oye

Páginas

Página principal

Vistas de página en total

lunes, 24 de febrero de 2014

Publicado por LIMAKO ARANTZAZU EUZKO ETXEA - LIMA BASQUE CENTER en 21:08

Enviar por correo electrónico Escribe un blog Compartir con Twitter Compartir con Facebook Compartir en Pinterest

Etiquetas: diario la cronica, diario la tercera, euzko etxea arantzazu lima, fondo editorial revista oiga, jhon bazan aguilar, la haya chile, la haya peru, prensa chile, prensa peru, revista oiga, vascos lima

No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario

Oiga! Don Paco!

Nota: solo los miembros de este blog pueden publicar comentarios.

Entrada más reciente Entrada antigua Inicio

Suscribirse a: Enviar comentarios (Atom)

oiga

oiga

Antonio María Artola Arbiza. Ezkioga. En el 80° aniversario de la Pastoral de Mons. Mateo Múgica Urrestarazu sobre Ezkioga (07/09/ 1933), Lima, Fondo Editorial Revista Oiga (978-61-2465-76-03).

oiga

oiga

Antonio María Artola Arbiza. Ezkioga. En el 80° aniversario de la Pastoral de Mons. Mateo Múgica Urrestarazu sobre Ezkioga (07/09/ 1933), Lima, Fondo Editorial Revista Oiga (978-61-2465-76-03).

oiga

oiga

Antonio María Artola Arbiza. Ezkioga. En el 80° aniversario de la Pastoral de Mons. Mateo Múgica Urrestarazu sobre Ezkioga (07/09/ 1933), Lima, Fondo Editorial Revista Oiga (978-61-2465-76-03).

Datos personales

LIMAKO ARANTZAZU EUZKO ETXEA - LIMA BASQUE CENTER: New York, New York, United States

Ver todo mi perfil

Archivo del blog

▼ 2014 (58)
- ► julio (1)
- ▼ febrero (3)
- ► enero (54)

► 2013 (12)
- ► diciembre (11)
- ► julio (1)

Entradas populares

FRANCISCO IGARTUA ROVIRA

Portadas 1948

- Como se sabe, una imagen dice más que mil palabras. Testigos irrefutables de toda una vida, estas fotografías son muestra de los viajes realizados por Paco...
Hace 14 años
Portadas 1962-1965

- Fue un andar a la deriva que no debía continuar. Y no continuó. El golpe de Odría y su sigiloso ingreso a Lima lo conmovieron profundamente y lo apartaron...
Hace 9 años
Portadas 1965-1974 y 1974.1977

UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAÍS VASCO - UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAÍS VASCO UNIVERSIDAD DEL PAÍS VASCO
Hace 9 años
Portadas 1978-1980

oiga78 -
Hace 13 años
Portadas 1980-1985

-
Portadas 1985-1990

LUM: Entrevista al periodista Francisco Igartua sobre denuncia contra Agustin Mantilla -
Hace 7 años
Portadas 1990-1995

ADIÓS CON LA SASTIFACCION DE NO HABER CLAUDICADO - NUMERO DE COLECCIÓN: "ADIÓS CON LA SATISFACCIÓN DE NO HABER CLAUDICADO" BIBLIOTECA FRANCISCO IGARTUA FONDO EDITORIAL REVISTA OIGA LIMA - BILBAO EDITORIAL ...
Hace 11 años

FRANCISCO IGARTUA ROVIRA

Editoriales 1948

-
Editoriales 1962-1965

-
Editoriales 1965-1974

-
Editoriales 1978-1980

-
Editoriales 1980-1985

-
Editoriales 1985-1990

-
Editoriales 1990-1995

LUM: Entrevista al periodista Francisco Igartua sobre denuncia contra Agustin Mantilla -
Hace 7 años

Visionaries

The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ

William A. Christian Jr.

EVENTS

________________________________________

― 13 ―

2.

Mary, the Republic, and the Basques

During July and August 1931 at Ezkioga in northern Spain, scores of Basque seers had increasingly elaborate and explicit visions of the Virgin. The visions offered a way to mobilize the Basque community and focus their hopes. Watching Basque society define and tap this new power is like watching a kind of social x-ray or scanner. In the case of the Ezkioga visions, the scan highlights a struggle between competing views of the world. At a turning point in Basque and Spanish history, local leaders, the press, and the audience helped the visionaries to articulate general concerns.

The Republic and the Catholic North

From 1874 to 1923 Spain was a constitutional monarchy in which the Liberal and Conservative oligarchic parties alternated in power. During this period parts of Catalonia and the Basque Country rapidly industrialized. As in much of Western Europe and North America, the labor movement in Spain reached a peak of strength at the conclusion of World War I. In the face

________________________________________

― 14 ―

of labor unrest and regionalist movements, General Miguel Primo de Rivera installed a military dictatorship, still under royal legitimacy, which lasted from 1923 to 1930. After the general stepped down, the municipal elections of April 1931 became a referendum on the monarchy itself. Republicans won in most major cities and proclaimed the Second Republic. King Alfonso XIII went into exile.

The fall of the monarchy jarred an entire order in which for centuries the relation of king to subjects had been the model for relations of God to persons. By extension it even shook the belief in God. It opened the door to changes in relations between women and men, workers and employers, laity and priests, and children and parents. Human relations are by nature imitative. The change to a republic led to changes in the ways people treated one another. Of course, the fall of the monarchy was effect as well as cause—the effect of gradual shifts in a whole host of social relations, particularly as a result of militant labor movements. Visions of Mary throughout Spain in the spring and summer of 1931 were short-term consequences of the change in the regime, but they also reflected more long-term changes.

On 23 April 1931, nine days after the advent of the Republic, children playing outside the church of Torralba de Aragón (Huesca) saw what they thought was the figure of the Virgin Mary pacing inside, and one girl heard the Virgin say, "Do not mistreat my son." Citizens took this to be a reference to a crucifix in the town hall which the anarchist minority had taken down and broken up. Catholic newspapers reported this vision throughout Spain.[1]

Two weeks later, from May 11 to 13, anticlerical vandals set fire to dozens of religious houses in Madrid and Andalusia. Banner headlines and photographs of gutted buildings and headless images left Spain's Catholics with little doubt about the will of the new republic to defend church property. In mid-May seminary professors in Vitoria, seat of the Basque diocese, concluded that they had no way to affect the policies of the government in Madrid and that instead they should concentrate on preserving the faith in the Basque Country. A priest who attended the gathering told me, "It was a fortress mentality … the attitude of us versus them." Further evidence of government hostility came with the expulsion from Spain of Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria for agitating on his pastoral visits (May 17) and of Cardinal Pedro Segura, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain (June 16).[2]

In the Basque Country the superiors of urban religious communities asked for police protection. Their fears increased after a fire of suspicious origin at the Benedictine monastery of Lazkao on May 20. Strikes heightened the tension. In a general strike on May 26 and 27 fishermen, workers, women, and children from Pasaia marched on San Sebastían. Police gunfire killed six and wounded scores.

In June this tension found an outlet in religious visions in Mendigorría, a town of 1,300 inhabitants thirty kilometers southwest of Pamplona in the Spanish-speaking

________________________________________

― 15 ―

part of Navarra. In 1920 in the adjacent town of Mañeru children had had visions of a crucifix moving. Mendigorría, like Mañeru, was a devout town that produced many religious vocations. On 31 May 1931 the Daughters of Mary attended a mass with a general Communion and a sermon by a Capuchin from Sangüesa. In the afternoon, accompanied by the town band, they carried an image of the Virgin through Mendiogorría.[3] On the evening of Thursday, June 4, the feast of Corpus Christi, the village priests were in confessionals preparing children for the Communions of the first Friday and the town band was playing in the square. The month of June was dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and this image was on a table in the church. A girl went in and saw an unearthly woman in mourning clothes kneeling on a prayer stool before the Sacred Heart. Frightened, the girl told her friends outside. A group went in, saw the woman, and went to tell others. More girls, including younger ones, then went in, saw nothing, and started to pray the rosary. According to one of the children, the schoolmistress told them they should pray for Spain, because it was in a bad way. When the prayer leader reached the phrase in the Litany "Master Amabilis," she said she saw the figure, and then many of the others girls cried out, "Look at her!" Some saw first a bright light on the little door of the tabernacle. Others saw only a brightness. Others, including the adults present, saw nothing. One adult told the girls to ask the Virgin what she wanted, but all they could get out was, "Madre mía." One girl fell over a chair when, she said, the Virgin called to her. And she saw the Virgin run onto a shelf between two altars. A seer, then nine years old, told me in 1988 that she saw the Sacred Heart tremble, then "a brightness; it seemed to us to be the Virgin of the Sorrows." At the time she felt a strong, sad feeling in her heart. She still thinks the vision was real, but she does not want me to use her name, lest her family think her loony.

Men in the church alerted the priests and rang the bells. After questioning the girls, the parish priest reported to the assembled town what they had said, assured them that he would inform the bishop, and led cheers for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Catholic religion, the Virgin, and the Jesuits. The church stayed open until midnight, a vortex of emotions.[4]

Two days later El Pensamiento Navarro of Pamplona broke the story with a letter from a villager to a relative in the city. Subsequently, the newspaper carried a more cautious version, which the clergy clearly influenced if not composed, leaving open the possibility of an "obsession" on the part of the girls. One seer told me a priest had offered them candy and told them to say that it was a lie, that otherwise they would have to go to jail; but the girls refused and swore they were telling the truth.[5]

In addition to at least twelve girls roughly nine to fourteen years old, there was a boy seer as well. Lucio, thirteen years old, was an "outsider" who had recently arrived in town. His mother was originally from Mendigorría and his father came from a village near Madrid. The boy worked as a cowherd and

________________________________________

― 16 ―

said—whether before or after June 4 is unclear—that the Virgin had also appeared to him in the countryside. On June 4 he was standing in line for confession and he too saw the Virgin as a mourning lady.

The next day the Vincentian Hilario Orzanco, director of the juvenile magazine La Milagrosa y los Niños, visited the house in Mendigorría of the Daughters of Charity. In his magazine he described the visions as a reward from the Virgin to the girls who had left the music in the square to pray for Spain before the altar of Mary. He pointed to their seeing the Virgin herself in sorrowful prayer before the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist as evidence that she was interceding for Spain and he held up her prayer as an example for his child readers, intimating that they too would have visions if they were good.

To Her, then, we must address ourselves in these days of trial with a heart contrite for the sacrilege and horrible profanation of the Holy Eucharist and its churches. The profound sorrow of the Virgin, as seen in her mourning clothes and her weeping face, should make us turn inward and sweetly oblige us to atone through her for so many sins. You above all, boys and girls, subscribers to this magazine, you must dearly love the Miraculous Virgin. See how the Virgin answers the prayers of good children.[6]

Some of the Mendigorría children were subscribers to the magazine and would have read articles of a similar nature in earlier issues. As with the visions at Torralba a month earlier, those at Mendigorría did not draw many persons and had few consequences for the villagers or the seers, aside from heightening their piety and excitement.[7]

Incidents during the electoral campaign for the Constituent Cortes kept up a generalized fear in June 1931. On June 14 republicans at stations from Marcilla to Castejón assaulted a trainload of Catholic activists returning to Zaragoza from a demonstration in Pamplona. And in Mendigorría itself on the eighteenth, two weeks after the visions, villagers ambushed a busload of republicans with stones and staves. Police had to rescue two republicans marooned on a rooftop, and six others had to go to hospitals in Pamplona for treatment.[8]

An example of the way Catholics in the Basque Country reacted to all these disturbances was a cartoon on the front page of a Bilbao weekly the day before the election. The drawing shows a single Basque country youth with a club holding off a group of ill-clad urban riffraff carrying burning torches and heading for a rural chapel. The caption read "Not Here!!" An intemperate article railed against immigrant and local leftists.

Here where little by little they have dirtied our land, where little by little they have invaded our home, where little by little they have undermined our tradition, our holy past, our mission, our honor, here, no! Those people, the accusers, the desecrators, the anarchists, cannot live together with us, because we are honorable people.

________________________________________

In the elections rightist coalitions won handily in Gipuzkoa and Navarra. On that day in Bergara, fifteen kilometers from Ezkioga, electoral violence left several injured and one worker dead.[9]

It is no surprise that under these conditions on 29 June 1931, the day after the elections, a woman who had to stop her car because of a crowd on the highway near Ezkioga thought that some kind of political incident, or explosion, or assassination had taken place. But the crowd had gathered because a brother and a sister, ages seven and eleven, claimed to have seen the Virgin. The immediate and sustained interest in the Ezkioga visions showed that this was the right time and the right place for heaven to intervene in a big way.[10]

Ezkioga is a rural township of dispersed farms in the Goiherri, the uplands of the province of Gipuzkoa. In 1931 it had about 550 inhabitants. Almost all

________________________________________

― 18 ―

lived on farms and spoke Basque. The town hall, the parish church of Saint Michael, and a government school were in a cluster of houses up the hill from the highway linking Madrid and San Sebastián. Down on the road there were two other small groups of houses, together known as Santa Lucía. The western group, nearer the town of Zumarraga, included a church and a school. The father of the original seers operated a store-tavern in the eastern cluster, and many pilgrims stayed in the Ezpeleta fonda there. The visions occurred on the hillside above these buildings.

How had the Second Republic affected the people of Ezkioga? One of the changes that most pained believers was the removal of crucifixes from schools and government offices. From April 1931 until the end of 1932 the government removed the crucifixes gradually throughout Spain. Manuela Lasa Múgica was the interim schoolteacher in the Santa Lucía barrio of Ezkioga from 1929 to early 1931. She came from the village to the east, Ormaiztegi, and shared the beliefs of her pupils and their families. And so, like her predecessors, she opened the day with a prayer, led the rosary on Saturdays, and celebrated the month of May with flowers and prayers. She kept a statue of Mary and a crucifix in the classroom. But in early 1931 she had to make way for the official teacher, an outsider who did not speak Basque. The community received the woman coldly, and she needed Manuela's help to find lodging. The government instructed the teacher to remove religious images from the classroom, she obeyed, and Manuela remembers people commenting that it was a shame that the children could not celebrate the month of Mary. The Republic thus represented a change for the children of the Santa Lucía, including the two future seers, just as it did for the entire region. Perhaps more so, for the schoolchildren were virtually illiterate in Spanish. Manuela Lasa taught mostly in Basque to students who would leave school at an early age.[11]

In the Basque Country and much of the north of Spain priests and religious were an integral part of the rural and small town population. Many of them came from the more prosperous farms. They shared a common outlook with peasants and those who worked in the factories of the company towns. And all higher education was then still religious education. The universities of the region were its seminaries and novitiates in Vitoria, Pamplona, and Loyola.

