkioga the press, the religious and civic elites, and in the last analysis the general public were the meneurs. How else can we explain an entire Catholic society that delegated its direction to its children and to some of its least prestigious members? These seers gave voice to the society's hope.
Selective memory is a problem not just for the Basques, the church, churches, or institutions. Remembering and forgetting are equally important for all of us. But we generally conceal the way we accumulate, discard, and distribute meaning. In the rush of grace in time of upset—in the visions of Ezkioga as in the cargo cults of New Guinea or in the ghost dances of the American West—we can see the process at work more easily.[18]
See Fernandez, Bwiti.
The process works by trial and error. From an immense range of alternatives we reject some material even before we know it. By the nature of awareness itself, we are never aware of the alternatives. By the very way we know and perceive, we block out information that we cannot use. What remains as information, news, fact, is the recognizable and believable item.Before the church even starts to confer or deny holiness, people have been at work, consciously or unconsciously eliminating persons, times, places, and messages they consider inappropriate. At Ezkioga the public never saw certain seers and quickly dismissed others. There were vision sites the press in hundreds of articles never mentioned. Seers did not tell about certain supernatural figures—devils or witches, for example. People ridiculed certain visions and locations. Photographers did not portray bizarre visionary poses. People rejected some messages as demonic or invented. In short, there was a constant, intensive weeding out, the elimination of cultural material that did not fit. Conversely, there were rewards for seers who addressed certain problems—the collective predicament of Catholic Basques, Catalans, or Spaniards or the everyday problems of the dead, the missing, the unforgiven, the unabsolved. Wittingly or not, every person who went to see the visions or merely read a newspaper about them was doing this kind of evaluating and rewarding. Certain selectors and patrons played a powerful role in determining which visions and seers prevailed.
It must also be obvious by now, however, that the seers were not puppets of these forces or these guides. We have seen that some of them were better than others at understanding and serving the needs of the society, the general public, and the promoters. The seers who became famous were those who were most alert, sensitive to human feelings and needs, open to strangers, and able to absorb written material. These kinds of skills must also serve seers in other times and places.
After her husband's death, Marie de Rigné wrote that what he most wanted was for people to remember him. Some of the seers simply wanted people to know them while they were alive. But the events at Ezkioga had an internal dynamic and momentum that carried forward seers, believers, and disbelievers alike. This maelstrom of hope and anguish swept along many who had no thought of fame. Now, if not totally forgotten, they are all well on their way to oblivion. Let this work be a memorial to their spiritual adventure.