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.