Carmen Medina y Garvey
Amundarain's cool distance contrasts with the active engagement of most of the other key believers at Ezkioga, including the second leader to arrive on the scene, Carmen Medina y Garvey, whose close contacts with seers—including Lolita Núñez, the girl from Ataun, Patxi Goicoechea, and Evarista Galdós—lasted for at least three years.
At the Casa de Pilatos in Seville I learned about Carmen from her nephew, Rafael Medina y Vilallonga, the former mayor of the city.[34]
Sevilla, 23 October 1989; Medina, Memorias.
He estimated that Carmen was about sixty years old in 1931. One of the ten children of the marquis of Esquivel and Dolores Garvey, she was very wealthy, for she inherited land from her father and money from the sherry fortune of her bachelor uncle, José Garvey. She became a nun in the convent of the Irlandesas in Seville, which she helped to restore with her money. She later left this convent and founded another of her own, but the new convent apparently did not survive.
Carmen Medina at the base of the Ezkioga hill before an automobile with diplomatic plates
and the stand of the photographer Joaquín Sicart, 1932 or 1933. Photo by Joaquín Sicart
Two of Carmen's sisters became nuns and a sister-in-law entered a convent when widowed. Carmen's sister María Josefa and her brother Luis married, respectively, the son and daughter of the couple, Rafaela Ibarra and José Vilallonga. In 1894 Rafaela Ibarra founded an order, the Instituto de los Santos Angeles Custodios, dedicated to the care of young women in danger of becoming prostitutes. Indeed, Rafaela has been beatified, and when I asked to speak to the family about a relative involved in religious visions, they thought I referred to her. José Vilallonga was the founder in Bilbao of Spain's biggest iron works. In the early twentieth century the alliance of Andalusian aristocrats with Basque industrialists was not unusual. The women of both families in this particular alliance had enduring religious interests and a social conscience. Carmen had other powerful relations, including the leader of the monarchist Unión Patriótica, who was the minister of public works under Primo de Rivera.
Carmen Medina's nephew and niece remember her as loving, high-spirited, and generous, but they were somewhat wary of talking about her, for they also thought her a little unstable and feared her enthusiasms might reflect badly on the family. It was my understanding, although this was left rather vague, that
she herself had had visions at some time in her life. The family, I gathered, thought of her as a beloved, credulous eccentric. They remember, for instance, when she announced to her nieces in San Sebastián that on a certain day a tidal wave would wipe out the city. She had learned this from a male seer, who had it from the Virgin. When the tidal wave failed to materialize, she went back to the seer, who told her (and she told her nieces) that when he saw the Virgin again, he noticed a tail sticking out from under her mantle and recognized the devil in disguise.[35]
Carmen Medina had over fifty nieces and nephews and provided them with swimming pools and tennis courts. On 18 March 1932 Luis Irurzun had a vision of the sea wiping out San Sebastián (B 657).
In late July Walter Starkie found Medina already ensconced in an Ezkioga fonda with two female companions.
Doña Carmen, in the intervals of putting Gargantuan morsels into her mouth, pontificated about everything. She apostrophized the girls who were serving the dinner; she abused the cook; she asked for the priests; she criticized the behavior of some of the young people at the religious service: her resonant voice echoed and reechoed through the house. I tried to crouch in my corner, but I knew that sooner or later I should be dragged within her sphere of influence and become a butt for her inquisitive questioning.
… she was one of those imperious women who declare their views but never wait for an answer. Such people's whole life is so rooted in assertion, that they only hear their own voices. Destiny fortunately deafens them to any other sound.[36]
S 121-122.
Medina assumed that Starkie was a pious Irish pilgrim, so she made no secret of her politics. She told him the Republic was a force of Satan.
Though [Carmen Medina] was a daily communicant and spent a great deal of the day in prayer, she was a very active and practical woman, and directed many organizations connected with the church and the exiled monarchy…. The Basque province and Navarra, in her opinion, would rise before long in defence of their religion. In my own mind I felt quite convinced that she was doing her best to use the Ezquioga apparitions as a political lever…. "Our Lady is appearing in order to inspire people to defend their religion. And I tell you that in many cases she is appearing, holding a sword dripping with blood."[37]
S 124-125.
