Hope and Anguish
For many people the apparitions at Ezkioga were simply a great divine event. These people went to the site as they might go to see a solar eclipse. For them Ezkioga was part of a skein of divine intervention that ran back for centuries. In this skein trances, messages, and prophecies repeated and adapted themselves. Seers heard and read what had gone on in the past and what was going on elsewhere; they knew the religious orders and shrines that visions had inspired in the past and present, in Spain and elsewhere.
The skein took on meaning and maintained coherence in a more practical way. "Carriers" were at work before Ezkioga, persons dedicated to receiving, understanding, and propagating communications from the divine. In the last years of sixteenth-century Madrid connoisseurs quite like Padre Burguera elicited the political dreams of Lucrecia de León. The French prophet Thomas Martin had his expert Louis Silvy, Catharine Labouré had Père Aladel, the Italian David Lazzaretti had two priests of the Congregation of San Felipe Neri and the monarchist Le Vachat, and Anna Katerina Emmerich had Clemens Brentano. The type is entirely recognizable and surely goes back to the time of Moses.[9]
Kagan, Lucrecia's Dreams, 86-113; Boutry and Nassif, Martin l'Archange, 69-70, 93-94; Lazzareschi, David Lazzaretti, 102, 190; Staehlin, Apariciones, 347-349.
These carriers passed on meaning and enthusiasm like a torch, from one set of visions to another. Several of our protagonists connected Limpias with Ezkioga. Both Juan Bautista Ayerbe and Catholic activist María de Echarri had previously interpreted the visions of the Christ of Limpias. Juan José Echezarreta,
The Virgin of Fatima enters Terrassa on García Cascón's car, 13
October 1951. Courtesy Arxiu Salvador Cardús i Florensa, Terrassa
owner of the Ezkioga field, had gone to Limpias, had a vision, and wept there. Joaquín Sicart, chief photographer at Ezkioga, had been cured after a vision at Limpias in 1919, as had the priest Francisco Aguirre, who took down Evarista Galdós's messages. Remigio Gandásegui, the archbishop of Valladolid who encouraged Baudilio Sedano's interest in Ezkioga, had been the most assiduous episcopal visitor to Limpias. Raimundo Galdeano was a Navarrese farmer who linked Ezkioga both to Limpias and Piedramillera. By paying for parish missions by the Capuchins who stimulated the visions at Limpias, he unwittingly prepared a zone of Navarra for visions in 1920. He paid for a mission in the Barranca in 1931, when he accompanied a seer from Lizarraga to Ezkioga.
The skein runs forward as well as backward. Many of the major propagandists took their agendas from Ezkioga to subsequent visions in other parts of Spain and Europe. Raymond de Rigné wrote about the apparitions of Assisi and La Codosera. Several of the seers from Torralba de Aragón in 1931 went to Cuevas de Vinromà in 1947 for the great miracle, and Padre Burguera talked to the seer there. Salvador Cardús was in Solsona when to enormous excitement a traveling image of the Virgin of Fatima entered the town. He immediately bought an image to install in Terrassa. On 13 October 1951 the statue entered the city
on top of Rafael García Cascón's car. Three children dressed as the shepherd seers met it in the town square. García Cascón himself never ceased his frenetic visits to apparition sites, whether Fatima, Lourdes, La Codosera, Garabandal, Monte Umbe, or Cerdanyola. He always wanted the cars to go fast and he opposed rest stops. He brought the Utrera seer María Marín to his house in Terrassa and almost had a heart attack when a woman seer at El Palmar de Troya told him he held the Baby Jesus in his arms.[10]
Rigné to director of ABC (Madrid), Zumarraga, 27 February 1948, carbon copy, private collection. Cardús described the Fatima entry at length in an unpublished manuscript, ASC. For García Cascón: family member, Terrassa, 19 October 1985.
José Javier Martínez Sarrasa hunted out seers all over Spain. In particular, he made friends with those who had visions in La Codosera in 1945, but he also was acquainted with seers of Garabandal (Cantabria) in the 1960s. José Martínez Cajigas, a devout photographer who lived in Santander, took pictures for postcards at Limpias and Ezkioga; some of his descendants befriended the seers at Garabandal. Several seers from Gipuzkoa and many of their followers went to Garabandal in the 1960s. In turn busloads of Garabandal devotees visited the Ezkioga seer Rosario Gurruchaga in Bergara. I first heard of the Ezkioga visions in 1968 from my friend Jon Leemans, a Dutch devotee of Garabandal. He knew a Spanish diplomat who had been a correspondent of Juan Bautista Ayerbe and Pedro Balda and owned what was then, in 1968, one of the few copies of Burguera's book in circulation. In the 1950s and 1960s Padre Pio, the Italian Capuchin, served for many of these people as the same kind of spiritual fulcrum as Thérèse Neumann did in the 1930s.[11]
McKevitt, "San Giovanni Rotondo," and his doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics. For the worldwide aspect of the modern phenomena, see Stirrat, Power and Religiosity.
