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.