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1.
INTRODUCTION
VISIONS OF
THE divine are as old as humanity. They have continued in the postindustrial
age. You may read about them in tomorrow's newspaper. The visions at Ezkioga in
1931 reflect a phase in the history of Western society and in the place of
Catholic divinities in that society. Their story is also universal and
perennial: it is the story of people who claim to speak with the gods and try
to tell what they heard and saw and it is the story of other people who try to
stop them.
Spanish
Catholics used to deal with the divine not only as individuals but also as
members of groups. Legally, citizens owed devotion to the town's patron saints.
Members of guilds or professions had additional obligations to other saints.
Typically, the Virgin Mary in a specific local avatar was the protector of a
community for general problems, and some of her shrines, like Guadalupe and
Montserrat, drew devotion from vast areas. Other saints were specialists for
particular problems. People understood apparitions as one of the many ways that
Mary and other saints bestowed protection and requested devotion.
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In
fifteenth-century Spain the visionaries that people believed tended to be men
and children. The divine beings they saw generally offered ways for towns to
avoid epidemic disease and often called on towns to revive older, dormant
chapels in the countryside. Some of the visions harked back to stereotypic
scenarios of "miraculous" discoveries of relics and to legends of
similar discoveries of images. Two centuries earlier, theologians had condemned
as pagan some of the motifs in the visions—Mary clothed in white light on a
tree, a nocturnal procession of a woman accompanied by the dead. By the second
decade of the sixteenth century the Inquisition had stifled these visions in
central Spain. Local and devotional, the visions were no threat to doctrine,
but both the church and the monarchy were afraid of heretics and freelance
prophets.[1]
The
Counter-Reformation served to focus devotion on Mary in the parish church
rather than on specialist saints in dispersed chapels. A new set of lifelike
images of Christ joined those of Mary as sources of help. In this period, the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish Catholics found alternate
miraculous events that did not threaten the church's control of revelation. In
particular, towns turned to an ancient tradition of bleeding and sweating
images. In these miracles without messages, everyone was a seer and the clergy
controlled the meaning. Most of the three dozen or so Spanish cases of images
that "came alive" in the Early Modern period were of Christ in some
phase of the Passion. These events occurred particularly in years of crisis.[2]
At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century
bishops discouraged this kind of religiosity as superstitious.
Religious
orders had their own images whose power was independent of place, like Our Lady
of Mount Carmel. One such image, which the Jesuits in particular propagated,
was the Sacred Heart of Jesus, based on the visions of the nun Marguerite-Marie
Alacoque (1647–1690) in Paray-le-Monial, northwest of Lyon. She said that
Jesus, with his heart exposed, promised that he would reign throughout the
world. Devotions like Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Sacred Heart came to
have standardized images and the pope rewarded prayers to these devotions with
indulgences. Communities often domesticated these general figures for local
use, and some of these standard images became the focus of shrines in their own
right, like Our Lady of Mount Carmel of Jerez and Paray-le-Monial itself. There
was a constant tension between the Roman church, allied with religious orders,
which stimulated devotions and holy figures that were inclusive and universal,
and the local church, identified with nation, town, or village, which tended to
fix a devotion and make it exclusive and local.