This devout rural culture bore one hundred years of suspicion toward the violent anticlericalism of Spain's cities and Spain's progressive governments. The antagonism dated at least from the first Carlist War and its aftermath. In 1833 the deceased king's brother, Don Carlos, rebelled against the liberal monarchy. Carlos promised to restore local liberties and the power of the church and to rule Spain as a consensual monarch of a loose confederation of regions. The stronghold of the Carlists was Navarra and the Basque Country. Enough priests and religious threw in their lot with him that liberals identified religious in general as subversives. This was one reason for the killing of religious in

________________________________________

― 19 ―

Madrid in 1835. The governments that sold off church property also sold off the peasants' common lands. In the Basque Country Carlist peasantry and the rural clergy repeatedly clashed with the commercial and working people of the cities.

The last of the three Carlist wars ended in 1876, but the party lived on, a utopian, agrarian anomaly in a Spain that was rapidly modernizing. In 1888 a branch of Carlists broke away. They called themselves Integrists and they stood for a patriarchal society in which right-wing Catholicism, rather than the Carlist dynasty, was the guiding force. More papist than the pope, their strength was in the small town gentry and clergy of Navarra and the Basque Country. Their special symbol was the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but this symbol was shared with other militant Catholics.

The Carlists in their two branches cared about Spain as a whole. Basque Carlists were allies of others in Catalonia, Valencia, Castile, and Andalusia. The literature of the time often refers to them as Traditionalists. After 1920 their chief competitors for the votes of the peasantry were Nationalists. Basque Nationalism originated in the devout commercial class of Bilbao and gradually spread to the countryside and Gipuzkoa. The men of Ezkioga generally voted for Carlists or Integrists until 1919, when almost half voted for a Nationalist candidate. During the Republic the Nationalists gained new force.[12]

Before the creation of the Second Republic the deputies representing the rural, Basque-speaking laity in the Cortes allied themselves with the monarchy; the governments of the monarchy by and large left the Basques and their traditions alone. But the Republic was different, and in the new parliament most Basque representatives were part of a small minority, which the Madrid press ridiculed as "cavemen" and "wild boars." The total lack of access to a government that rural Basques considered alien compounded their apprehension after the anticlerical violence in the rest of Spain.

Furthermore, this devout society lived cheek by jowl with another enemy—enclaves of Spanish-speaking, largely immigrant republicans, socialists, and anarcho-syndicalists in the company towns, river cities, and coastal capitals. Factories near Ezkioga in Beasain, Zumarraga, Legazpi, and Tolosa offered evidence of the shift in the economic base of the region from the agriculture of dispersed farmhouses to industry. Parish priests took on the difficult task of combating new ideas and morality with religious sodalities, sermons, and revival missions. They saw the new republic tipping the scales in favor of the long-term, ongoing encroachment of modernism.

Some of the new factories were paper mills. The tenant farm of Ezkioga where the two children had gone for milk on the night of the first visions belonged to an entrepreneur who later refused to rebuild his tenants' house when it burned down; instead he planted pine trees for his paper mill in Legorreta. Farm families were under siege, not only from the new republic and its schoolteachers but also

________________________________________

― 20 ―

from industrial development. It can be no coincidence that the majority of the people who eventually had visions at Ezkioga were from the farms, not the towns or cities, of the Basque Country.[13]

The appearances of the Virgin seemed to provide a solution to the great crisis. The first words she uttered (not to the original seers from Ezkioga but to a seven-year-old girl from Ormaiztegi and a twenty-four-year-old carpenter from Ataun) were in Basque, asking them, "Errosarioa errezatzea egunero [Pray the rosary daily]."[14] And pray the rosary people did, at night, on a hillside, often in the rain, on their knees, with arms outstretched during the Litany, while the seers waited for the visions to occur. First hundreds prayed, then within a week thousands. On the nights of July 12, 16, and 18 and October 16, up to eighty thousand persons turned out expecting miracles. In the first month there were over a hundred seers, and the visions continued in public, outdoor form until the fall of 1933. Seers at Ezkioga came especially from Gipuzkoa and within Gipuzkoa from the upland Goiherri; others came from the Basque-speaking villages of Navarra, and a few from Bizkaia, Castille, Catalonia, and the French Basque region. The visions soon spread out from Ezkioga, carried home by these pilgrims who had become seers and imitated by persons who read of the visions in the national press. Few Basques over seventy-five today did not go to Ezkioga then. It is possible that more persons gathered on that hillside on July 18 and October 16 than had ever gathered in one place in the Basque Country before.

Tapping and Defining New Power: The Press and Local Leaders

The atmosphere of rural Gipuzkoa and Navarra in June 1931 was like a cloud chamber with air so saturated that even slight radioactive emissions become visible to the naked eye. Two children whose own father did not believe them when they said they had seen the Virgin immediately attracted two to three hundred observers. In the following days, weeks, and months, in this atmosphere, other visions by other children and by adults, visions we would not normally hear about, left their marks. The impressions on these seers' minds held immense potential importance for the Catholics of the Basque Country, Spain, and Western Europe of 1931. These strong impressions are still available sixty years later in the form of memories and printed accounts.

The visions offered Catholics a source of new power or energy—power to know the future and to know the other world of heaven, hell, and purgatory, power that could heal, convert, and mobilize the faithful. The crowds that converged on Ezkioga even before the news came out in newspapers showed how much people wanted this knowledge and this intervention. Calling this power new implicitly accepts the local definition of what was happening, the

________________________________________

― 21 ―

truth of the divine appearances. But even believers would probably quality the idea that the power was new, because for them it would be a new version of a power very old indeed, the everyday power of God among them.

At Ezkioga this power was manifest in an unusual but hardly unique way. The Ezkioga parish church had bas-reliefs of Saint Michael appearing at Monte Gargano. Many Basque shrines had legends of apparitions. Lourdes was nearby, and well over a hundred thousand Basques had gone there and experienced firsthand the spiritual fruits of Bernadette's visions. The vision sites of Limpias (about a hundred kilometers northwest) and Piedramillera (about fifty kilometers south) were even closer. And Basque children knew about the apparitions of Fatima. The Ezkioga visions occurred during a period of enthusiasm within Catholicism in which the devout, in the face of rationalism, had come to believe that the old power was closer at hand, certifiable miracles were fully possible, and the supernaturals were easier to see.[15]

This kind of power came from the conversion of potential to kinetic energy. The potential energy lay in the Basques daily devotions, their normal attention

________________________________________

― 24 ―

to local, regional, and international saints. They deposited and invested this energy in daily rosaries, novenas, masses, prayers, and promises. They banked it through churches, shrines, monasteries, and convents. The church in its many representatives husbanded and administered it. The threat of the secular republic mobilized this accumulated devotional energy in the people of the north.

Tens of thousands of persons focused this power intensely on the seers. The seers were the protagonists, their stories and photographs in newspapers. Many of them seemed to feel in their bodies a tremendous force. Walter Starkie, an Irish Hispanist who wandered into Ezkioga and became for a few days in late July 1931 its one precious dispassionate witness, described a girl in vision as he held her:

I could feel the strain reacting upon her: every now and then a powerful shock seemed to pass quivering through her and galvanize her into energy, and she would toss in my arms and try to jump forwards. At last she sank back limp and when I looked down at her white face moist with tears I saw that she was unconscious.[16]

As we will see, time and again beginning seers described blinding light and fell into apparent unconsciousness. The metaphor of great power was one that they themselves used. When they lost their senses, wept uncontrollably, or were blissful, they demonstrated this energy to observers.

How was this power tapped? Which visions made it into print and which are available only in memories? Who by controlling the distribution of news of the visions helped define their content? How did what the seers saw and heard come to address what their audience wanted to know?

The Basques and the Navarrese were more literate than most Spaniards. In 1931, 85 percent of Basques and Navarrese aged ten or older could read and write; the percentage was about the same for women as for men. The national average was 67 percent. Parents took elementary school seriously and teachers were important members of the community. This high rate of literacy ensured many avid readers for news of the Ezkioga visions.[17]

For most Spaniards the news came largely from the reporters of the rightist newspapers of San Sebastián and Pamplona. In addition, the small-town stringers of these papers occasionally went to Ezkioga with busloads of pilgrims. Only on two occasions in July did writers for the more skeptical El Liberal of Bilbao go to Ezkioga, and there were no such eyewitness reports in the republican La Voz de Guipúzcoa .

The Basque newspapers covering the visions were those who had supported the winning coalition of candidates for Gipuzkoa in the Constituent Cortes, the parliament in Madrid that would draw up a constitution. La Constancia was the newspaper of the Carlists and Integrists; its deputy was Julio Urquijo. Two priests had recently founded El Día , the newspaper that reported the visions in greatest

________________________________________

― 25 ―

detail. The Catholic press reprinted El Día 's stories throughout Spain. The newspaper was discreetly pro-Nationalist, with emphasis on news of the province of Gipuzkoa, and its deputy was the canon of Vitoria Antonio Pildain. The coalition candidates were selected in its offices. Euzkadi was the official organ of the Basque Nationalist Party, whose deputy was Jesús María de Leizaola. El Pueblo Vasco catered to the more worldly gentry of San Sebastián, and its deputy was its founder and owner, Rafael Picavea. The weekly Argia, which tended toward nationalism, went out to rural, Basque-speaking Gipuzkoa; it carried many reports on Ezkioga in 1931. News of the visions reached the public in these newspapers and their points of view affected the reporting. Even leftist newspapers depended on these sources.

While the newspapers reporting the visions were Catholic and broadly to the right, they did have some differences. The editor of La Constancia, Juan de Olazábal, was the national leader of the Integrists. In 1931 and 1932 this faction was in the process of rejoining the main Carlist party. The Integrists, "few but vociferous," had another organ in San Sebastián, the weekly La Cruz . The two factions were most powerful in Navarra, where they had two newspapers, the Carlist La Tradición Navarra and the Integrist El Pensamiento Navarro . In contrast to the readers of the Carlist and Integrist newspapers, the readers of Euzkadi, El Día , and Argia wanted an autonomous government that responded to the traditions, culture, and "race" of the Basques. For them the form of the Madrid government was immaterial, and they eventually allied themselves with the Republic and fought against the Carlists in the civil war of 1936–1939. But in 1931 the Basque Nationalist Party and the Carlists, the two main forces in the agricultural townships of the Goiherri and among the clergy of the diocese, stood together against the Republic. El Pueblo Vasco, whose Catholicism and Basque nationalism was somewhat more liberal, provided its readers with a more skeptical slant on the Ezkioga visions. While always respectful, its reporter occasionally pointed out inconsistencies and doubts. But in July 1931 its articles, some quite extensive, were largely factual.[18]

In July and early August 1931 the three San Sebastián Catholic daily newspapers each had an average of two articles daily on the visions, usually naming visionaries and describing what they had seen and heard. They also carried background articles on trances, levitation, and stigmata and on the German stigmatic Thérèse Neumann, the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, and the visions at Lourdes, Fatima, and La Salette. Ezkioga was a big story; only the campaign for a Basque statute of autonomy surpassed it in column inches. These newspapers served as a filter. Some news passed, some did not.

Between the reporters and the seers there was another filter, that of an ad hoc commission of the two Ezkioga priests, Sinforoso Ibarguren and Juan Casares; a doctor from adjacent Zumarraga, Sabel Aranzadi; the Ezkioga health aide and the mayor and town secretary. The doctor examined those seers who came

________________________________________

― 26 ―

forward, and the priests asked questions that they eventually made into a printed form. By the end of July 1931 the commission had listened to well over a hundred persons, and because many persons had visions on more than one night, the total number of visions they heard about in that month was somewhere between three and five hundred. They sometimes allowed reporters to hear the seers and copy the transcripts. The doctor guided them toward the most convincing cases. The members of the commission encouraged some visionaries to return after future visions but dismissed others. The press and the commission tended to ignore adult women seers and heed adult men, comely adolescents, and those children who expressed themselves well (see questionnaire in appendix).

The seers themselves also participated in the filtering; some of them reserved what they saw for themselves or their families and did not declare their visions. This self-censorship particularly applied to the content of the visions. Seers were especially unlikely to declare unorthodox visions. For instance, one woman told others privately of seeing something like a witch in the sky. And a man from Zumarraga told me he saw a headless figure. He added, "Don't write that down; we all saw things there."[19]

Similarly, two girls about seven years old had visions of an irregular sort in Ormaiztegi in late August and early September 1931. The father of one of the girls, a furniture maker, wrote down what they saw. On August 31 the girls said that they saw a monkey by the stream near the workshop and that two days before in the same place they had seen a very ugly woman. They then saw the monkey turn into the same woman, whom they called a witch; the witch said she understood only Basque. Directed by the father, who saw nothing, they asked the witch in their imperfect Spanish why she had come and from where. She replied, in Basque syntax and Spanish vocabulary, that she had come from the seashore to kill them. Later she supposedly ran up to the workshop and tried to attack the religious images the father was restoring.

On September 1 the two children saw the witch in the stream with a girl in a low-cut dress, short skirt, painted face, and peroxided hair who said she was "Marichu, from San Sebastián, from La Concha [the central beach]." The father made the sign of the cross and the girl disappeared, leaving the old lady, who made a rough cross in response. Later, both appeared again, coming out of the water together. The next day the Virgin appeared to the children together with figures representing the devil and temptation. The girls also saw a procession of coffins of the village dead.