Some of the older surviving devotees in Gipuzkoa and Navarra went to the visions that started at Monte Umbe near Bilbao in the 1970s. The Basque believers are in touch with newer Catalan groups, like one in Barcelona called the White Army.[12]Basque believers in Ezkioga showed me a number of mimeographed sheets, for example, Felix Sesma, "Ejército Blanco de María Madre, Circular," Barcelona, 6 January 1970, 1 page, announcing special grace for a select few who resist the devil's dominion over the world as apocalyptic events approach, and Félix Sesma, "Consideraciones, Marzo 1971: El Ejército Blanco como tremendo anuncio de Dios y como Ilamada de la Reina de Cielos y Tierra," 5 pages, mimeo.
Juan Roig Gironella, a Jesuit who counseled the seers on the outskirts of Barcelona in the 1970s, told me his mother had been one of the Catalan pilgrims to Ezkioga in the 1930s. His opinion was that all apparitions start out being authentic and then because of a lack of spiritual direction almost all get on the wrong track.Visions spawn devotions. Devotions lead to cures. Cures elicit visions. Some persons cured miraculously feel they have special grace, much as survivors of lightning bolts are thought to have a gift for healing. Thérèse Neumann, Magdalena Aulina, La Madre Esperanza, Anna Pou i Prat, and María Agueda Aguirre began their visions after cures. Pepita Pugés, a visionary who started a shrine in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near Barcelona, in the 1970s, had been cured at Lourdes.
Starting in the early 1970s a specialized magazine, Maria Mensajera, and a publishing house, Editorial Círculo, have brought seers and believers of different Spanish visions in contact. The owner of both, Francisco Sánchez-Ventura y Pascual, has promoted certain apparition sites—to the point of buying land and erecting chapels. Since the end of compulsory church approval of religious literature, similar publishing houses and magazines have sprung up throughout the Catholic world. A growing body of Catholics consumes this literature avidly.
The ephemeral nature of any particular event should not distract us from the vital, routine way grace makes credible and freshens ideals, dogmas, and rules. Any organization that is highly adaptive continually renews itself. Each of the Catholic church's established holy places, persons, times, and institutions was once fresh and exciting. The church depends on successive layers of creativity. In the constant process of renewal, grace plays a role similar to that of oxygen in the bloodstream or new water in a tide pool. For many Catholics grace is an energy that reawakens interest and provides hope and direction.
Contact with new grace in heavy concentrations can be intoxicating. The Spanish Jesuit Carlos María Staehlin judged it unhealthy and called it marvellism.[13]
Staehlin, Apariciones, 72-91. Carlos Maria Staehlin and the English jesuit Herbert Thurston were exceptional in their careful attention to contemporary "marginal" religious enthusiasms and devotions in Catholicism. Kenneth L. Woodward's Making Saints is a more recent, sensitive study.
Visions, stigmatics, prophets, new devotions, new institutes, and new sources of grace in trees, soil, stones, and water make up a kind of ever-changing (yet never changing) world. It is a world unto itself, and some devout persons like Burguera and Ayerbe dwell almost entirely within it, moving from one hot spot to another.For those who are a part of this inspired environment, a kind of luminous community develops.[14]
Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage.
I experienced this gentle, generous mood vicariously when I lived in the town of San Sebastián de Garabandal in the late 1960s. The remote mountain village was then paradoxically a crossroads for Catholic enthusiasm in the Western world. Many of the pilgrims who turned up there in search of divine help and love were open and vulnerable. They shared their experiences and their sorrows and listened well to those of others. The cuadrillas of Ezkioga believers were rather more intense, but we have seen the joy they found in penitential prayer.Sacralization is a process, but institutional religions like to understand the sacred as inherent. A place is either sacred or profane; it cannot be part-sacred, part-profane. Such an attitude toward places applies as well to persons, doctrines, visions, and organizations.[15]
See Christian, Sr., Doctrines of Religious Communities.
Because this attitude limits what evidence the public can have access to, it affects the thinking even of outsiders. Traditional church history—until recently the only history of these matters—tends to exclude the outer margin of enthusiasm. We have many documents for apparitions to which the church has granted credence, but few for those the church shunned. It discreetly files away its careful compilations about persons it judges insufficiently saintly, places it deems unworthy of cult, devotions it holds dubious, stigmatics it considers to be fakes, prophecies it judges spurious. Virtually all we know from the church about persons, visions, and orders are success stories. The failures and half-saints, the orders and obras and institutes the church culled—and these are surely the vast majority—are unavailable.Yet, as at Ezkioga, much religious excitement occurs precisely during the ambiguous period prior to church action, in the margins of what people know and what the church approves, around persons whose works, visions, or organizations the church has not yet judged, at places that are in doubt.[16]
Zarri, Finzione; Kleinberg, Prophets.
Part of theattraction of the not-yet-approved is precisely its novelty, its dynamic, changing nature, its very fragility. The believer can add little to approved, official devotions. By praying at new places, by venerating uncanonized holy people, by joining groups not yet approved, Catholics make a statement about the way heaven ought to be.