Toward the
end of the nineteenth century, however, when Catholicism was on the defensive,
the Vatican came to realize that the church should play to its strength. In
southern Europe that strength lay in localized religion. By
"crowning" Marian shrine images, the papacy associated them with the
universal church. Rome also endorsed a new series of proclamations of Marian
images as patrons
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of dioceses
or provinces. And it regarded with increasing sympathy visions of Mary that led
to the establishment of new shrines. For by the nineteenth century virtually
every adult in the Western world knew that there were profoundly different ways
to organize society and imagine what happened after death. The
industrialization of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had
separated large numbers of rural folk from local authority and belief and many
migrants to cities had found alternatives to established religion in deism,
spiritism, science, or the idea of progress.[3]
The continued
strength of Catholicism in nineteenth-century France was an incentive for
intellectuals to challenge the idea of the supernatural radically and
intensively. As a result, French Catholics needed all the divine help they
could get. Throughout the century they sought and received innumerable signs
that God and, in particular, the Virgin Mary were with them. An efficient
railway system and press ensured that regional devotions could reach national
audiences. Secularization was a global problem, and the Vatican developed a
global response to centralize and standardize devotion. France and Italy served
as laboratories for devotional vaccines against moral diseases. Religious
orders distributed these vaccines. Indeed, Our Lady of Lourdes became a new
kind of general devotion, one with its origin in the laity. Replicas of the
image entered parish churches worldwide.[4]
Visions took
place throughout the nineteenth century in France.[5] Three particular French
visions set important precedents for the events that are the subject of this
book: those of Catherine Labouré in Paris in 1830, those of Mélanie Calvat and
Maximin Giraud at La Salette in 1846, and those of Bernadette Soubirous at
Lourdes in 1858. The people of Spain knew about these episodes from pious
accounts.
According to
these accounts, the Daughters of Charity delayed admitting Catherine Labouré,
age twenty-four, until she learned to read and write. She had numerous visions,
but the first in the series that made her famous occurred in July 1830, after
she had been a novice three months. A spirit boy about five years old woke her
and led her to the main altar of the novitiate, where she found the Virgin Mary
seated. Mary wept violently, told of great disasters that would befall France
and all of Europe, and said that Catherine, the Daughters of Charity, and the
Vincentian Fathers would have grace in abundance. This was only days before the
revolution of 1830, during which crowds attacked many churches and religious
houses. Four months later, in November, Catherine saw Mary emerge resplendent
from a dark cloud in the church. The Virgin bore a halo of words: "O Mary,
conceived without sin, pray for us who come to you for help!" She held a
small globe in her hands and lifted it up to heaven, where it disappeared. The
Virgin then held out her hands and suddenly on each finger there were three
rings covered with precious jewels giving off bright rays. Catherine saw the image
revolve. On its back there was an M with a cross on top and below it the Sacred
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Hearts of
Jesus and Mary. She heard a voice say, "It is necessary to strike a medal
that looks like this. All who wear it … will receive many favors, above all if
they wear it around the neck." Mary insisted on the medals in successive
appearances until finally Catherine's confessor, Jean Marie Aladel, ordered
them made.
Labouré's
visions were like those of other religious who received privileges for their
orders. In this the Miraculous Medal was like the scapular of the Carmelites
and the rosary of the Dominicans. The timing of Labouré's visions and the
iconography—the Virgin had her foot on a serpent—pointed to the medal's
assignment as a response to the devil and his works. Aladel emphasized the
medal's efficacy for nonbelievers and Protestants as well as Catholics. The
church publicized widely how the medal converted a Jew in Strasbourg in 1842.
It worked apparently even if someone merely slipped it under a pillow. By 1842 people
had bought 130,000 copies of Aladel's description of the visions and well over
one hundred million medals.[6]
The pious
accounts of the visions of La Salette were as follows: in 1846 in the French
Alps near Grenoble, Mélanie and Maximin, fifteen and eleven years old,
respectively, saw a lady in white. She warned of an imminent famine as a
punishment from Christ and called for people not to work on Sundays and not to
swear or eat meat on fast days. She also gave the children secrets. The waters
there soon produced cures. And a military officer found a likeness of the face
of Christ on a fragment of the rock on which the Virgin had sat. People began
to go to the site in numbers. In 1851 the bishop of Grenoble decreed the
visions worthy of belief and forbade any criticism of them. Subsequently,
Mélanie released versions of her secret, which resembled medieval apocalyptic
prophecies. The La Salette apparition was private. No one saw the children
seeing the Virgin. And the seers did not claim to enter a trance state. In
these ways too the La Salette visions were similar to medieval visions.[7]
The visions
of fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes marked a change. In 1858
Bernadette saw the Virgin about three dozen times over five months in the presence
of crowds that reached thousands in number. She went with a lighted candle and
prayed the rosary in public. The Virgin told her, she said, to return for
fifteen days. Eventually over fifty persons had visions in and around the same
cave. Bernadette's abstracted state while having visions convinced a skeptical
doctor and through him other town worthies.