These visions are a mix of Basque folklore and contemporary religious motifs, with a dash of summer sin. "Marichu" was a kind of modern woman counter-image to the Daughters of Mary. The newspapers might never have reported the Ormaiztegi visions if the church had approved the apparitions of Ezkioga. The reporter did not reveal this unorthodox vision sequence until after the tide had turned against the apparitions in general.[20]

________________________________________

― 27 ―

Such journalistic suppression seems to have been common in July, when the visions had great public respectability. Starkie provides an example from the village of Ataun of the kind of vision the newspapers did not report:

I met a visionary of a more sinister kind who assured me with a wealth of detail that he had seen the Devil appear on the hill of Ezquioga … "I saw him appear above the trees—tall he was, with red hair, dressed in black, and he had long teeth like a wolf. I wanted to cry out with terror, but I made the sign of the Cross and the figure faded away slowly."[21]

Even mere spectators were aware that what others were seeing might not be holy but instead devilry or witchcraft. The word they used, sorginkeriak , literally "witch-stuff," reflected the ambiguous attitude toward the ancient subject, for it also had a looser meaning of "stuff and nonsense." Many priests preached that women should be retirado (indoors) after 9 P.M. ; thus, the woman who appeared at night on the hill was de mal retiro and going against the priests, something the Virgin would not do. This widespread opinion, more common among men, was also an indirect criticism of the women who stayed out late praying on the hillside. As long as the visions were respectable in the summer of 1931, the press rarely put such criticism into print.[22]

A third kind of distortion or molding affected the orthodox visions when certain messages were emphasized over others. The allocation of attention was the business of every person who when to, talked about, or read about the visions. In a gradual collective selective process, the Catholics of the north focused on the messages they wanted to hear. We can follow this process day-to-day through the press.

The first visions of the first seers were of the Virgin (they had no doubt who it was) dressed as the Sorrowing Mother, the Dolorosa. The image appeared slightly above ground level, and the visions were at night. Sometimes the Virgin was happy, sometimes sad, but her emotions were the "content" of the visions. On July 4 others began having visions, and during the rest of July newspapers described over two hundred of the visions in which the Virgin's wishes became more explicit. Some visionaries told how the Virgin reacted to her surroundings, to the audience, or to the prayers. Some saw the Virgin as part of allegorical tableaux. Others saw her move her lips. And starting on July 7 still others heard her speak. Visions involving acts, such as cures or divine wounds, developed only in later months.[23]

The rosary, a fixture of the gatherings, began on the third day of the visions. During and after the rosary the audience engaged in a kind of collective blind dialogue with the holy figure through the seers: on the one hand, the prayers and Basque hymns; on the other, the seers communicating the Virgin's emotions and attitudes. The Virgin was alternately sad, weeping, sad then happy when she heard the prayers, and happy. She sometimes participated in the prayers and

________________________________________

― 28 ―

hymns, said good-bye, and even threw invisible flowers. Mute glances, reproachful looks, sweating, and an occasional smile had been the main—indeed the only—content of the miraculous movements of the crucifixes of Limpias and Piedramillera.

People also deduced Mary's emotions and mission from her dress, which was mainly that of a Dolorosa with a white robe and black cape (the commission took care to establish her apparel and how many stars there were in her crown), but sometimes she came as the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Aranzazu, Our Lady of the Rosary, or other avatars. Some seers saw one Mary after another in rapid succession.

The communication between the Virgin and the congregation was the central drama of the Ezkioga visions in the first month, but there were other vision motifs. Visions predicting a divine proof of the apparitions earned particular attention. From July 10 there were reports of an imminent miracle. Seers' predictions overlapped, so when one miracle did not occur, people's hopes shifted to another. A rumor circulated that a very holy nun—some said from Bilbao, others said from Pamplona—had predicted on her deathbed that in a corner of Gipuzkoa prodigious events would take place on July 12. On the day before that date the carpenter Francisco "Patxi" Goicoechea of Ataun had a vision in which the Virgin said that time would be up after seven days. People understood this statement variously to mean that the miracle would take place on the sixteenth or the eighteenth. On July 12 an article appeared in El Día drawing parallels between Ezkioga and Lourdes and raised hopes for a miracle in the form of a spectacular cure. On the fourteenth Patxi again referred to a time span (un turno ) elapsing, and an eleven-year-old boy from Urretxu heard the Virgin say that she would say what she wanted on the eighteenth. On the twelfth and sixteenth of July there were massive audiences of hopeful pilgrims. The newspapers reported hundreds of seers on the twelfth, but on neither day was there a miracle of any kind. On the seventeenth the Zumarraga parish priest told a reporter he would rather talk the next day: "Let us see if tomorrow, Saturday, the Virgin wants to work a miracle; perhaps something startling and supernatural, as at Lourdes, will be a revelation for us all. Maybe a spring will suddenly appear, or a great snowfall."[24]

The Zumarraga priest's hopes in print set the stage for a day of record attendance on July 18, which the press estimated at eighty thousand persons. But the day before, Ramona Olazábal, age sixteen, was already setting up new expectations because the Virgin had told her that she would appear on the following days. No miracle occurred on the eighteenth. But Patxi heard the Virgin say she would work them in the future, and a girl heard her say that she would not show herself to everyone because people were bad; so hope for a miracle continued. On July 23 Ramona heard the Virgin affirm that she would work

________________________________________

― 29 ―

miracles in the future; on the next day there was a story that another nun, this one living, had announced great events in 1931; and on the following day a servant girl from Ormaiztegi announced that the Virgin "wanted to do miracles."[25]

When Starkie was in Ezkioga, around July 28, he found local people and outsiders in a kind of suspense, waiting for a sign. On July 30 the Virgin, ratifying what most persons had already concluded, declared through Ramona that "miracles were not appropriate yet."[26] By then the seers had worn out their audience, which declined to a few thousand persons and on some days to a few hundred, until Ramona herself became the miracle in mid-October.

Visions Relating to the Collective Religious and Political Predicament

The political-religious problems of 1931, which seem to have determined the immediate positive response to the visions, were not only pressing but also collective in nature, so help from the Virgin had to be collective as well. The Elgoibar correspondent in El Día of July 18 called for a message addressed to the Basques: "Let the Mother of Heaven make her decisions manifest, for we her sons in Gipuzkoa are prepared to carry them out." Already a month and a half before the visions began, La Constancia had laid out the collective plight:

Difficult times, times of trial, sorrowful omens; disquieting doubts, bitter disillusions, anguished fright, ears and eyes that open to reality, at last.

What is happening? What is going to happen?

And in this disarray, with spirits cowed, the mind goes blank, confusion grows, and the already general malaise spreads.

The writer also proposed a solution: "We must turn our eyes to God and to our conscience and begin a crusade of prayer, fervent persevering prayer; and a crusade of penance and atonement." Three weeks before the visions started the Bergara correspondent of the same newspaper made a similar analysis:

The simple and plain folk have understood that we are in the midst of a sea of dangers, that the hurricane wind tells us that we are two steps away from the most terrible storm, from which we will hardly be able to emerge without divine help; and in sacrifice they have gone to the feet of the Virgin to pray for Spain, the Basque Country, and for the town.

At Ezkioga the Basque people "turned their eyes to God" and went "to the feet of the Virgin" to pray for collective help in a way perhaps more literal than these writers expected but in a way they and others had already marked.[27]

________________________________________

― 30 ―

The first hint that the visions would address this need came in the Bilbao republican paper El Liberal on July 10. The correspondent from Elgoibar reported:

When on their return from Ezquioga these people arrive in town, they won't let you get by them. Some say they have seen the virgin [sic ] with the Statute of Estella under her arm; others claim that what she has under her arm are the fueros , without a sword. They tell us, and they won't stop, that the aforesaid virgin has a complete wardrobe of outfits of different colors, and that at her side are two rose-colored angels. Is it possible that this occurs in the twentieth century, when Spanish newspapers cross the border and carry news of Spain to the rest of the world?

The Liberal correspondent may have made up the part about the Statute of Estella (the statute of autonomy that the rightist coalition supported) and the fueros (the traditional laws of the Basque Country and Navarra that the central government abrogated in the nineteenth century). But in any case the article pointed to political issues that the right as well as the left expected the visions to address.

On 8 July 1931, writing from his hometown of Ezkioga, Engracio de Aranzadi described the first visions and suggested what they could mean. Aranzadi was a successor to Sabino Arana as the ideologue of the Basque Nationalist Party, a frequent contributor to Euzkadi , and a relative of Antonio Pildain, the deputy in the Cortes and canon of Vitoria. Aranzadi's words carried great weight in the movement, and the apparitions were almost literally in his front yard. His article "La Aparición de Ezquioga" came out in El Día on July 11 and in El Correo Catalán a week later.

Aranzadi began by stating that the supernatural and the natural orders were particularly close in the Basque Country. For the Basques, he said, there was "harmony between spiritual and national activities, between religion and the race." Sabino Arana had founded the Nationalist party because of his "deep conviction that exoticism was here impiety," that is, that Basques were religious and impiety came from the outside. In the recent election the Basques alone had stood up to the Republicans and Socialists. While in the rest of Spain candidates on the right had played down their religion, in Navara and Gipuzkoa the candidates had proudly proclaimed their Catholicism. As a result, only nine of twenty-three deputies in the Vasco-Navarra region were leftists and enemies of the church ("not Basque leftists, but leftist outsiders, encamped on Basque soil on the heights of Bilbao, Sestao, Barakaldo, Donostia, Irun, Iruña, and Gazteiz").

Aranzadi argued against Basques who favored an alliance with the Second Republic at the expense of their Catholic identity and he referred to the Nationalist cause as a religious crusade beneath the "two-crossed" Basque flag: "There is a great battle in preparation. For God and fatherland on one side, and against God and the fatherland on the other…. And to our aid heaven comes.

________________________________________

― 31 ―

It seems to seek to invigorate our faith, which is attacked by alien impiety." He described the first visions, which began the day he arrived for a stay in Ezkioga, and concluded:

May it not be that heaven seeks to comfort the spirit of Basques loyal to the faith of the race? May it not be that heaven seeks to strengthen the people, ever faithful to their religious convictions, in the face of imminent developments? Is it so strange, given the path we believers have taken, that to the calls of a race, of a nationality which with its blood has sealed the sincerity of its faith, a response should come from above with the help that we seek?

Aranzadi expressed the belief of many Nationalists that Mary supported the Basques against the Republic. For instance, the pro-Nationalist weekly Argia 's first article on the apparitions concluded, "God has great good will toward the Basque people." And in the next issue the Zarautz correspondent described how going to pray at Ezkioga had the effect of increasing Basque Nationalist fervor: "At this mountain the lukewarm get hot, and the hot get all fired up for Euskadi to be free and live in Her love." Throughout the month the visions of certain seers, particularly Patxi Goicoechea, himself a Nationalist, confirmed Aranzadi's diagnosis of heaven's intentions. The Virgin was preparing the Basques for a civil war.[28]

On July 14 Patxi saw the Virgin with a severe expression bless the four cardinal points with a sword. Leftist newspapers, which until then had made fun of the visions, quickly asked the government to intervene. Rightist papers countered that the visions were harmless and that it was natural that the Virgin, who as the Sorrowing Mother had a sword through her heart, should use the sword to make a blessing. On July 16 Patxi saw an angel give the Virgin a sword. The Virgin, holding a Christ with a bloody face, wept.[29]

Allegories of justice and vengeance continued on successive days. On July 17 a nineteen-year-old girl from Pasaia also saw the Virgin with a sword and a man saw the Virgin threaten him with her hand. Patxi began to reveal matters that reporters decided not to print: "The youth from Ataun told us many more things that we prefer not to mention, as they might be wrongly interpreted"; "Francisco Goicoechea made revelations of great importance which will be reserved for the time being." At the end of the month Patxi "specified certain revelations" that a writer did not "consider prudent to reveal."[30]

But the press described ever more explicit tableaux. On July 18 the Virgin blessed the audience with a sword, which she then gave to the attending angels. The next day the republican Voz de Guipúzcoa denounced "the manipulation of a hallucination" as part of a "rightist-separatist" plot and the provocation of "hatred and civil war." And a republican deputy warned in El Liberal of Madrid that Ezkioga was the product of clergy "ready to hitch up their cassocks, shoulder

________________________________________

― 32 ―

their guns, and take to the hills." On July 25 an assiduous seer, an eleven-year-old boy from Urretxu, saw angels with swords that were bloody, and on July 28 so did Patxi.[31] Starkie was present at this vision and heard Patxi describe it to the priests. He revealed what the press suppressed, that Patxi said openly that

there would be Civil War in the Basque country between the Catholics and the non-Catholics. At first the Catholics would suffer severely and lose many men, but ultimately they would triumph with the help of twenty-five angels of Our Lady.

Starkie also described the mood of monarchist pilgrims expecting momentarily an uprising in Navarra against the Republic. They encouraged, supported, and chauffeured selected seers. The theme of imminent war became a permanent part of the visions. On August 6 or 7 Juana Ibarguren of Azpeitia saw the Dolorosa with sword in hand, a river of blood, and Saint Michael the Archangel with a squad of angels running quickly along the mountaintops, as if fending off some invisible enemy.[32]

Carlist as well as Nationalist newspapers reported the tableaux of celestial wars. Engracio de Aranzadi notwithstanding, Basque autonomy was less an issue in the press reports on the visions than the mobilization of Spaniards in general. For the newspapers of Pamplona and La Constancia of San Sebastiín, the upcoming battle was not to secede from Spain but rather to reconquer it. Indeed, as early as the morning of July 9, a rumor circulated to the effect that the Virgin had said to the child seers, "Save Spain." In mid-July the vision sessions included applause, shouts of "Long live Catholic Spain!" and possible monarchical vivas.