Starkie saw a kind side as well. Carmen Medina was generous with the poor and spoke easily to everyone she met. But:
she was a fighter … she should have been fighting Moors at Granada and raising the Silver Cross above the minarets of the Prophet…. She longed for battle, and I saw her nostrils dilate like those of a war-horse when she described how civil war might come in a few weeks, with the Basques as the leaders of the revindication of the Church of Rome.
Carmen's family had a tradition of rebellion against liberal governments. Her paternal grandfather was a Carlist general. Her father, Francisco, and an uncle participated in the Carlist rebellion of 1873 and as a result her family spent two
years in exile in Portugal. From "Casa Blanca," the home in Seville of Carmen's widowed sister, General José Sanjurjo attempted to launch a monarchist coup in August 1932. One of Carmen's nephews was an active participant, and one of her brothers had to take refuge in France.[38]
For the Carlist past see the biography of Carmen's sister, Padron de Superioras, 17-18. For the Sanjurjo affair see S 125; Esteban Infantes, La Sublevación; Arrarás, Segunda República, 1:505-515; and Rafael Medina, Memorias, 131-135. For arrest of her brother Luis see VG, 19 November 1932.
María Dolores (Lolita) Núñez
Doña Carmen knew the original child seers and introduced them to Starkie, but by that time her interest, like that of Amundarain, had shifted to those who could provide messages. Her first great interest was in María Dolores Núñez, known as Lolita. Medina took Starkie in her car to pick up the eighteen-year-old seer and take her to the vision site.
Núñez was educated and refined; according to Starkie, she and her family were "poor members of the bourgeois class" who lived in a small second-floor apartment on the main street of Tolosa. By the time Starkie met her at the end of July, she had had seven visions and her name had appeared in print a dozen times. Her blurry and poignant photograph in El Pueblo Vasco was the first of a seer in vision. She would cry out to the Virgin to save Spain—it was probably this aspect that attracted Carmen Medina—and afterward she would report the Virgin's reaction.
The visions exhausted Lolita, but the excitement prevented her from sleeping at night. She told a reporter, "There is no human force that could resist so much magnificence and splendor. One feels a thousand times more blinded than when one looks at the sun." Her mother and older sister worried for her and opposed her visits to the site. One night in the room where the seers recovered Lolita declared, "Our Lady has told me that I must come here the next seven days, and I must depart from here and sing for joy in the streets." Starkie was disenchanted when Lolita came down to dinner afterward: "She had dwindled again to the fair typist with a good dose of coquettishness and pose" who confided that she had a boyfriend who knew nothing about the visions. Starkie played his violin for her that night and left early the next morning. Lolita's name appeared no more in the press after July 31; no one made postcards of her. If she returned the seven times the Virgin requested, I find no record, nor, alas, do I know if she sang in the streets. Her name meant nothing to the old-time believers left in Tolosa in the 1980s.[39]
PV, 14 July 1931, p. 7; S 141-142, 145-150.
Lolita was one of several seers that Carmen promoted among friends and relatives. At Ezkioga Starkie met Medina's elderly cousin, the duke of T'serclaes. The duke was a fixture of the San Sebastián summer set and Mateo Múgica used to stay in his house on the Calle Serrano on his trips to Madrid. Carmen's sister María, the duchess of Tárifa, went to pray for her husband, and one seer, after consulting the Virgin, assured the duchess that he would recover. A sister-in-law, the countess of Campo Rey, was at Ezkioga in December.[40]
S 130; Moreda, "Mateo Múgica," 222; L 10; R 56, 4 December 1931.
María Dolores Núñez, 12 July 1931, the night of her
first vision. From El Pueblo Vasco, 14 July 1931.
Courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal, San Sebastian
Carmen is almost certainly the grand dame a visitor described in early August as "the confidante of the most interesting seers" who assured visitors that the great miracle would come soon. She took particular interest in two seers from Ataun, both of whom learned "secrets" from the Virgin and claimed knowledge of the timing and content of the upcoming miracle.[41]
Lassalle, PN, 9 August 1931.