Prior to
these nineteenth-century French cases, visions by rural laypersons had
addressed broader geopolitical issues only occasionally.[8] Many people
understood the visions at La Salette and Lourdes simply as signs to establish
new shrines. But the secrets that Mélanie divulged addressed the division
between Catholics and rationalists. And at Lourdes the Virgin reaffirmed the
authority of the pope by confirming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Although many
churchmen were reluctant to accept children as carriers of messages from God,
the French visions put these doubts by and large to rest. The
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crowds that
converged on Lourdes by rail eventually made it one of the most popular shrines
in Christendom. By the turn of the century the cures there became the great new
argument not only for Bernadette's visions but for the Catholic religion and
the supernatural in general. When in the First World War the bishop of Tarbes
called on the Virgin to help France against Germany, even the Third Republic
made peace with Lourdes.
How did these
visions affect Iberia? In the nineteenth century Catholics in Spain, their
church shorn and starved, needed a lift as much as those in France. Urban
radicals and poor people afraid of cholera went on a rampage in the summer of
1835, killing seventy-eight male religious in Madrid and sacking religious
houses throughout much of Spain. Liberal governments suppressed virtually all
male religious orders and gradually sold off most church property. Spanish
clerics began to look to the papacy for help and moral support. When the orders
filtered back into Spain—first the female service orders, then the male
ones—they brought new devotions from France and revived older general ones like
the Sacred Heart of Jesus.[9]
The Daughters
of Charity entered Spain in increasing numbers after 1850. Vincentians
published Jean Marie Aladel's book on Catherine Labouré in Spanish in 1885. By
1922 there were twelve thousand members of the Association of the Miraculous
Medal in Spain, mainly children in schools run by the Daughters of Charity. In
May 1930 the primate of Spain, Cardinal Pedro Segura, held a national
conference in Madrid celebrating the centenary of the visions. Five bishops led
a procession including three floats of Labouré seeing the Virgin.[10]
Less than a
year after the La Salette vision, people in Barcelona could buy pamphlets about
it in Spanish and Catalan, and by 1860 they could buy manuals in Spanish for
pilgrims. In 1883 Catholic militants in Barcelona formed the association of Our
Lady of La Salette to combat both blasphemy and work on Sunday. They held dawn
rosaries in the city streets. They eventually had to desist when crowds
gathered to harass them and sing the Marseillaise. Spaniards who worried about
the apocalypse knew Mélanie's prophecy. Eventually it intruded on the vision
messages of Ezkioga.[11]
Lourdes
became the spiritual touchstone of the times. There is no facet of the Ezkioga
visions—the liturgy, the prayers, the new shrine, the chief promoters—that
Lourdes did not influence. Lourdes was just across the Pyrenees. Devotion was
intense in the Basque Country, Navarra, and Catalonia, all areas critical to
this story. Prior to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 the Basque Country and
Catalonia each provided over 30 percent of Spain's pilgrims to Lourdes. There
had always been close ties across the mountains, and Basque, Navarrese, and
Catalan cultural zones straddled the frontier. Basques considered Bernadette
one of theirs, and Basque nationalists held pilgrimages with a political slant.
Spanish
pilgrims saw that Lourdes was revitalizing Catholicism in France and began to
hope for a Lourdes in Spain.[12] In the first two decades of the twentieth
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century
Spanish visions that reached the press occurred mainly in the zone of devotion
to Lourdes. In them people saw images of Christ move or agonize. This trend
came to a climax at Limpias, a small town in Cantabria close to the Basque
Country, precisely when World War I prevented travel to the shrine of Lourdes.