We know of these shouts because of the outrage they provoked in the Basque Nationalist Euzkadi . A priest writing on July 15 knew it was a "complete lie" that the Virgin would say to save Spain, and a week later a correspondent complained bitterly:

"Viva España la católica! Viva la católica España!" They should keep these shouts and vivas to themselves. Why didn't they go and put out the fires in the convents they burned in Madrid and Seville?… [T]he ones who burned the convents were Spaniards, although many of those inside were Basques.

Because of the turn toward the salvation of Spain by some seers, some of the audience, or the prayer leaders, mostEuzkadi reporting was cool and reserved from mid-July.[33]

Simultaneously, Carlists throughout Spain became more interested. On July 24 a writer in La Constancia asserted that the visions had produced a sensation in the entire nation and he hoped for church approval, as at Lourdes and Fatima. The same day an article in the Vitoria Carlist paper Heraldo Alavés also emphasized Spain. This paper was the Catholic daily of the diocesan seat and, with the church hierarchy reticent about the visions, Heraldo had ignored the story

________________________________________

― 33 ―

almost completely. One of the only exceptions was this article, "Ama Virgiña [Virgin Mother]," by the Catholic writer and labor organizer María de Echarri.[34]

Echarri's piece was the equivalent for Spanish Catholics of that of Aranzadi for Basque Nationalists, a kind of ideological blueprint for the visions. She herself had twice witnessed the movement of the eyes of the Christ of Limpias and thought Our Lady of Lourdes had converted her brother on his deathbed, so she was attentive to supernatural events.

Some ask why that sword in her hand. God has his mysteries. But some suspect also that God's justice is suspended over the guilty, prevaricating fatherland, over the land that was known as that of María Santísima, over the earth where the Virgin of Pilar came in mortal flesh, over Spain, which she considered one of her most cherished prizes. And that this justice the Lord has held back and placed in the hands of the most holy Virgin, so she will spare us from it if we know how to make reparation, do penance, expiate…. [The devotion manifest at the visions] gives one's heart hope for a day when the dark clouds that now hang over Spain, the tempest that now blows against our holy religion, the hurricane of cold terrifying secularism that today threatens the faith of Spanish children, will have dissipated.

The seer children from Mendigorría were brought to Ezkioga with the banner "Mater Amabilis, Salva a España." And some of the Basque seers pleaded to the Virgin to save Spain from impiety.[35]

On August 13 the deputy Antonio de la Villa, a journalist from Extremadura, denounced the political drift of the visions in the Constituent Cortes, charging a conspiracy. The cover of the anticlerical magazine La Traca reflected his analysis. Most deputies in the Cortes did not take him seriously, but by attributing political significance to the visions, de la Villa had much in common with the ideologues of the Basque press and with some of the seers. His speech produced no action against Ezkioga. But the government was already aware both of Carlist paramilitary organizations and of contacts between Basque Nationalists and monarchist military officers. On August 22 it shut down all rightist newspapers in the north and sent troops on exercise through the countryside.[36]

The Visions and the Younger Generation

The apparitions at Ezkioga evoked an enthusiastic response in the rural devout and the urban gentry in July 1931 because everyone recognized immediately, even before there was any explicit idea of their content, the visions' potential for resolving a crisis in competing ideologies.[37] While this crisis came to a head with the proclamation of the Second Republic, the burning of religious houses, the elections of the Cortes, and the Basque autonomy movement, its long-term cause was the change from agriculture to industry and tourism.

________________________________________

― 34 ―

The Basque ethnographers of the time, who were rural clergymen dedicated to preserving "traditional Catholic ambience," presented the conflict as a struggle between rural agriculture and urban industry. In truth, small-town factory owners like Patricio Echeverría of Legazpi or Juan José Echezarreta of Legorreta (who owned the Ezkioga apparition field) were themselves of farm origin, shared these values, and counted on them to ensure their company towns a dependable workforce from the younger sons of the farms. Industrialists, it is claimed, subsidized La Constancia and kept up the fight for traditional Basque and Navarrese legal and fiscal privileges. Doubtless they financed much of Nationalist party activity as well. But whether Carlists, Integrists, or Nationalists promoted this patriarchal ideology (against, respectively, Liberals, Freemasons and Jews, and outsiders), all knew Catholic rural culture was threatened, and the diocese of Vitoria had long since geared up to defend it. Devout Basques judged the apparitions in this context.[38]

________________________________________

― 35 ―

Most churchmen considered industrial urban society lost to atheism or liberalism. But they hoped they could yet contain the corrosive effects of these new ways of life on rural society. Carlists had been denouncing city life for one hundred years, but the success of Basque coastal resorts at the turn of the century caused additional confusion in rural areas and more defensive measures on the part of rural elites. In 1924, writing about his hometown of Ataun, the Basque ethnographer José Miguel de Barandiarán described the deleterious effects of contact with the cities.

Hence, many of the young people of Ataun spend part of their lives in more or less close contact with the base, tavern-going mobs of the cities and see the ostentation and show of the "fine" and "elegant" public that today makes up a large effeminate caste of little brains, but which is in the forefront of style and is the prime expression of a thoughtless and sensual outlook ever more dominant in the big cities.

In the cities, he wrote with uncharacteristic luridness, "the flower of youth wilts in sumptuous orgies and … lewd old men paint their faces and dye their white hair."[39]

San Sebastián, in particular, with its fashionable beachfront, provoked rural antagonism, which can be seen in the Ormaiztegi vision of "Marichu" from La Concha arm-in-arm with a witch. In San Sebastián at the beginning of the Second Republic there was an upsurge of sexually explicit literature. Even the republican newspaper called for "liberty in laws, but morality in customs." Some saw this immorality as the result of a breakdown of parental authority. Consider one priest's analysis of the reasons for the relatively low church attendance in the factory town of Eibar.

There is a total absence of family life: in Eibar paternal authority barely exists; "democracy and equality" have reached the intimacy of the home where people go their separate ways—more like a boardinghouse than a home. The house serves only to satisfy physical needs; apart from this all go out to the street, the bar, the café, the political club, or the movies, and this every day, in turbid promiscuity of sexes until very late at night, with dire consequences for morality and religiosity.

The clergy saw this kind of city life as a threat to the souls of rural youth.[40]

At first glance the challenges to authority in the countryside seem trivial and incidental. For they had less to do with strikes and revolts than with family and community matters like deference, social control, and gender. Examples include couples' close-dancing (a threat to parental control of courtship); women's wearing more revealing clothes, riding bicycles, or staying out later at night (threats to the authority of husbands or parents); lack of deference to the priest as measured in public reverences or greetings; and lack of deference to God and

________________________________________

― 36 ―

the Virgin Mary with the abandonment of the family rosary or prayers at daybreak, noon, and nightfall at the ringing of the Angelus. Barandiarán's students and collaborators focused on the erosion of traditional practices in a 1924 survey. His clerical correspondents considered issues like close-dancing as threats to religion and to an entire way of life.

The initial reports about the Ezkioga visions show the children, returning at nightfall with milk from a farm, kneeling to pray at the ringing of the Angelus bells. Validating traditional piety, those children immediately became emblems of the Basque heartland. At this time one could see well-off girls in Vitoria dressed as farmworkers and praying the Angelus in a tableau. The Virgin thus appeared as a reward to those who kept the faith.[41]

By the same token, small matters under local dispute could also be the basis for rejecting the visions in general or particular seers. Should women be out at night? Many men decided the visions were not real because they set an example of immorality. Similarly, an argument against the truth of the visions of Ramona Olazábal was that she liked to dance; indeed, she did so on some of the same days she had visions. We may suppose that this level of discernment often escaped the

________________________________________

― 37 ―

urban newspaper reporters and on this basis local people disqualified some visionaries who had passed muster with the local commission and the press. In San Sebastián one might know, at most, if someone went to church or not. Rural folk cut finer distinctions—whether one prayed on one knee or two, confessed weekly, on major feast days, or annually, and touched one's beret or took it all the way off when greeting a priest. Local people soon knew how devout seers had been prior to their visions and whether their behavior had subsequently improved.[42]

The erosion of devotional practices and respect for authority was taking place above all in the younger generation, particularly among males working in factories or on military service and among females who went to work, at ages fifteen to seventeen, as servants away from home. By 1924 an Oñati member of the youth sodality of San Luis Gonzaga read the republican Voz de Guipúzcoa in his workshop and a girl in Ataun could prefer expulsion from the Daughters of Mary to giving up her strolls with her boyfriend, transgressions unthinkable a few years earlier. A young freethinker who had worked as a waiter in Paris lived three doors from the first seers.[43] Girls on bicycles were also breaking the rules. An older lady in Zumarraga told me that when as a girl she rode past on a bicycle, a priest called out that he hoped she would not have the nerve to go to Communion the next day. One of her friends recalled Don Andrés Olaechea, one of the priests who led the rosary at Ezkioga, crossing the town square where a girl was riding a bicycle and muttering "Sinvergüenza, sinvergüenza, sinvergüenza, sinvergüenza [hussy, hussy, hussy, hussy]" until he was out of sight. To such women Dolores Nieto, the first girl to ride a bicycle, was a social hero.[44]

And of course the dancing issue was generational. In June 1931 in Marikina (Bizkaia), for example, the town authorities fined girls who danced closely in the modern fashion (el valseo or agarrado ). The citations referred the girls as "delinquents" for violating collective community vows. The diocesan bulletin describes how on 29 March 1931 Jesuits giving a mission led one such vow.

To the final service, held in the village square on the afternoon of Palm Sunday, Ceánuri came out en masse, 2,500 persons, with many more from the surrounding villages. It was there that P. Goicoechea, grasping the holy crucifix of the mission prior to the papal blessing, was able to ask that all, with their arms in the form of a cross, give their word to dance the agarrado no more and to preserve in pure form the traditional custom of being indoors when the Angelus is rung, and other customs that had been observed until now, and which are now seen as in danger because of the constant pressure of outsiders.[45]

One of the major battles fought by Liberals, and later Republicans and Socialists, was to relax attitudes toward sex and the body. Their correspondents chronicled the struggle in villages between the youth in favor of close-dancing and

________________________________________

― 38 ―

the clergy and town councils in favor of the traditional (suelto ) varieties. In Ormaiztegi one of the issues in the changeover from an older to a younger town council in 1932 was pressure from the parish priest against close-dancing at town fiestas.[46]

Rural cinemas posed a particular challenge to the old ways, both in the movies they showed and the opportunities they offered couples for privacy. Around 1930 the diocese of Vitoria had tried and failed to stop Juan José Echezarreta, the owner of the Ezkioga apparition site, from opening a cinema in Ordizia. After the films on Sundays, youths from the surrounding villages stayed on for dances.[47]

On these issues peer pressure was the first line of defense for the church and the older generation. The main vehicle for this pressure was the Daughters of Mary, a pious association, or sodality, for girls. In some towns the priests who directed the sodality made girls who danced the agarrado wear a purple ribbon when receiving Communion. After the girl's third offense they expelled her and confiscated her medal, as they expelled those who walked alone with boys. Morality was the responsibility of the girls, not the boys. The church had less leverage over the boys; few of them belonged to the male sodality of San Luis Gonzaga.[48]

Given this generational conflict, the press and the general public quickly accorded adolescent and young adult seers prominence at Ezkioga. These seers were the good examples. Some, like Patxi, who started out mocking or skeptical, were even exemplary converts. By the same token, some of the divine messages most successful with the press and the public were those that spoke to these skirmishes in the war against modern ideas and religious laxity. The first message, "Pray the rosary daily," would have been superfluous in earlier times. But already by 1924 only the more devout households, particularly on the isolated farms, were saying the prayers. Commentators in Argia and the magazineAránzazu suggested that the Virgin appeared in order to restore the rosary.[49]

And, of course, the physical presence of the Virgin, Saint Michael, and other saints at Ezkioga itself confirmed most overtly heaven's direct links to the Basques and the Spaniards. It was especially for this purpose people wanted a miracle that would demonstrate the truth of the apparitions and, by extension, of the divinity. Eventually the visions persisted in spite of the bishop's denunciation and the result was the undermining of church authority. At that point, the diocese as well as the government (the Republic and later the government of Francisco Franco as well) persecuted the visionaries and believers. But such was not the case in the summer of 1931, when priests stepped right in to lead the rosaries, direct the crowds, examine the visionaries, and even escort them from their home villages. In July, at least, there seemed to be an unbroken line from the divine to the Basque faithful, abetted by enthusiastic clergy, that served to confirm a way of life

________________________________________

― 39 ―

seriously in question. To the extent that the visions contradicted this way of life, people did not believe them.

The more political messages from visionaries responded to the most grave and immediate source of the threat to Basque lines of authority, the Madrid government of the Republic. Unlike the monarchy, which even with Liberal governments maintained a certain divine connection and an alliance with local power, the secular Second Republic of 1931 was totally outside the lines of authority that ran from God to bishop to parish priest to male head of household, with ancillary lines for civil and industrial authorities. The standing Sacred Hearts of Jesus in prominent urban locations and the enthroned ones that Spain's Catholics had in the previous decades consecrated in parish churches, town halls, factories, and households served as storage batteries along the way. With the burning of convents and the expulsion of the bishop of Vitoria and the primate of Spain, the Republic seemed bent on disrupting these lines and dismantling these structures.

The Second Republic was not just an external enemy. There was a danger that the youth of the Basque Nationalist movement might pass to the pro-Republican Acción Nacionalista camp. Engracio de Aranzadi feared they would defect in his 8 July 1931 article. A fifth of the voters in Ezkioga had supported the Republican coalition. It was entirely conceivable that Basque youths might see the Republic as a defender of freedom of ideas and of a less restrictive sense of morality and as an ally against excesses of paternal, clerical, municipal, industrial, or male authority. The Republic was thus also an internal enemy that aggravated the division of generations. Even in rural Gipuzkoa Starkie came across heated arguments in taverns between republicans and rightist Catholics. When he played his fiddle in nearby, equally Catholic, Castile in the summer of 1931, both in Burgos and in remote villages young girls shouted out for him to play the Marseillaise, the anthem of liberty.[50]

The Catholics of the north, and in particular the Basques, perceived that their society and culture, once unified, was divided and under a violent attack from without which accentuated its internal divisions. This perception determined in part the way Basque Catholics tapped, defined, and interpreted the new devotional power generated by the visions of Ezkioga.