Ramona's Friend, the Girl from Ataun
By early October a girl seer, age eighteen, from Ataun had become inseparable from Ramona. Like Ramona, she too was from a farm and had worked as servant
to a prominent family in Ordizia. Her hands were those of señorita, and there is a photograph of her sitting at a Singer sewing machine. Her visions had started on July 12, four days before those of Ramona. They were quite detailed and received wide publicity. The Virgin first spoke to her, she said, on July 16. At the end of the month she was seeing the Virgin several times daily.[42]
Picavea, PV, 6 and 11 November 1931; ED, 17, 26, and 29 July 1931; PN, 22 July 1931.
In August she gave a special blessing from the Virgin to a Catalan cleric who had singled her out of the mass of seers. She claimed to have a vision every time she went to the hillside; by September 27 she had had them on forty-one days. Like Ramona she was conspicuously good-natured and felt no call to the cloisters.[43]
Elías, CC, 19 August 1931; Farre, EM, 8 October 1931; Cardús to Rafael García Cascón, 13 October 1931; PV, 20 October 1931.
This girl, Ramona, and an unnamed Tolosa seer helped one another when in trance. They stayed together on the morning of October 15. When Ramona's hands started to bleed, the Ataun girl was probably the seer who announced to the crowd, "The Virgin has cut her with swords and now places a rosary around her waist!" The next morning as the public pressed to kiss Ramona's hands, she, the Tolosa seer, and Ramona talked to reporters together.[44]
Detailed accounts of events on October 15 in Easo, 16 October 1931; and in my interview with Pío Montoya, San Sebastián, 7 April 1983, p. 7.
At that time a family from Bilbao was pampering both the Ataun girl and Ramona. Julio de Lecue was a stockbroker and his brother José was a painter and sculptor. They had nieces the age of Ramona and her friend. José in particular was close to Ramona, and in mid-October she began to dictate to him what she saw in her visions.[45]
R 60; PV, 17 October 1931.
On the morning of Ramona's miracle José de Lecue refused to leave her side, which prevented an effective search by the Aliadas. He was one of the two men who carried Ramona down the hill in a chair. On the days after the miracle some reporters briefly suspected him of having made the wounds on her hands. Another suspect was a confidence man and pickpocket who had allegedly boasted how he could arrange a miracle at Ezkioga.[46]The pickpocket was Isidoro Arpón Jaime; suspicious reporter: Juan de Urumea, in PV, 20 and 21 October 1931, p. 2, and in El Nervión, 22 and 23 October 1931.
On October 16 after the diocesan inquiry into Ramona's wounds, attention shifted to the girl from Ataun. Over sixty thousand persons had gathered on the hillside, and for the first time the seers used a stage Patxi Goicoechea had been building with lumber and manpower from the owner of the land. Only family members, priests, and reporters could go with the seers on the stage. The seers lined up in late afternoon, and many fell into trance. A medal of the Daughters of Mary on a blue ribbon appeared in the Ataun girl's hands, as if out of nowhere, and shortly thereafter another appeared in the hands of a seven-year-old girl from Ormaiztegi.[47]
SC E 94-97, 101-104; LC, PV, Easo, and DN, 17 October 1931.
On Saturday, October 17, yet more people came, most of them unaware of the vicar general's finding about Ramona. The Ataun girl suddenly lifted one of her hands, which had a little scratch, and said that the Baby Jesus had left the mark with a dagger. We see her the next day in a proud pose with Ramona, both of them discreetly displaying their bandages from a window of the fonda. Shortly after this high point, Carmen Medina began to look after the Ataun girl.[48]
Teresa Michelena, Oiartzun, 28 March 1983; SC E 101-106, 169; Castellano, PV, 20 October 1931; Rigné photography of crowd, plates 33, 261, 262, collection of author; PV and LC, 18 and 20 October 1931; Easo, 19 October 1931; for Medina's interest in the Ataun girl see L 14.