The church channels and domesticates religious enthusiasm by organizing memory. Here I understand the church to be a decentralized, collective, articulated process that serves the spiritual needs of Catholics and perpetuates itself, a community of memory with a particular purpose. The mass is a remembrance of the Passion of Christ, a remembrance in the body that entire societies learn by bending knees, by making the sign of the cross with the hands, by hearing a solemn story at the moment of consecration thousands of times over a lifetime, by ingesting the body and blood of Christ. Holy Week brings this memory alive. Those carrying the crosses and floats carry the weight of the cross to Calvary, and still in places there are those who flay themselves and prolong the physical memory of the flaying of Christ.[17]
Connerton, How Societies Remember; Mitchell, Passional Culture.
This exaltation of memory applies to the lives of saints. Religious orders, dioceses, and sodalities all depend on the enthusiasm of their members and their clients for survival and fruitfulness. By remembering particular people these societies define their mission. For the believer holy acts in the present show that God is inspiring individuals now; historical holy lives and holy acts demonstrate that God's wisdom and the Holy Spirit dwell in the organization and its rule.
My inquiries in dioceses and in religious orders about persons involved in the Ezkioga apparitions revealed a certain sensitivity and reticence. I found this difficulty to a lesser or greater extent in regard to memories about Amundarain, Aulina, Degrelle, Vallet, de la Torre, Irurita, Corbató, and Naya. Some—like Corbató, Naya, and Degrelle—their dioceses or orders would prefer to forget. Others had an involvement with Ezkioga that their communities now consider embarrassing.
But these people's stories, and that of Ezkioga as a whole, are necessary and useful. The selective memory that removed this story from church history, Spanish history, and Basque history removed the opportunity for us to learn from the phenomenon. Only through reflection on historical events in all their human detail can we understand a process and avoid the same tragic result. In 1931 Basques, Catalans, and Spaniards seized on people to voice collective hopes. For some of the children especially, the episode hopelessly distorted their lives and confused their family relations. Some lived with fear until their death.
Tens of thousands of older people in the Basque Country were left perplexed by what they saw and heard. The silence the bishop imposed left them ashamed of their own enthusiasm. They too need a historical explanation that makes these events understandable. Hundreds of families of the seers throughout Navarra and Gipuzkoa, especially the rural and small-town families who have not moved,
have borne the stigma of Ezkioga in total silence for sixty years. Whatever variations the seers themselves introduced, the visions at Ezkioga were a collaborative enterprise of hundreds of thousands of people in search of meaning and direction. At the turn of the century psychologists suggested that crowds responded to skilled persons who manipulated them, the meneurs . At Ezkioga the press, the religious and civic elites, and in the last analysis the general public were the meneurs. How else can we explain an entire Catholic society that delegated its direction to its children and to some of its least prestigious members? These seers gave voice to the society's hope.
Selective memory is a problem not just for the Basques, the church, churches, or institutions. Remembering and forgetting are equally important for all of us. But we generally conceal the way we accumulate, discard, and distribute meaning. In the rush of grace in time of upset—in the visions of Ezkioga as in the cargo cults of New Guinea or in the ghost dances of the American West—we can see the process at work more easily.[18]
See Fernandez, Bwiti.
The process works by trial and error. From an immense range of alternatives we reject some material even before we know it. By the nature of awareness itself, we are never aware of the alternatives. By the very way we know and perceive, we block out information that we cannot use. What remains as information, news, fact, is the recognizable and believable item.Before the church even starts to confer or deny holiness, people have been at work, consciously or unconsciously eliminating persons, times, places, and messages they consider inappropriate. At Ezkioga the public never saw certain seers and quickly dismissed others. There were vision sites the press in hundreds of articles never mentioned. Seers did not tell about certain supernatural figures—devils or witches, for example. People ridiculed certain visions and locations. Photographers did not portray bizarre visionary poses. People rejected some messages as demonic or invented. In short, there was a constant, intensive weeding out, the elimination of cultural material that did not fit. Conversely, there were rewards for seers who addressed certain problems—the collective predicament of Catholic Basques, Catalans, or Spaniards or the everyday problems of the dead, the missing, the unforgiven, the unabsolved. Wittingly or not, every person who went to see the visions or merely read a newspaper about them was doing this kind of evaluating and rewarding. Certain selectors and patrons played a powerful role in determining which visions and seers prevailed.
It must also be obvious by now, however, that the seers were not puppets of these forces or these guides. We have seen that some of them were better than others at understanding and serving the needs of the society, the general public, and the promoters. The seers who became famous were those who were most alert, sensitive to human feelings and needs, open to strangers, and able to absorb written material. These kinds of skills must also serve seers in other times and places.
After her husband's death, Marie de Rigné wrote that what he most wanted was for people to remember him. Some of the seers simply wanted people to know them while they were alive. But the events at Ezkioga had an internal dynamic and momentum that carried forward seers, believers, and disbelievers alike. This maelstrom of hope and anguish swept along many who had no thought of fame. Now, if not totally forgotten, they are all well on their way to oblivion. Let this work be a memorial to their spiritual adventure.