Taken as a whole, the many newspaper reports and analyses about the visions are quite revealing. A "fast" medium like daily newspapers, radio, or television (as opposed to the "slow" media of pamphlets, books, and letters of, say, late-fifteenth-century Italian visions) is a forum for the tacit negotiation between what is really on the minds of individuals, what material is all right to distribute, and what people want to hear. Note that from at least the fourteenth century in Europe few socially significant visions have been single events; rather, they have continued and developed over time, sometimes years, allowing for feedback even from slow media. While word of mouth was no doubt the most effective way of

________________________________________

― 40 ―

spreading enthusiasm for both ancient and modern visions, the daily articles on the visions ensured for Gipuzkoa a homogeneous core of knowledge.[51]

The seers of Ezkioga were well aware of the importance of the press. Many of them made friends with reporters and wanted the press to tell their story. The seers' visions no doubt converged in part because they read about each other's experiences. Moreover, information could be quickly spread by word of mouth throughout the region. In 1931 Gipuzkoa had one of the most extensive telephone systems in all of Spain; indeed, there was a telephone office at the base of the apparition hill. The hope for a miracle created a network of friends and believers who could alert the entire region within hours.[52]

Most of the repeat seers were children or youths, who had an unparalleled chance for fame in the Basque Country, fame of the kind only the best improvisational poets, dancers, jai alai players, weight lifters, or log-splitters could hope for. And the seers were more than famous—they were important, they were part of a critical historical moment: Mary's direct intervention in their nation.

These visionaries gained power so surprisingly because they could express the diffuse yearning for miraculous change or, if you will, serve as lightning rods for the divine. In such a complex situation it is difficult to speak of individual responsibility. All who were present and hoping for apparitions had a hand in negotiating their content. On 8 July 1931, when by all reports the Virgin was simply appearing as Dolorosa, Engracio de Aranzadi publicly surmised that she was preparing the Basques for an imminent battle. Eventually the visions confirmed his expectations because many others, including some of the seers, shared them.

In part, the onlookers' concerns reached the seers in questions for the Virgin. A reporter stated that Patxi "directed at the apparition interminable questions, which were suggested to him by those around him." A skeptic observed that "many who question [Patxi in vision] themselves provide the answer, and others draw from the seer the desired response." Even believers in the visions would agree that when the Virgin responded to questions put to her, her messages thereby addressed and reflected the preoccupations of the questioners.[53]

For students of other places and times, the first summer of the Ezkioga visions may suggest the importance of the context in which "prophets" and charismatic leaders formulate and gradually fix their messages. In the Basque visions and movements, individual seers responded to general anxieties and hopes with what they said were God's instructions, but it seems clear that the messages were as much a consensual product of the desires of followers and the wider society as of the leaders, the prophets, or the saints. We will therefore pay as much attention to the audience—the Greek chorus, the hagiographer, the message takers, and the message transmitters—as to the visionaries themselves.

________________________________________

― 41 ―

3.

Promoters and Seers I: Antonio Amundarain and Carmen Medina

Mary's sorrowful opposition to the Second Republic was the central interest of believers and seers at the Ezkioga visions in the summer of 1931. Press and public nudged along the evolving political message in a collective fashion. Simultaneously, another process, less collective, ensured that the seers produced messages for particular constituencies. Socially powerful organizers sought divine backing for various programs. After the summer of 1931 their projects absorbed much of the seers' attention.

In early August 1931, in the absence of a confirming miracle, the people of San Sebastián and Bilbao and their newspapers got over their first, sharp interest in the visions. Reporters tired of the same seers and the same messages. In any event the seers lost their forum. For the government, fearing a rightist military uprising, suspended most newspapers in the north on August 22. El Día, which printed the most about Ezkioga, only came out again at the end of October.[1] By then the tide had turned against the visions. After early August there was little detailed reporting of the visions and visionaries.

________________________________________

― 42 ―

This decline in publicity coincided with the Radical Socialist Antonio de la Villa's attack on the visions in parliament and military exercises in the area. For whatever reason, the visionaries subsequently shied away from overt political messages.

Diaries, letters, books, and circulars by literate believers are our main sources for the following months and years. They show the extent to which the visions, like those at Limpias a decade earlier, served as a sounding board for movements and new devotions within Spanish Catholicism. This is not surprising. Catholics came to Ezkioga from all of Spain and southern France, many of them with prior agendas. A large number of visionaries continued to provide messages of great variety. Many seers were open to suggestion. Highly literate emissaries from the urban world of devotional politics latched onto particular rural visionaries or were actively sought out by them. This kind of symbiosis points us toward the mystical side of these Catholic movements and to principles governing alliances across boundaries of class, gender, age, and culture.[2]

The next three chapters recount the principal alliances of promoters and seers. Pressure from the increasingly hostile diocese, counsel from spiritual directors, and rivalry among seers and among promoters affected these alliances. Seers attempted to convince observers. Observers had to decide whom to believe. Or, if observers believed in several, they had to decide who had the most important messages. Those believers who sought to influence or to gain inside information from seers had to win them in some way. Believers drove the most convincing seers to the site, gave them gifts, and spread their vision messages. Over time, as these seers gained an ample public, they tended to address issues that were more general—at first political and later apocalyptic. Coming from the most convincing seers, such dramatic messages more easily passed the severe scrutiny they provoked. At the other end of the spectrum, the less theatrical, less convincing visionaries nonetheless each had a band of followers (called a cuadrilla ) which principally included persons who had known the seer previously—friends, family members, and neighbors—and who therefore trusted the seer. These less virtuosic visionaries spent more time attending to the spiritual and practical needs of constituents with less ideological interests.

As the popularity of the visions as a whole rose or fell, individual seers might move from one mode of response to another. A number of seers, when they started, addressed personal questions. When they became more popular, they supplied a more general public with news about political developments and the Last Judgment. If the visions then lost favor and only die-hard supporters remained, the seers responded once again to believers' personal needs.

Such relationships between seers and critical believers have affected the lives and work of virtually all Catholic mystics who achieved fame, for what is at stake is fame itself. Promoters are critically important for seers whose access to literate, urban culture can only be achieved through others. We know the nobleman

________________________________________

― 43 ―

Francis of Assisi primarily through the eyes of those around him. We depend even more on chroniclers and promoters to learn about the day laborer Marcelina Mendívil of Zegama. As we look at particular learned believers and their contacts with particular seers, we gradually become aware of a far more general process by which the parties creatively combine suggestion and inspiration. As they court and separate, promoters like Antonio Amundarain, Carmen Medina, Manuel Irurita, Magdalena Aulina, Padre Burguera, Raymond de Rigné and their seers show us one way societies create new religious meaning.[3]

Antonio Amundarain

The first, crucial link between visionaries and influential believers was between the girl from Ezkioga who was the first seer and the parish priest of Zumarraga, Antonio Amundarain Garmendia. Apparitions with a broad public appeal can be halted with ease only at the very start. The parish priest, usually the first authority to deal with the matter, is of utmost importance. If he is indecisive or reacts positively, the visions can build up momentum before newspapers and diocesan officials notice them. So it was fortunate for the Ezkioga visions that the girl seer found her way to Amundarain, a clergyman influential in the diocese and fascinated by mystical experiences. The parish priest of Ezkioga and the curate in charge of Santa Lucía were far less famous and far more hardheaded.[4]

Amundarain heard about the Ezkioga visions from the woman who brought him milk. Antonia Etxezarreta, then twenty-three years old, had found out from Primitiva Aramburu, who brought milk from the farmhouse nearest the site of the visions. Primitiva had heard about them from her sister Felipa, who had been with the girl and her brother when they had their first vision.[*] Antonia was a curious, lettered woman who contributed reports in Basque to Argia . She stopped by the school in Santa Lucía to talk to the seer girl and then took her with mule and milk to Zumarraga. At the rectory she presented the girl to a curate she trusted and liked. He was inclined to dismiss the matter, but it was Amundarain who was in charge. The next day, July 2, when Antonia brought the milk, Amundarain had her tell him what had happened and that evening he went to observe the visions.[5]

Amundarain's past and character are vital to this tale. They explain why he did not dismiss the visions but instead nursed them into a mass phenomenon in the first week. A priest with intense energy and drive, Amundarain was a born organizer who was also a photographer, musician, and author of religious dramas. In Zumarraga he supervised six clergymen and three houses of nuns. He

________________________________________

― 44 ―

came from the rural town of Elduain, and his father had been a Carlist soldier in the Carlist War half a century earlier. Amundarain's mother had bad memories of the Liberal household in which she had worked in San Sebastián, and her son had no yearning for the easy life of the city. One of his brothers was a Franciscan missionary in South America, a nephew became a priest, and two nieces were nuns. Amundarain himself was a Carlist-Integrist. He received La Constancia, La Gaceta del Norte , and Euzkadi . Occasionally he contributed to Argia and La Constancia . He consideredLa Voz de Guipúzcoa sinful. He read standing up so as not to enjoy the activity too much or waste time.[6]

Amundarain's first post had been as chaplain to the Mercedarian Sisters of Charity in Zumarraga from 1911 to 1919 and directing female religious remained his true calling. In San Sebastián, where from 1919 to 1929 he was a curate, he served as confessor to several communities of nuns.[7] There in 1925 he founded the Alliance in Jesus through Mary (La Alianza en Jesús por Maria), a lay order in which young women and older teenage girls took temporary vows of chastity and poverty, followed a rigorous dress code, and helped in parishes. By 1929 there were 207 Alliance members (Aliadas ) in twenty chapters in Gipuzkoa, Alava, Bilbao, and Madrid. By then an eighth of the young women

________________________________________

― 45 ―

had gone on to become nuns. The Mercedarian Sisters came to know the Aliadas well; numerous Aliadas joined the order and the sisters helped to set up Aliada centers in the towns where they had houses.[8]

In the next two years the lay order quintupled in size, spreading to most Spanish regions. In the Basque Country Aliadas were established mainly in the provincial capitals, but there were centers in six other towns, including Zumarraga. Each section had a local spiritual director, so in 1931 Amundarain had a network of priests with whom he was in close contact. At that time the Basque Aliadas were largely from kaleak , the town centers. In the eyes of the farm people they were "señoritas [young ladies]," and I have the impression that in more rural areas many were sisters of priests. For all of the Aliadas Amundarain was a charismatic figure.[9]

With this order Amundarain worked to preserve women frrom corupt modern society, especially its sexual side. And he tried to ensure that these women at least would not make modern society more corrupt. Some women have told me that in those years in the confessional he concentrated heavily on the sins of impurity. And in this sense the Alianza was an extreme expression of a reigning preoccupation.[10] Members kept close count of their rosaries, Our Fathers, masses, novenas, and mortifications, and Amundarain reported the totals in the journal Lilium inter Spinas . While the idea of an order of devout laywomen working in the world was unusual for the 1920s, it was not new in Spain. Prior to the Council of Trent women known as beatas had taken temporary vows and many had led lives in contact with the world. In 1926, however, Amundarain's concept of a lay institute was new again. Two years later, in 1928, José María Eserivá y Balaguer founded another lay institute, Opus Dei.

Even for his time, Amundarain's religion was stern and rigorous. This was the Catholicism of the amulets of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which read, "Detente Enemigo [Stop Enemy]." This was a Catholicism wounded and angered by the anticlericalism in much of Spain. Yet this was also a Catholicism bound to the profane world it opposed. In San Sebastián in 1921 Amundarain instituted weekly prayer meetings on Friday afternoons during the summer as atonement for the sins on the nearby beach, and this session became a fixture of the Aliadas. The Aliadas themselves were a defense against the enemy of God. As Amundarain wrote in early 1931, the Alianza was an army of virgins, "of victim souls, a host of love, an oasis of purity, a legion of chaste Judiths and valiant Jeannes d'Arc." Their goal was to "placate" and "discharge the wrath of God" in the face of "irreligion, libertinism, immorality, corruption," and "pillage, anarchy, atheism, and destruction." All this took place, he wrote, on "the eve of a worldwide cataclysm."[11]

Mateo Múgica, bishop of Vitoria, shared this strict Catholicism. We see him posed in photographs with the Aliadas. The strategy of Múgica, Amundarain, and many of their peers was essentially defensive. They retreated to the high

________________________________________

― 46 ―

ground of rural religiosity and the protected zones of the upper class and defended them tooth and nail from the surrounding world. They considered the urban working class almost irredeemably lost. For Amundarain only supernatural help could soften the hardened heart and regain those lost to the church.