Ramona Olazábal and the girl from Ataun, 18 October
1931. Photo by Raymond de Rigné, all rights reserved
Francisco (Patxi) Goicoechea, the Convert
Carmen Medina also took an interest in Francisco Goicoechea, known as Patxi or "the lad from Ataun." At the end of July Medina told Starkie that Patxi (pronounced Patchi) had become a veritable Saint John of the Cross in his piety. His parents were tenant farmers and he was a carpenter on construction jobs. His first vision occurred on 7 July 1931, as he was making fun of the visions of others. His deep trances became a highlight of the vision evenings. Stern young men from Ataun generally went with him; they would carry him semiconscious down to the recovery room. He became the central figure in the apparitions from early July and was, in the words of the industrialist and deputy Rafael Picavea, "the most famous youth in the entire region."[49]
S 130; Picavea, PV, 13 November 1931. Except for the two-day parenthesis of Ramona's wounds, the press treated Patxi as the central figure from late July to mid-November.
We have seen that it was Patxi, a Basque Nationalist, who came out and said that the Virgin called for the overthrow of the Republic. He took the initiative in other ways as well. He put up a wooden cross at the site in August, the stage in October, and stations of the cross the following February. Patxi repeatedly predicted miracles, including ones for July 16 and mid-October. The Ataun girl and Evarista Galdós from Gabiria normally supported him.[50]
Construction, ARB 19-21; miracle predictions, ED, 23 July 1931, p. 8; SC E 13; García Cascón to Francisco de Paula Vallet, 31 October 1931, AHCPCR 10-A-27/2; Picavea, PV, 6 and 8 November 1931.
Patxi made a large and varied number of friends. He allegedly had the use of the automobiles of a devout Bilbao heiress, Pilar Arratia, and the Traditionalist physician Benigno Oreja Elósegui, brother of a deputy in the Cortes.[51]
L 14. Arratia gave 3,000 pesetas to the seminary fund in 1931 (BOOV, 1931, p. 354) and provided a house for the Ave Maria schools in Bilbao whose director, Doroteo Irízar, was also an Ezkioga sympathizer. She visited the German mystic Thérèse Neumann in the winter of 1931-1932. María Recalde had a vision in Bilbao at the house of "P. A.," 18 January 1932, allegedly in the presence of the brother of Cardinal Segura, B 601-602.
Because of his prestige, believers took him to observe the visions of little girls in the riverbed by Ormaiztegi, which he judged diabolical, and those of children in Navarra. Carmen Medina took him to Toledo at the beginning of October so he could attend the visions of children in the village of Guadamur.[52]Ormaiztegi (August 31): Easo, 17 October 1931. Navarra (Bakaiku): Picavea, PV, 6 November 1931. Guadamur: Cardús to García Cascón, 5 October 1931, and Picavea above. Patxi traveled to Bilbao, SC E 111, and in 1933 observed Luis Irurzun in Iraneta (Navarra), according to Pedro Balda, Alkotz, 8 April 1983, pp. 21-22.
By November Patxi had tried to pass on divine messages to the Basque deputies Jesús Leizaola, Marcelino Oreja, and José Antonio Aguirre. When he heard that Patxi had a message for him, Leizaola replied, "Message from the Virgin? I know her too. If she has something important she wants me to know, she will give it to me herself." In early December it had become clear that the vicar general of Vitoria rejected all the Ezkioga visions, and Patxi, Carmen Medina, and the other believers could only hope that the exiled bishop felt differently. Rumor had it that on December 14 Patxi had given Bishop Mateo Múgica, by then in the village of La Puye near Poitiers, a sealed letter that said the miracle would take place on December 26.[53]
On deputies, Picavea, PV, 8 November 1931; on rumored trip to France, J. R. Echezarreta to Cardús SC E 249, and Clotilde Moreno Eguiguren to a correspondent at Ezkioga, Bilbao, 15 January 1932.
I am not certain that Patxi went to France, but in any case he passed on the Virgin's instructions for Carmen Medina to take a group of seers to see the bishop. Medina went with Ramona Olazábel, the girl from Ataun, the child Benita Aguirre, Evarista Galdós, and a fifth seer on December 19. Bishop Múgica spoke to each seer separately for half an hour and allegedly told Carmen Medina that, whatever the origin of the visions, he did not think the seers were knowingly lying.[54]
ARB 44; R 29; B 290, 320, 717; Múgica, "Declarando," 242, 244; Echezarreta to Cardús, 24 December 1931 (SC E 263-264), and 7 January 1932. Declaration by Ramona to Rodríguez Dranguet, 18 November 1932, from private archive. Sources give the fifth seer as Juana Ibarguren of Azpeitia or María Luisa of Zaldibia.