In the period 1919–1926 the Christ in Agony at Limpias attracted over a quarter
of a million pilgrims. The diocese of Santander modeled the Limpias pilgrimages
on those of Lourdes. We can document at least forty-five pilgrimages and tens
of thousands of pilgrims from the Basque Country and Navarra. About one in ten
of the pilgrims saw the image move. The visions occurred in a period of high
inflation, general strikes, and political turmoil. Some of those in power
understood the visions as divine signs in favor of the nation. As at Limpias a
year earlier, children and adults of a village in Navarra saw their crucifix
move in 1920. These visions at Piedramillera lasted for more than a year, but
the diocese took care to limit newspaper reports and people gradually stopped
going there.
The visions
at Limpias and Piedramillera were hybrids. Like the baroque miracles of the
Early Modern period, they involved preexisting statues of Christ nd did not
include explicit messages. But like the medieval visions and those of Catherine
Labouré and the children of La Salette and Lourdes, they were subjective
experiences. That is, the cruxifixes had no liquid on them and only some people
saw them move. Spaniards appeared to be inching toward the full-fledged talking
apparitions of the medieval past, which the French had already revived. The
visions at Limpias and Piedramillera were important precedents for those of
Ezkioga.[13]
By July 1931
Spaniards, and Basques in particular, had just begun to hear about the visions
at Fatima in Portugal. Led by Lucia Dos Santos, born in 1907, children in a
hamlet to the north of Lisbon had several visions from 1916 on; the most famous
were those on the thirteenth day of six successive months in 1917. The Fatima
visions took place during an anticlerical republican regime and they became a
reaffirmation of Catholicism. In 1927 a Dominican magazine in the Basque
Country began to publish accounts of cures at Fatima, which the author
considered "a permanent challenge to materialist and rationalist
criticism." In 1930 the magazine described the visions after the bishop of
Leire in Portugal declared them worthy of credit. But Fatima did not gain popularity
in Spain until the 1940s, after Lucia revealed messages that gave the
apparitions an explicitly anticommunist slant.[14]
The visions
at Ezkioga were the first large-scale apparitions of the old talking but
invisible type in Spain since the sixteenth century. But they included the
innovations of Lourdes: there were many seers, the seers had their visions in
public view, and most of the seers entered some kind of altered state. We will
see how the social and political situation of Spain and the Basque Country encouraged
Catholics to believe the seers.
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The reader
should know something about nationalism in Spain, the Basque Country, and
Catalonia. The less authoritarian and more democratic the central government,
the less Spain coheres. At present, in the new freedom after the long
dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in the Basque Country and Catalonia in
particular, many people are careful to refer to Spain only as a state, not as a
nation. When the majority of male voters brought in the Second Republic in April
1931, Spain was a mosaic of cultures that hundreds of years of royal rule had
done little to homogenize. The regions with the strongest nationalist movements
were those with the most international contacts: the Basques lived on both
sides of the border with France and had a major trading partner in Great
Britain; Catalonia, also on the border, traded with the Mediterranean countries
and the Caribbean. These external contacts meant that some regional elites did
not depend entirely on Madrid and resented its taxes, bureaucracy, and
language. Eight years of centralized rule by General Miguel Primo de Rivera in
the twenties had exacerbated these resentments. Even in regions with virtually
no separatist sentiment in 1931, people had a strong sense that they were
different culturally. The Navarrese, for instance, had a past that helped them
maintain an identity distinct from that as Spaniards. Navarra was once an
independent kingdom that spanned the Pyrenees. Those Navarrese who lived in a
strip running across the north of the province spoke Basque, and in the distant
past most of the region's inhabitants had been Basque-speaking. Most still had
Basque family names and lived in towns with names of Basque origin.