To maintain and deepen the faith of practicing Catholics, Amundarain placed great value in the spiritual exercises of Ignacio de Loyola. These were a directed series of prayers and meditations with vivid use of the imagination to draw people out of the everyday world and focus their minds and emotions on the life, passion, and resurrection of Christ. He himself performed the exercises annually. In 1928 he organized them for 700 girls in San Sebastián. When he went to Zumarraga in 1930, he held them first for 300 teenage girls, then for 150 boys, and in early 1931 for adult men and women. No parish priest in the diocese made more energetic use of the exercises at this time; at least no one else published the statistics in the diocesan bulletin. When Amundarain brought parishioners to the Ezkioga visions, they were well prepared in spiritual imagination.[12]

Amundarain also promoted local shrines. A devotee of the Virgin of Aranzazu and a leader of pilgrimages to Lourdes, in Zumarraga he composed a hymn to the local devotion of Our Lady of Antigua and began an annual novena at her ancient shrine above the town. In June 1931 he dedicated the novena to atonement for the burning of religious houses, and an Aliada present remembers him saying when they came to the Litany, "Now, with great devotion, put your arms in the form of the cross." He also started an annual mountaintop rosary on May 1 at the iron cross of Beloki above the town; nine meters tall, the cross was lit on the nights of special feasts.[13]

Amundarain's collaborator and biographer, Antonio María Pérez Ormazábal, referred to him as "excessively credulous—as credulous as he was pious." In the 1920s in San Sebastián, says Pérez Ormazábal, Amundarain was "the paladin of all the movements of a spiritual and supernatural nature that emerged at the time." When the Mercedarians completed their convent chapel in 1929 under his supervision, they installed a bust of the Christ of Limpias. In early 1931 he published in the Alianza journal excerpts of a message from a French mystic nun. In 1932 we find Amundarain passing out the first Spanish pamphlet about the apparitions of Fatima. And he was a devotee of Madre Marí Rafols of Zaragoza and gave his nephew a picture of her as a talisman in the Civil War.[14]

I learned much about Amundarain from this nephew, Juan Marí, who grew up with Amundarain in Zumarraga. Juan María's sister Teresa was an Aliada and Amundarain's favorite. Juan María was one of the last weavers of wicker furniture in Gipuzkoa, and I talked with him as he worked in a cool, dark loft in the old quarter of San Sebastián. There he sang "Izar bat [A Star]," a hymn

________________________________________

― 47 ―

composed for the Ezkioga visions. That year a church commission considering the beatification of his uncle had interviewed him for three days. One sticking point for the commission was precisely Antonio Amundarain's enthusiasm for the visions.[15]

Other priests, family members, friends, and the people of Zumarraga describe Amundarain as righteous, rigid, discreet, and extremely pious. He traveled throughout the diocese to give sermons and was famous as an effective confessor. By 1931 he was a leader among the clergy who knew how to act with energy and authority. In the absence of Bishop Múgica, known to be his friend, he organized and supervised the Ezkioga visions in the first months. His presence gave the visions a credibility and legitimacy they would otherwise have lacked.

We can follow much of Amundarain's involvement at Ezkioga in the press. He took the first seers to find the exact spot where the Virgin appeared, led the rosary, managed the news that reached the crowd, confided to a reporter his hope for a miracle, and retained the children's declarations in written form. On July 28, a month after the first visions, he instructed the public, through the newspapers, how to behave at the site, as if the Ezkioga hillside was his parish church. This note provoked a public rebuke from the diocese. Thereafter Amundarain kept a lower profile and let his subordinates lead the vision prayers.[16]

In correspondence and in the Alianza journal Amundarain revealed some of his more private thoughts and hopes about the visions. On July 6 he wrote to María Ozores, head of the Aliadas in Vitoria: "Soon you will all find out about alarming prodigies that we are witnessing here these days. Tell the sisters to pray a lot …" To an ally in Vitoria he wrote on July 25: "The Ezquioga affair is something sublime, the most solemn act of atonement that Spain now offers to God. The Virgin cannot abandon us." On September 13 he took three hundred Aliadas to Ezkioga in a heavy rain "to pray for the Alianza … the church … the bishop in exile, for our poor Spain, and for everyone." "Two little virgins in ecstasy" had visions while the Aliadas prayed and sang. One seer told the Aliadas afterward:

The Virgin was down close. I have never seen her so low, almost touching the ground and in the midst of the Sisters. She wore her black mantle very loose, and let her white interior tunic be seen, tied at the waist with a white cord, and showing the tips of her bare feet, and with a very pleasant and happy expression on her lovely face, and with a very sweet voice she spoke … and said that she was very pleased with the Alianza, and that the Sisters have much, much confidence in her, and her powerful protection will guard the Obra.

It is possible that one of these seers was Ramona Olazábal, but by September a number of seers delivered this kind of tailor-made message.[17]

________________________________________

― 48 ―

Amundarain believed the first seers. He then turned to others, like Ramona. Why was he so soon distracted? Let us look at the seers.

The First Seers

The sister was born in 1920, the brother in 1924. (In this account they shall remain anonymous.) When they had their first vision she was eleven and he was seven years old. Their father had a small roadside bar and they lived upstairs with their four brothers and sisters. The girl was quiet and introverted. The Irish traveler Walter Starkie wrote, "I have rarely seen such a tragic expression on a child's face. She looked as if she had already borne the brunt of a whole life's sorrow." When Starkie was at Ezkioga at the end of July, he noted that "she had stopped seeing the Virgin, and she shut herself up in her room and refused to play with the other children." In all, the girl had sixteen visions. She never fell into a trance when doing so, she remained impassive, and her pulse did not vary. She never heard the Virgin speak.[18]

Her brother was more lively. Starkie described him as mischievous and impudent. Newspapers reported him as "unruly," "brusque," "alert," "smart," and "simpático." After the visions were discredited, they called him "bold," "brazeen," and "wild." The Ezkioga parish priest wrote, "The boy is pure rebellion." According to some reports he did not speak Spanish. A San Sebastián writer commented at the beginning of August: "He is a terrible rebel, and by now he is used to the vision and does not attribute it the least importance, and he is sick of being questioned."[19]

The boy rarely fell into anything like a trance. He would simply stop playing, extend his arms and pray during his vision, then go back to playing. He might climb trees as people prayed on the hillside or run off into the woods when people wanted to talk to him. His visions occurred in various places, especially in apple trees behind his house. He did not hear the Virgin speak. By early September he had had thirty-one visions and believers claimed that he continued having them daily for at least two years. In early 1934 he had them during family prayers at night. By then he went to school in Zumarraga.[20]

An older neighbor followed the events closely from 1931 to the present. She told me that this family "was very simple, the simplest family around here, so modest and humble. They never liked to stand out. A family always unassuming."[21] And despite snide allusions to the contrary in the press, the family and seers profited little if at all from the visions. Older Ezkioga residents distinguish the sister and brother from the later, more famous seers and emphasize the children's innocence and lack of ulterior motives. They feel that older seers "messed it up." But people hungry for answers to religious and political questions and aching personal problems could hardly rest happy with the sister and brother,

________________________________________

― 49 ―

especially while other, more theatrical and more attractive seers were delivering the desired goods.

For others were hearing messages from the Virgin and providing answers to the public. The voluble seers, not the silent ones, led Amundarain and many others to expect a great miracle in mid-October. Two seers in particular convinced him. One was an Aliada from San Sebastián who had had visions at Ezkioga. She had another on about 6 October 1931. In "a pleasant conversation," the Virgin told her, as Amundarain reported to a colleague,

that within a few days there will be a prodigy (in this she coincides with the visionary of Ataun) and three times She insisted to her that all the Sisters be that day at Ezquioga, and each one with her emblem on display; that the Alianza has been called to save many souls in the world.[22]

An even better reason to expect a portent on October 15 was a semiprivate prophecy by Ramona Olazábal.

Ramona Olazábal, the Girl with the Bleeding Hands

Ramona Olazábal was fifteen when she had her first vision on July 16 at Ezkioga. Born and raised on an isolated farm in Beizama, about twenty kilometers away, she was one of nine surviving children. Before the visions she stood out for her vivacity and her fine dancing more than her piety. At age nine she had gone to live with her sister in Hernani, and by age thirteen she was working in aristocratic households in San Sebastián. When she began to have visions in July 1931 she had spent much time away from the farm and had had some contact with the upper classes.[23]

Like other visionaries in July, Ramona wanted to know if there would be a miracle and when it would be. By the end of the month, she was "one of the best known seers," for newspapers had reported nine of her visions. At the beginning of September a Catalan pilgrim wrote that "her prayer consists of an insistent clamor for pardon and mercy for everyone" and that of the seers she was "the only one who sees the Virgin as happy."[24]

About this time Ramona stopped working and moved to Zumarraga, closer to the vision site. There she stayed with her cousin Juan Bautista Otaegui, one of Amundarain's curates, who boarded in the house of Amundarain's brother. She had many followers and for some she provided special messages. Amundarain's niece, the Aliada Teresa, often accompanied Ramona shopping, for Ramona had money from believers. Ramona gave a sealed letter to Otaegui saying that on October 15 the Virgin would give her a rosary. Amundarain took the prediction seriously, no doubt because it coincided with the visions of the San Sebastián Aliada. Ramona sent a similar letter to a prominent family in San Sebastián. And on October 13 and 14 she told many people to bring handkerchiefs, for the Virgin was going to wound her.[25]

________________________________________

― 50 ―

On October 14 Amundarain wrote to the Aliada leader María Ozores in Vitoria: "It seems the Virgin is calling you here; we are in historic days, and we have to give heaven strength." He assigned Ozores and another Aliada to stay with Ramona the next day and search her before she went up the hill. Amundarain had a family lunch to celebrate the saint's day of his mother, and then he, his brother, and his nephew went to the apparition site.[26]

After the Aliadas searched her, Ramona went into an outhouse before going up the hillside. Fifteen to twenty thousand persons, the largest crowd since July 18, had been attracted by the predictions she and Patxi Goicoechea had made about a miracle. Ramona emerged at about 5:15 P.M. with her close friend, a girl from Ataun who was also a seer. When Ramona neared the fenced area for visionaries, she lifted her hands. Blood spurted from the backs of both. "Odola! Odola! [Blood! Blood!]" shouted the crowd. Men carried Ramona into the enclosure, and there a doctor found a rosary twisted around the belt of her dress. In an atmosphere of awe and anguish men carried her downhill seated in a chair, like an image in a procession. All the time people collected her blood on their handkerchiefs. Alerted by phone, pilgrims poured in from all over the Basque Country well into the night.[27]

The Aliadas Amundarain had detailed to observe Ramona were totally convinced. When María Angeles Montoya arrived at her home in Alegia, she told her brother Pío that a miracle had happened. Pío, a priest who was cofounder of El Día , immediately called Justo de Echeguren, the vicar general of the diocese and an intimate family friend. Pío emphasized that unless Echeguren investigated Ramona's wounding at once there would be no stopping the matter.[28]

The next morning Echeguren arrived by train at Zumarraga, where he met Montoya, Amundarain, and Julián Ayestarán, a priest who worked with Amundarain on the Aliadas and whose sister had watched Ramona the day before. Amundarain reported what had happened and spoke favorably about the innocence of the original seers. Echeguren was skeptical about the miracle, but the fact that María Angeles Montoya, who was like a niece to him, believed in it gave him pause. So he immediately formed an ecclesiastical tribunal consisting of himself, Montoya, and Ayestarán to interview witnesses.[29]

Before starting the proceedings, Echeguren had in hand the letter that Ramona had given her cousin Otaegui. He also talked to a man whom Ramona had told to bring a handkerchief and to her friend from Ataun, whom Ramona had told she would receive stigmata. He then asked Ramona whether she had told anyone about what would happen. She denied three times that she told anyone, and Echeguren became so angry that he broke his pencil. He confronted her with the conflicting evidence, including the letter, and she admitted that she had indeed told people and named still others. He told her she had been lying and sent her off.

________________________________________

― 51 ―

At that point a man from Lezo asked to speak to Echeguren in private. He said that the day before he had been next to Ramona when, stunned by seeing the blood coming out of her hands, he had lowered his eyes in awe and seen to his surprise a razor blade on the ground. He had come back to look for it. To settle the matter, Echeguren asked Montoya to find two doctors, one Catholic and the other, if possible, a non-Catholic, to examine Ramona's wounds. Montoya called in Doroteo Ciaurruz, later the Basque Nationalist mayor of Tolosa, and Luis Azcue from the same city and both examined Ramona that afternoon. That night they reported to Echeguren at Montoya's house that they thought Ramona had inflicted the wounds on herself, most probably with a razor blade. Echeguren immediately drew up a note for the press that said there was positive evidence of natural, not supernatural, causes for Ramona's wounds.

At some time in the fall of 1931 Echeguren instructed priests not to lead the rosary at the site and, according to one source, reprimanded Amundarain for his involvement in the apparitions. On November 4 Amundarain sadly wrote to María Ozores:

Ezquioga continues to wind down. New prophecies of something extraordinary, new dates, new preparations, new failures. I continue to believe in a

________________________________________

― 52 ―

powerful, extraordinary intervention and presence in these mountains of Our Mother, but among the seers there is a lot to be purged.[30]

I find no more reports of Amundarain at Ezkioga. But he continued to hear the effects of the visions in the confessional. On December 14 a group of Catalan believers visited him. One of them wrote:

The parish priest of Zumárraga spoke to us of the beautiful spiritual fruit harvested at Ezquioga. There have been countless general confessions, he told us, and they still continue. Even today, he added, there were some in this church. Even men eighty years old have wanted to make a general confession.

He said he believed 80 percent of the seers, but that Freemasons had become involved to discredit the apparitions. By this time both he and Otaegui had broken with Ramona.[31]

A year later, on 16 December 1932, due to stress and ill health, Amundarain resigned as parish priest to devote himself fully to the Alianza, which he did for

________________________________________

― 53 ―

the rest of his life. But he did not renounce his hopes for Marian apparitions or his hopes for the role the Aliadas would play. In his copy of a book of prophecies published in 1932, the following passage from the prophecy of Madeleine Porsat is underlined and "¿Alianza?" written in the margin:

The church is preparing everything for the glorious coming of Mary…. It forms a guard of honor to go out and meet the angels that come with her.

The arch of triumph has been erected. The hour is not distant.

It is she herself in person, but she has her precursors, holy women and apostles, who will heal the wounds of the body and the sins of the heart.[32]

Antonio Amundarain was prudent in public about the visions. As far as I know, he had little personal contact with the seers, but his sharp attention, foresight, and careful use of the media were critical to the pace and momentum of the visions. Many people thought he was acting on behalf of the diocese. El Pueblo Vasco reported that "it was [Amundarain] who was charged by Vitoria to gather testimony of the events." If this was the case, Amundarain's role would have been unofficial. Such a procedure was not unusual. Both at Limpias and at Piedramillera bishops instructed the parish priests to take down testimony of seers as if at their own initiative. When Amundarain issued the note on July 28 referring to the commission of priests and doctors as "official," the vicar general immediately issued a denial, disavowing any diocesan connection. Given the vicar general's subsequent total skepticism, it would seem that Amundarain was on thin ice from the start. But at least in some matters he seems to have worked for Echeguren. That Amundarain had matters in hand probably contributed to the diocese's relaxed attitude in the first months.[33]

Carmen Medina y Garvey

Amundarain's cool distance contrasts with the active engagement of most of the other key believers at Ezkioga, including the second leader to arrive on the scene, Carmen Medina y Garvey, whose close contacts with seers—including Lolita Núñez, the girl from Ataun, Patxi Goicoechea, and Evarista Galdós—lasted for at least three years.