Francisco Goicoechea (second from left) and friends at Ataun,
October 1931. Photo by Raymond de Rigné, all rights reserved
For the people of Ataun Goicoechea was "Patxi Santu [Holy Patxi]." They remember lines of cars parked in front of his farm and people kissing his hand and leaving presents. The nickname probably came after his apotheosis on 1 August 1931, when newspapers reported that he had levitated. After that he received large numbers of letters. In the summer of 1931 or 1932 Carmen Medina organized a bus excursion to Ezkioga for her many nieces and nephews living or vacationing in San Sebastian; they also went to Ataun, where Patxi obligingly entered into a trance. When they asked what the Virgin had said, one of Patxi's friends said she wanted them to leave the bus in Ataun for the use of the village.[55]
For levitations see chap. 10 below, "The Vision States"; correspondence, Rodríguez Ramos, Yo sé, 15; bus excursions, Rafael Medina y Vilallonga, Sevilla, 23 October 1989.
Patxi was a complex individual, and those who knew him offer conflicting testimony. Some say he drank a lot; others say he did not. They agree that he attended church, both before and after the visions, and that for a while during the visions he went to church daily. He was tall and handsome and spoke Basque better than Spanish. With some reporters he was camera shy and defensive, especially when there were questions that implied his vision state might have a component of mental illness or epilepsy. Some remember him as messianic. In the
projected reconquest of Spain, they recall, he was going to be the captain. Like some of the other more dramatic seers, he asked to die for his sins to save the world: "Mother, mother, do not weep, kill me, but forgive the rest, for they know not what they do."[56]
Lassalle, PN, 9 August 1931.
Patxi had his cuadrilla, a friend who answered his mail, and a schoolteacher who took down his messages. He also had the support of priests, at first from his parish, then from elsewhere. Therefore he did not need the kind of patronage that the younger or poorer seers did. From the end of August 1931 and continuing through early 1933 at least, he usually went to Ezkioga on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights with his friends. By the beginning of 1932 he was no longer the center of attention, and by May 1933 his nocturnal visions were almost furtive, his small band quite separate from the daytime seers. Formerly he arrived in a chauffeured car; now he came and went on bicycle after work.[57]
García Cascó to family in Bejar, September 1931, in García Cascón, "Algo más"; Picavea, PV, 3 November 1931; Ducrot, VU, 30 August 1933, p. 1365.
I do not know whether the subsequent absence of news about Patxi was the result of his rejection by others or his own self-exclusion. Perhaps the Carlist-Integrist believers, who predominated after 1931, rejected him for his nationalism. Or perhaps he was burned by bad publicity. His public downfall began with that of Ramona. As Catholic newspapers began to feel freer to print negative information, they pointed out that Patxi had made many false predictions. Rafael Picavea in El Pueblo Vasco exposed Patxi's inconsistencies. And when Patxi protested, Picavea ridiculed him for social climbing with Carmen Medina. As Patxi, Ramona, and the girl from Ataun fell from grace, the other seers also began to turn on them. Benita Aguirre reported that the Virgin had told her that the decline of a seer named F (almost certainly Patxi) should be an object lesson for seers, that they should shun worldly honors: "They spoiled him, and now what is left for him?"[58]
Goicoechea, ED, 12 November 1931; Picavea, PV, 13 November 1931; vision of Benita Aguirre, date not given, B 568.