As a mass
phenomenon the apparitions at Ezkioga were a kind of dialogue between
divinities and the anticlerical left—anarchists and socialists in the Basque
coastal cities, socialist farmworkers in Navarra, republican railway officials
and schoolteachers in rural areas, anticlerical poor in cities throughout
Spain, and socialist and communist movements worldwide. In this aspect Ezkioga
was similar to other modern apparitions. As over the years the enemy changed
from Freemasons and liberals to communists, the messages seers conveyed changed
to maintain the dialogue. But any analysis that reads the last two centuries of
Marian visions as a clerical plot to thwart social progress is impoverished, as
we shall see.[15] To be sure, visions are easy to manipulate for political
purposes. But at Ezkioga people of all classes immediately put the seers to
work for other practical and spiritual ends. Apparitions spark little interest
without people's general hunger for access to the divine.
To ascribe
visions to particular psychological needs—sexual drive, for example, or the
search for parental affection—constitutes another kind of reduction. Of
necessity observers base such theories on a very small and very skewed sample;
the visionaries who become famous. It might well be that a given psychological
profile simply makes seers more believable or more likely to persist in their
visions. There will be visions as long as people believe in them, so to
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understand
visions we must study the believers. Thus one set of lessons we can draw from
the visions at Ezkioga has to do with context.
Other lessons
are less bound to time and place. In religions people interact with the gods
and with one another. This study is in part a window on how new religious
worlds come to be. All innovation has to struggle against an established order
that attempts to absorb or suppress it. Visions are intrinsically subversive;
they go over the head of human to divine superiors. In this sense Ezkioga is a
microcosm of the excitement and crosscurrents of every schism and heresy.
Another
larger theme is the way people formulate their hopes. At Ezkioga people did so
in various ways. One was a collective process of trial and error by which local
elites, the press, and the general public selected and rewarded certain vision
messages. Here it almost seems appropriate to speak of a collective
consciousness. Particular groups also induced messages with a desired content
by their questions. These processes illustrate the wider question that
underlies this work: how society structures perception.
I wrote this
book with the advantage of the work of others. And when I had completed the
manuscript I read the book by David Blackbourn about the visions that started
in Marpingen in the Saarland in 1876 and the books by Paolo Apolito about the
visions that started in 1985 at Oliveto Citra in Campania. The visions at
Marpingen, like those at Ezkioga, took place in a hostile state and in a
diocese without a bishop. The visions at Oliveto Citra have had even more seers
than those of Ezkioga. Apolito was present almost from the start and was able
to observe many of the processes that I reconstruct from interviews and
documents.
Church
sympathy for visions has waxed and waned. It waxed in the mid to late
nineteenth century (the model was La Salette and then Lourdes), the mid-1930s
(the model was Lourdes), the late 1940s (the models were Fatima and Lourdes),
and the 1970s and 1980s (the models were Fatima and Medjugorje). The needs of
the church periodically overcome its suspicion of lay revelation, and
particular popes have been more sympathetic than others. But there also exists
a cyclical dynamic of discouragement that emerges when visions threaten church
authority or become commonplace.
Since I began
this study, most of the official place-names in the Basque Country and
Catalonia have changed. I use the official place-names as of mid-1994. Many of
these for Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and northern Navarra are different, usually only
slightly, from the official names in 1931, but they were already in use among
Basque speakers and in Basque-language publications at that time. I have
respected the old spellings in direct quotations. In part 5 of the appendix I
list the Basque places in this book whose names have changed. For the sake of
simplicity I have left Vitoria (instead of Vitoria-Gasteiz), Mondragón
(Arrasate-Mondragón),
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and San
Sebastián (Donostia-San Sebastián) in their Spanish forms.
I do not
address the question essential for many believers: were the apparitions
"true"? As I told my friends among the Ezkioga believers and in the
diocese, I must stick to human history. By upbringing and nationality I am an
outsider ill-equipped to tell Basques, Spaniards, and Catholics what is sacred
and what is profane. In
any case, I am quite unwilling to try.
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