At the Casa de Pilatos in Seville I learned about Carmen from her nephew, Rafael Medina y Vilallonga, the former mayor of the city.[34] He estimated that Carmen was about sixty years old in 1931. One of the ten children of the marquis of Esquivel and Dolores Garvey, she was very wealthy, for she inherited land from her father and money from the sherry fortune of her bachelor uncle, José Garvey. She became a nun in the convent of the Irlandesas in Seville, which she helped to restore with her money. She later left this convent and founded another of her own, but the new convent apparently did not survive.

________________________________________

― 54 ―

Two of Carmen's sisters became nuns and a sister-in-law entered a convent when widowed. Carmen's sister María Josefa and her brother Luis married, respectively, the son and daughter of the couple, Rafaela Ibarra and José Vilallonga. In 1894 Rafaela Ibarra founded an order, the Instituto de los Santos Angeles Custodios, dedicated to the care of young women in danger of becoming prostitutes. Indeed, Rafaela has been beatified, and when I asked to speak to the family about a relative involved in religious visions, they thought I referred to her. José Vilallonga was the founder in Bilbao of Spain's biggest iron works. In the early twentieth century the alliance of Andalusian aristocrats with Basque industrialists was not unusual. The women of both families in this particular alliance had enduring religious interests and a social conscience. Carmen had other powerful relations, including the leader of the monarchist Unión Patriótica, who was the minister of public works under Primo de Rivera.

Carmen Medina's nephew and niece remember her as loving, high-spirited, and generous, but they were somewhat wary of talking about her, for they also thought her a little unstable and feared her enthusiasms might reflect badly on the family. It was my understanding, although this was left rather vague, that

________________________________________

― 55 ―

she herself had had visions at some time in her life. The family, I gathered, thought of her as a beloved, credulous eccentric. They remember, for instance, when she announced to her nieces in San Sebastián that on a certain day a tidal wave would wipe out the city. She had learned this from a male seer, who had it from the Virgin. When the tidal wave failed to materialize, she went back to the seer, who told her (and she told her nieces) that when he saw the Virgin again, he noticed a tail sticking out from under her mantle and recognized the devil in disguise.[35]

In late July Walter Starkie found Medina already ensconced in an Ezkioga fonda with two female companions.

Doña Carmen, in the intervals of putting Gargantuan morsels into her mouth, pontificated about everything. She apostrophized the girls who were serving the dinner; she abused the cook; she asked for the priests; she criticized the behavior of some of the young people at the religious service: her resonant voice echoed and reechoed through the house. I tried to crouch in my corner, but I knew that sooner or later I should be dragged within her sphere of influence and become a butt for her inquisitive questioning.

… she was one of those imperious women who declare their views but never wait for an answer. Such people's whole life is so rooted in assertion, that they only hear their own voices. Destiny fortunately deafens them to any other sound.[36]

Medina assumed that Starkie was a pious Irish pilgrim, so she made no secret of her politics. She told him the Republic was a force of Satan.

Though [Carmen Medina] was a daily communicant and spent a great deal of the day in prayer, she was a very active and practical woman, and directed many organizations connected with the church and the exiled monarchy…. The Basque province and Navarra, in her opinion, would rise before long in defence of their religion. In my own mind I felt quite convinced that she was doing her best to use the Ezquioga apparitions as a political lever…. "Our Lady is appearing in order to inspire people to defend their religion. And I tell you that in many cases she is appearing, holding a sword dripping with blood."[37]

Starkie saw a kind side as well. Carmen Medina was generous with the poor and spoke easily to everyone she met. But:

she was a fighter … she should have been fighting Moors at Granada and raising the Silver Cross above the minarets of the Prophet…. She longed for battle, and I saw her nostrils dilate like those of a war-horse when she described how civil war might come in a few weeks, with the Basques as the leaders of the revindication of the Church of Rome.

Carmen's family had a tradition of rebellion against liberal governments. Her paternal grandfather was a Carlist general. Her father, Francisco, and an uncle participated in the Carlist rebellion of 1873 and as a result her family spent two

________________________________________

― 56 ―

years in exile in Portugal. From "Casa Blanca," the home in Seville of Carmen's widowed sister, General José Sanjurjo attempted to launch a monarchist coup in August 1932. One of Carmen's nephews was an active participant, and one of her brothers had to take refuge in France.[38]

María Dolores (Lolita) Núñez

Doña Carmen knew the original child seers and introduced them to Starkie, but by that time her interest, like that of Amundarain, had shifted to those who could provide messages. Her first great interest was in María Dolores Núñez, known as Lolita. Medina took Starkie in her car to pick up the eighteen-year-old seer and take her to the vision site.

Núñez was educated and refined; according to Starkie, she and her family were "poor members of the bourgeois class" who lived in a small second-floor apartment on the main street of Tolosa. By the time Starkie met her at the end of July, she had had seven visions and her name had appeared in print a dozen times. Her blurry and poignant photograph in El Pueblo Vasco was the first of a seer in vision. She would cry out to the Virgin to save Spain—it was probably this aspect that attracted Carmen Medina—and afterward she would report the Virgin's reaction.

The visions exhausted Lolita, but the excitement prevented her from sleeping at night. She told a reporter, "There is no human force that could resist so much magnificence and splendor. One feels a thousand times more blinded than when one looks at the sun." Her mother and older sister worried for her and opposed her visits to the site. One night in the room where the seers recovered Lolita declared, "Our Lady has told me that I must come here the next seven days, and I must depart from here and sing for joy in the streets." Starkie was disenchanted when Lolita came down to dinner afterward: "She had dwindled again to the fair typist with a good dose of coquettishness and pose" who confided that she had a boyfriend who knew nothing about the visions. Starkie played his violin for her that night and left early the next morning. Lolita's name appeared no more in the press after July 31; no one made postcards of her. If she returned the seven times the Virgin requested, I find no record, nor, alas, do I know if she sang in the streets. Her name meant nothing to the old-time believers left in Tolosa in the 1980s.[39]

Lolita was one of several seers that Carmen promoted among friends and relatives. At Ezkioga Starkie met Medina's elderly cousin, the duke of T'serclaes. The duke was a fixture of the San Sebastián summer set and Mateo Múgica used to stay in his house on the Calle Serrano on his trips to Madrid. Carmen's sister María, the duchess of Tárifa, went to pray for her husband, and one seer, after consulting the Virgin, assured the duchess that he would recover. A sister-in-law, the countess of Campo Rey, was at Ezkioga in December.[40]

________________________________________

― 57 ―

Carmen is almost certainly the grand dame a visitor described in early August as "the confidante of the most interesting seers" who assured visitors that the great miracle would come soon. She took particular interest in two seers from Ataun, both of whom learned "secrets" from the Virgin and claimed knowledge of the timing and content of the upcoming miracle.[41]

Ramona's Friend, the Girl from Ataun

By early October a girl seer, age eighteen, from Ataun had become inseparable from Ramona. Like Ramona, she too was from a farm and had worked as servant

________________________________________

― 58 ―

to a prominent family in Ordizia. Her hands were those of señorita, and there is a photograph of her sitting at a Singer sewing machine. Her visions had started on July 12, four days before those of Ramona. They were quite detailed and received wide publicity. The Virgin first spoke to her, she said, on July 16. At the end of the month she was seeing the Virgin several times daily.[42]

In August she gave a special blessing from the Virgin to a Catalan cleric who had singled her out of the mass of seers. She claimed to have a vision every time she went to the hillside; by September 27 she had had them on forty-one days. Like Ramona she was conspicuously good-natured and felt no call to the cloisters.[43]

This girl, Ramona, and an unnamed Tolosa seer helped one another when in trance. They stayed together on the morning of October 15. When Ramona's hands started to bleed, the Ataun girl was probably the seer who announced to the crowd, "The Virgin has cut her with swords and now places a rosary around her waist!" The next morning as the public pressed to kiss Ramona's hands, she, the Tolosa seer, and Ramona talked to reporters together.[44]

At that time a family from Bilbao was pampering both the Ataun girl and Ramona. Julio de Lecue was a stockbroker and his brother José was a painter and sculptor. They had nieces the age of Ramona and her friend. José in particular was close to Ramona, and in mid-October she began to dictate to him what she saw in her visions.[45] On the morning of Ramona's miracle José de Lecue refused to leave her side, which prevented an effective search by the Aliadas. He was one of the two men who carried Ramona down the hill in a chair. On the days after the miracle some reporters briefly suspected him of having made the wounds on her hands. Another suspect was a confidence man and pickpocket who had allegedly boasted how he could arrange a miracle at Ezkioga.[46]

On October 16 after the diocesan inquiry into Ramona's wounds, attention shifted to the girl from Ataun. Over sixty thousand persons had gathered on the hillside, and for the first time the seers used a stage Patxi Goicoechea had been building with lumber and manpower from the owner of the land. Only family members, priests, and reporters could go with the seers on the stage. The seers lined up in late afternoon, and many fell into trance. A medal of the Daughters of Mary on a blue ribbon appeared in the Ataun girl's hands, as if out of nowhere, and shortly thereafter another appeared in the hands of a seven-year-old girl from Ormaiztegi.[47]

On Saturday, October 17, yet more people came, most of them unaware of the vicar general's finding about Ramona. The Ataun girl suddenly lifted one of her hands, which had a little scratch, and said that the Baby Jesus had left the mark with a dagger. We see her the next day in a proud pose with Ramona, both of them discreetly displaying their bandages from a window of the fonda. Shortly after this high point, Carmen Medina began to look after the Ataun girl.[48]

________________________________________

― 60 ―

Francisco (Patxi) Goicoechea, the Convert

Carmen Medina also took an interest in Francisco Goicoechea, known as Patxi or "the lad from Ataun." At the end of July Medina told Starkie that Patxi (pronounced Patchi) had become a veritable Saint John of the Cross in his piety. His parents were tenant farmers and he was a carpenter on construction jobs. His first vision occurred on 7 July 1931, as he was making fun of the visions of others. His deep trances became a highlight of the vision evenings. Stern young men from Ataun generally went with him; they would carry him semiconscious down to the recovery room. He became the central figure in the apparitions from early July and was, in the words of the industrialist and deputy Rafael Picavea, "the most famous youth in the entire region."[49]

We have seen that it was Patxi, a Basque Nationalist, who came out and said that the Virgin called for the overthrow of the Republic. He took the initiative in other ways as well. He put up a wooden cross at the site in August, the stage in October, and stations of the cross the following February. Patxi repeatedly predicted miracles, including ones for July 16 and mid-October. The Ataun girl and Evarista Galdós from Gabiria normally supported him.[50]

Patxi made a large and varied number of friends. He allegedly had the use of the automobiles of a devout Bilbao heiress, Pilar Arratia, and the Traditionalist physician Benigno Oreja Elósegui, brother of a deputy in the Cortes.[51]Because of his prestige, believers took him to observe the visions of little girls in the riverbed by Ormaiztegi, which he judged diabolical, and those of children in Navarra. Carmen Medina took him to Toledo at the beginning of October so he could attend the visions of children in the village of Guadamur.[52]

By November Patxi had tried to pass on divine messages to the Basque deputies Jesús Leizaola, Marcelino Oreja, and José Antonio Aguirre. When he heard that Patxi had a message for him, Leizaola replied, "Message from the Virgin? I know her too. If she has something important she wants me to know, she will give it to me herself." In early December it had become clear that the vicar general of Vitoria rejected all the Ezkioga visions, and Patxi, Carmen Medina, and the other believers could only hope that the exiled bishop felt differently. Rumor had it that on December 14 Patxi had given Bishop Mateo Múgica, by then in the village of La Puye near Poitiers, a sealed letter that said the miracle would take place on December 26.[53]

I am not certain that Patxi went to France, but in any case he passed on the Virgin's instructions for Carmen Medina to take a group of seers to see the bishop. Medina went with Ramona Olazábel, the girl from Ataun, the child Benita Aguirre, Evarista Galdós, and a fifth seer on December 19. Bishop Múgica spoke to each seer separately for half an hour and allegedly told Carmen Medina that, whatever the origin of the visions, he did not think the seers were knowingly lying.[54]

________________________________________

― 61 ―

For the people of Ataun Goicoechea was "Patxi Santu [Holy Patxi]." They remember lines of cars parked in front of his farm and people kissing his hand and leaving presents. The nickname probably came after his apotheosis on 1 August 1931, when newspapers reported that he had levitated. After that he received large numbers of letters. In the summer of 1931 or 1932 Carmen Medina organized a bus excursion to Ezkioga for her many nieces and nephews living or vacationing in San Sebastian; they also went to Ataun, where Patxi obligingly entered into a trance. When they asked what the Virgin had said, one of Patxi's friends said she wanted them to leave the bus in Ataun for the use of the village.[55]

Patxi was a complex individual, and those who knew him offer conflicting testimony. Some say he drank a lot; others say he did not. They agree that he attended church, both before and after the visions, and that for a while during the visions he went to church daily. He was tall and handsome and spoke Basque better than Spanish. With some reporters he was camera shy and defensive, especially when there were questions that implied his vision state might have a component of mental illness or epilepsy. Some remember him as messianic. In the

________________________________________

― 62 ―

projected reconquest of Spain, they recall, he was going to be the captain. Like some of the other more dramatic seers, he asked to die for his sins to save the world: "Mother, mother, do not weep, kill me, but forgive the rest, for they know not what they do."[56]

Patxi had his cuadrilla, a friend who answered his mail, and a schoolteacher who took down his messages. He also had the support of priests, at first from his parish, then from elsewhere. Therefore he did not need the kind of patronage that the younger or poorer seers did. From the end of August 1931 and continuing through early 1933 at least, he usually went to Ezkioga on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights with his friends. By the beginning of 1932 he was no longer the center of attention, and by May 1933 his nocturnal visions were almost furtive, his small band quite separate from the daytime seers. Formerly he arrived in a chauffeured car; now he came and went on bicycle after work.[57]