The diocese early identified Patxi as a troublemaker. In August 1931 he refused to remove the cross he had put up on the hillside. And on December 26 Bishop Múgica of Vitoria sent his fiscal, or magistrate, to take testimony in Ormaiztegi that Patxi predicted a miracle for that day. Patxi had convinced Carmen Medina, who had imprudently spread the word. Patxi lost further credibility when he predicted a miracle for January. His clerical support in Ataun dropped away. He probably made his nocturnal visits to Ezkioga in late 1932 and 1933 in spite of explicit, personal diocesan orders not to go. Like most prominent seers, he also had trouble with the Republic, and in October 1932 the governor sent him for observation to the Mondragón mental hospital.[59]
For prophecy and investigation: Cardús to Ramona, 16 and 30 December 1931; Múgica, "Declarando," 241; and R 41-42. For Patxi in Mondragón: Burguera to Cardús, 22 October 1931; B 380; ARB 163; R 32-33. He was released 13 November 1932.
We catch a final glimpse of Patxi's complexity when on 15 March 1935 he appeared as a witness in a traffic case in San Sebastián. There reporters learned that the government had indicted him for taking part in the October 1934 uprising. Socialists had led the rebellion and took over much of the province of Asturias. In the Basque Country the more radical nationalists participated by trying to organize a general strike. When a reporter asked Patxi about his
involvement in the rebellion, he complained, "If I had known that they brought me here to bother me with questions about my private life, I would not have come. Whose business is it that I am the fellow involved with Ezquioga and at the same time an advanced republican?"[60]
Gil Bare, PV, 16 March 1935. For 1934 uprising see Fusi, "Nacionalismo y revolución," and Granja, Nacionalismo, 491-505.
I do not know how Carmen Medina's friendship with Patxi ended. Surely his crossover from the revolutionary right to the revolutionary left would have alienated her had they maintained contact. Her family remembers that Carmen dropped one youthful male seer when he told her that he and she should get married, by order of the Virgin.
Evarista Galdós
A final seer in whom Carmen Medina took special interest was Evarista Galdós y Eguiguren. Evarista was seventeen years old when she began to have visions in early July 1931. She came from a farm in Gabiria, not far from the vision site, and when the visions started she was in service in the home of a journalist in San Sebastián. The press described her visions in early July but did not mention her again until the fall. By that time she had had over thirty visions and went to Ezkioga on Thursdays and Sundays, presumably her days off from work.[61]
Her employer, Díaz Alberdi, alleged that she claimed she too would see the Virgin at Ezkioga: Juan de Urumea, El Nervión, 23 October 1931. First visions, ED and PV, 14 and 15 July 1931; also B 32, 714-715; Boué, 23-24. For October 1931 see SC E on 4 October, Rigné photo 261 on 17 October, PV and Easo, 20 October, and LC, 21 October.
The believers heeded Evarista more from mid-October. On October 18 and 19 the Jesuit José Antonio Laburu filmed her and Ramona having visions.[62]
Hermano Rafael Beloqui, Urretxu, 15 August 1982; Easo, 20 October 1931, p. 8; L 10.
On October 19 she told a reporter that both she and Patxi knew when the big miracle would be and that it would be soon: She predicted a miracle for the next day, which attracted a large crowd that was duly disappointed; with the seer girl from Ataun she predicted another for November 1 between 4:00 and 4:15 P.M. On December 4 she claimed to receive from heaven a medal on a ribbon like those others received previously. She announced this event in advance to a sympathetic priest and had herself searched beforehand. By this time she was important enough for Carmen Medina to take her to the bishop in France.[63]R 55; B 717.
