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.