On 17 January 1932 Evarista, Ramona, the Ataun seer, and six other girls from the district attended the spiritual exercises offered by the Reparadora nuns in San Sebastián. Carmen Medina may have paid for them. Her family patronized this elite order, whose first house in Spain was in Seville. Carmen's sister Dolores had founded the houses in San Sebastián and Madrid. Antonio Amundarain might have suggested the exercises; he had been the confessor of the Reparadoras in San Sebastián, and the Aliadas went for exercises there. Whoever was responsible probably also had a hand in the spiritual exercises at Loyola for male youths who were seers and converts. The Reparadoras based their rules on those of the Jesuits, and the Jesuits worked closely with them. Like the exercises of the Jesuits, those of the Reparadoras emphasized atonement, in which "a detailed contemplation of the scenes of the Passion … poses the question of acting and
Evarista Galdós with ribbon and medal that on 4 December 1931 fell
to her from the sky. Photo by Raymond de Rigné, all rights reserved
suffering for Christ in return." Immediately subsequent to these exercises Evarista and other seers began to have visions in which they experienced the crucifixion.[64]
For exercises see SC E 278, citing letter from J. R. Echezarreta of 18 January 1932; for Dolores see the anonymous biography Padrón de Superioras, 173-185. Carmen's sister Concepción and a niece were also in the order. On Amundarain see the chronicles in LIS, passim. In Vitoria the Aliadas used the Reparadora house for ceremonies in 1929 and 1931. For Loyola exercises see SC E 278. Amundarain did exercises there in early 1920s: Pérez Ormazábal, Aquel monaguillo, 73-74, 85-86. Quote is from Édouard Glotin, "Réparation," DS 13 (1988), col. 385. Émilie d'Oultremont founded the Reparadoras in Strasbourg in 1857.
In 1932 Evarista and Ramona stayed for a time in Azkoitia in the house of a wealthy woman, who paid a driver to take them back and forth to Ezkioga daily. But the two seers had a bad falling-out. Only the concerted efforts of José de Lecue, the Bilbao artist, and Patxi in a meeting in Bilbao in April led them to make peace. In the fall of 1932 and early 1933 a young male convert recorded Evarista's visions. This friendship cost Evarista some of her more prudish followers. She lived for most of 1933 in Irun. There she convinced a priest after having a vision in his house, and he started taking down her messages. Many of these visions had to do with the adventures of the believing community. She saw specific churchmen conspiring against the visions, other seers having their final visions, the hostile clergy changing their minds and believing, and other mystics making prophecies.[65]
On Evarista's trouble with Ramona see SC E 279, 434-435; on José Atín, the male convert, see Surcouf, L'Intransigeant, 19 November 1932; Rigné to Olaizola, 2 October 1932; Rigné to Ezkioga believer, 29 January 1933. For Evarista in Irun and priest, B 312, 726; García Cascón visited her there 7 December 1933. For community visions, B 714-717.
In January 1934 Carmen Medina spirited Evarista off to Madrid. There Medina hoped to set up a refuge from the coming revolution for a "high dignitary," who was in all likelihood the papal nuncio, Federico Tedeschini.[66]
Ayerbe to Cardús, 18 January 1934. She and Carmen lived at Calle Alfonso XII 32, 3° (López de Lerena to Ezkioga believer, 19 April 1934, private collection). More on Evarista and Tedeschini below in chap. 6, "Suppression by Church and State."
Carmen Medina was in the class of grandees, enjoying powerful ecclesiastical, political, social, and financial connections. She was untouchable, even unmentionable. When the diocesan investigator went to Ormaiztegi to document Patxi's false prediction, his investigation included Medina, but he nonetheless accepted her hospitality and ate with her. The bishop and vicar general had no qualms about attacking other key figures openly, but they steered clear of Medina. Even in private correspondence Ezkioga believers mention her circumspectly. Only a complete outsider, Walter Starkie, could be frank about her.[67]
When Burguera referred to her he often called her C. M.; Picavea wrote obliquely about a "dama aristocrática"; and Laburu even in his private lecture script wrote C. Med., though he spelled out all other names (e.g., L 14).
The most overtly political of the Ezkioga patrons, Carmen Medina needed no one to tell her a civil war was imminent, and she knew which side she was on. Nor did the other patrons have any doubt about their sympathies. But they considered politics a distant second to religion. Amundarain is a case in point: what was foremost for him was the saving of souls and the spiritual mission of his new order in the unfolding divine plan. In the June 1931 issue of Lilium inter Spinas he put politics in its place:
Say it, dear Sisters. Hail Jesus in our hearts and in those of all others as well! Hail Jesus in those who love us and those who persecute us! Hail Jesus in those who rule and those who obey! Hail Jesus in the Republic, in its governments, and its laws! Hail Jesus in the Church, in its ministers, and in its faithful! Hail Jesus in the heavens, on earth, and in the depths! Hail Jesus now and forever, Amen, Amen![68]
Amundarain, LIS 35 (June 1931): 1-11.