I do not know whether the subsequent absence of news about Patxi was the result of his rejection by others or his own self-exclusion. Perhaps the Carlist-Integrist believers, who predominated after 1931, rejected him for his nationalism. Or perhaps he was burned by bad publicity. His public downfall began with that of Ramona. As Catholic newspapers began to feel freer to print negative information, they pointed out that Patxi had made many false predictions. Rafael Picavea in El Pueblo Vasco exposed Patxi's inconsistencies. And when Patxi protested, Picavea ridiculed him for social climbing with Carmen Medina. As Patxi, Ramona, and the girl from Ataun fell from grace, the other seers also began to turn on them. Benita Aguirre reported that the Virgin had told her that the decline of a seer named F (almost certainly Patxi) should be an object lesson for seers, that they should shun worldly honors: "They spoiled him, and now what is left for him?"[58]

The diocese early identified Patxi as a troublemaker. In August 1931 he refused to remove the cross he had put up on the hillside. And on December 26 Bishop Múgica of Vitoria sent his fiscal, or magistrate, to take testimony in Ormaiztegi that Patxi predicted a miracle for that day. Patxi had convinced Carmen Medina, who had imprudently spread the word. Patxi lost further credibility when he predicted a miracle for January. His clerical support in Ataun dropped away. He probably made his nocturnal visits to Ezkioga in late 1932 and 1933 in spite of explicit, personal diocesan orders not to go. Like most prominent seers, he also had trouble with the Republic, and in October 1932 the governor sent him for observation to the Mondragón mental hospital.[59]

We catch a final glimpse of Patxi's complexity when on 15 March 1935 he appeared as a witness in a traffic case in San Sebastián. There reporters learned that the government had indicted him for taking part in the October 1934 uprising. Socialists had led the rebellion and took over much of the province of Asturias. In the Basque Country the more radical nationalists participated by trying to organize a general strike. When a reporter asked Patxi about his

________________________________________

― 63 ―

involvement in the rebellion, he complained, "If I had known that they brought me here to bother me with questions about my private life, I would not have come. Whose business is it that I am the fellow involved with Ezquioga and at the same time an advanced republican?"[60]

I do not know how Carmen Medina's friendship with Patxi ended. Surely his crossover from the revolutionary right to the revolutionary left would have alienated her had they maintained contact. Her family remembers that Carmen dropped one youthful male seer when he told her that he and she should get married, by order of the Virgin.

Evarista Galdós

A final seer in whom Carmen Medina took special interest was Evarista Galdós y Eguiguren. Evarista was seventeen years old when she began to have visions in early July 1931. She came from a farm in Gabiria, not far from the vision site, and when the visions started she was in service in the home of a journalist in San Sebastián. The press described her visions in early July but did not mention her again until the fall. By that time she had had over thirty visions and went to Ezkioga on Thursdays and Sundays, presumably her days off from work.[61]

The believers heeded Evarista more from mid-October. On October 18 and 19 the Jesuit José Antonio Laburu filmed her and Ramona having visions.[62] On October 19 she told a reporter that both she and Patxi knew when the big miracle would be and that it would be soon: She predicted a miracle for the next day, which attracted a large crowd that was duly disappointed; with the seer girl from Ataun she predicted another for November 1 between 4:00 and 4:15 P.M. On December 4 she claimed to receive from heaven a medal on a ribbon like those others received previously. She announced this event in advance to a sympathetic priest and had herself searched beforehand. By this time she was important enough for Carmen Medina to take her to the bishop in France.[63]

On 17 January 1932 Evarista, Ramona, the Ataun seer, and six other girls from the district attended the spiritual exercises offered by the Reparadora nuns in San Sebastián. Carmen Medina may have paid for them. Her family patronized this elite order, whose first house in Spain was in Seville. Carmen's sister Dolores had founded the houses in San Sebastián and Madrid. Antonio Amundarain might have suggested the exercises; he had been the confessor of the Reparadoras in San Sebastián, and the Aliadas went for exercises there. Whoever was responsible probably also had a hand in the spiritual exercises at Loyola for male youths who were seers and converts. The Reparadoras based their rules on those of the Jesuits, and the Jesuits worked closely with them. Like the exercises of the Jesuits, those of the Reparadoras emphasized atonement, in which "a detailed contemplation of the scenes of the Passion … poses the question of acting and

________________________________________

― 64 ―

suffering for Christ in return." Immediately subsequent to these exercises Evarista and other seers began to have visions in which they experienced the crucifixion.[64]

In 1932 Evarista and Ramona stayed for a time in Azkoitia in the house of a wealthy woman, who paid a driver to take them back and forth to Ezkioga daily. But the two seers had a bad falling-out. Only the concerted efforts of José de Lecue, the Bilbao artist, and Patxi in a meeting in Bilbao in April led them to make peace. In the fall of 1932 and early 1933 a young male convert recorded Evarista's visions. This friendship cost Evarista some of her more prudish followers. She lived for most of 1933 in Irun. There she convinced a priest after having a vision in his house, and he started taking down her messages. Many of these visions had to do with the adventures of the believing community. She saw specific churchmen conspiring against the visions, other seers having their final visions, the hostile clergy changing their minds and believing, and other mystics making prophecies.[65]

________________________________________

― 65 ―

In January 1934 Carmen Medina spirited Evarista off to Madrid. There Medina hoped to set up a refuge from the coming revolution for a "high dignitary," who was in all likelihood the papal nuncio, Federico Tedeschini.[66]

Carmen Medina was in the class of grandees, enjoying powerful ecclesiastical, political, social, and financial connections. She was untouchable, even unmentionable. When the diocesan investigator went to Ormaiztegi to document Patxi's false prediction, his investigation included Medina, but he nonetheless accepted her hospitality and ate with her. The bishop and vicar general had no qualms about attacking other key figures openly, but they steered clear of Medina. Even in private correspondence Ezkioga believers mention her circumspectly. Only a complete outsider, Walter Starkie, could be frank about her.[67]

The most overtly political of the Ezkioga patrons, Carmen Medina needed no one to tell her a civil war was imminent, and she knew which side she was on. Nor did the other patrons have any doubt about their sympathies. But they considered politics a distant second to religion. Amundarain is a case in point: what was foremost for him was the saving of souls and the spiritual mission of his new order in the unfolding divine plan. In the June 1931 issue of Lilium inter Spinas he put politics in its place:

Say it, dear Sisters. Hail Jesus in our hearts and in those of all others as well! Hail Jesus in those who love us and those who persecute us! Hail Jesus in those who rule and those who obey! Hail Jesus in the Republic, in its governments, and its laws! Hail Jesus in the Church, in its ministers, and in its faithful! Hail Jesus in the heavens, on earth, and in the depths! Hail Jesus now and forever, Amen, Amen![68]

________________________________________

― 66 ―

4.

Promoters and Seers II:

the Catalans

From December 1931 through October 1932 Catalan believers in the Virgin of EZkioga played a central part in the visions. Like Antonio Amundarain and Carmen Medina, many brought prior commitments. Some believed the bogus prophecies a nun in Zaragoza was concocting. Others were militants from the movement of a charismatic preacher. Many followed the spiritual directions of a mystic from a small town in Girona.

The immediate interest of the Catalan Catholic bourgeoisie in the apparitions is not surprising. Like Basques and Navarrese, Catalans were especially receptive to new visions because of their proximity to France. In the 1850s Catalans had been attracted to the visions of La Salette; by 1910 they were sending hospital trains on large and regular pilgrimages to Lourdes; and in the years 1919 and 1920 they sent three diocesan pilgrimages to Limpias. Of the Spanish press outside the Basque Country, two Barcelona newspapers gave Ezkioga the best coverage: the Catalanist and centrist El Matí and the Carlist El Correo Catalán . In 1931 El Correo Catalán carried several first-hand

________________________________________

― 67 ―

reports by priests; this interest reflected that of the bishop of Barcelona, Manuel Irurita Almándoz.[1]

The Bishop of Barcelona and the Nun from Zaragoza

Manuel Irurita paid close attention to Ezkioga in part because he was from nearby Navarra and returned every summer to the Valle de Baztán. But perhaps more important was that he, like Antonio Amundarain, had a taste for the marvelous. He was born just over the border from France, and of all bishops up to the Civil War, he was the one who went to Lourdes most frequently.[2]

Irurita was not shy about recounting a strange experience of his own. In 1927, when he was a canon in Valencia, he took the wrong train, an express instead of a local, on his way to preach at a Carmelite convent. He prayed for help to Thérèse de Lisieux, and the train jerked to a halt at the station for the convent. When he got off, he asked the engineer what had happened. The engineer said he had seen a nun standing on the tracks. None of the people on the platform had seen her.[3]

Incognito, dressed as a layman, Irurita visited Ezkioga at least four times in 1931. He made his first visit with the priest from Alegia, Pío Montoya, and this may have been around July 21, when Irurita was in Navarra on vacation. His visit on July 31, in the company of Antonio Amundarain, was his third. By then he had had occasion to speak with one of six seers from his native Baztán who had traveled together to Ezkioga; he was impressed with the seer.[4]

In the aftermath of Ramona Olazábal's wounding Irurita returned to Ezkioga. We see him in photographs kneeling next to Ramona.[5] Irurita's last visit to Ezkioga was an open secret and helped to maintain the respectability of the visions at a time when the diocese of Vitoria was turning against them. Pilgrims could buy a souvenir postcard showing Ramona, the Virgin, and Irurita. Irurita subsequently delegated a layman from Barcelona to observe the Ezkioga visions and report back to him. The Barcelona diocesan censor approved articles in favor of the visions for Catholic newspapers as late as the summer of 1932, and at the end of that year Irurita was still saying in private that he believed in the visions.

Irurita's prior entanglement in the spurious prophecies of Madre Rafols deepened his interest in Ezkioga. For some time the Sisters of Charity of Saint Anne had been campaigning to canonize their founder, María Rafols y Bruna. The pseudo-Rafols story is a fascinating example of religious politics and merits study.

Rafols was born in 1781 near Vilafranca del Penedès in the province of Barcelona.[6] She founded her order in Zaragoza, but it remained small until 1894, when Pabla Bescós became the superior. Bescós obtained approval for the order from Rome and before her death in 1929 organized over sixty new houses, some

________________________________________

― 68 ―

in South America. In 1932 there were 2,500 religious in 130 houses. As the order grew, its leaders moved to honor their founder. Bescós held meetings in homage to Madre Rafols in Zaragoza and Vilafranca, commissioned a biography, and began gathering documents.[7]

In the 1920s Madre Bescós's niece, María Naya Bescós, was a teacher of novices. Perhaps out of a sense of proprietary connection with the order and its history, she began to falsify documents to fill in and illustrate the life of the founder. She made her forgeries with care, using period paper. Her procedure was to observe or provoke contemporary events and have the Sacred Heart of Jesus predict them to Madre Rafols a century earlier. Then she would "discover" the prophecies. For instance, when Naya and the acting superior Felisa Guerri went to purchase the Rafols homestead on 31 August 1924, Naya pointed to a crucifix and identified it as belonging to Madre Rafols. Supposedly the crucifix was fixed to the wall, but Naya was able to remove it with ease, as if she herself had some supernatural power. Later she doctored a prophecy (and discovered it on 2 January 1931) to confirm that the crucifix belonged to Madre Rafols and to

________________________________________

― 69 ―.

consecrate its removal as miraculous. This crucifix—El Santo Cristo de la Pureza y Desconsuelo—became an important relic.

María Naya "found" forged letters and spiritual writings in 1922 and between 1926 and 1932. She confirmed her own special role in 1930 by putting into a message from Jesus that the documents would be discovered by "one of [Rafols's] daughters much beloved by my Heart." The prophecies implied that the church would canonize her aunt Pabla as well. On 15 November 1929 workers digging the foundations for a convent at the Rafols homestead found a

________________________________________

― 70 ―

second crucifix, allegedly with fresh blood on it. In January 1931 Naya located a prophecy about this crucifix—El Santo Cristo Desamparado—and in October 1931 another about its discovery.

Irurita was named bishop of Barcelona in March 1930 and Vilafranca del Penedès fell within his diocese. On 30 April 1931 he laid the cornerstone for the complex of buildings at Vilafranca. From September 14 through 16 he displayed in his episcopal chapel the crucifix that had "bled" as public atonement for Spain's sins. For long periods he himself held the image for the faithful to kiss. This provoked scenes of religious enthusiasm unusual in Barcelona under the Second Republic. Barcelona Catholic newspapers printed the tales of the miraculous discovery of the crucifixes, and a Barcelona cathedral canon put out a pamphlet. A Zaragoza manufacturer sold copies of El Cristo Desamparado nationwide. Of course, these were trying times for Catholicism and Irurita was acutely aware that the church was no longer one of the powers in control of the nation. In this context a bleeding crucifix meant something special, as did the appearance of the Sorrowing Mother in the Basque hills.[8]

A canon of Zaragoza, Santiago Guallar Poza, was in charge of the Rafols cause. The diocesan tribunal, the first stage in the beatification process, began in July 1926 and finished in February 1927. In 1931 Guallar published a biography of Rafols with the materials he had gathered. That year he was one of eight priests elected to the Constituent Cortes in Madrid. I do not know whether Guallar was aware of the forgeries. But in 1931 politics was on everyone's mind, and Naya began to compose prophecies with a political slant. On 2 October 1931, when the Cortes was about to discuss separating church and state, Naya uncovered a text that included a vision by Rafols of the Sacred Heart predicting visible miracles. And on 29 January 1932, the day the government dissolved the Jesuit order in Spain, Naya found a political prophecy that foretold a chastisement and explained that sacrilege, the removal of the crucifixes, and the expulsion of the Jesuits was the work of the Masons and God's punishment of Spain for female indecency.

The Vatican checked these more political texts and permitted their publication (although the names of the cities God would chastise and the names of living persons were excised). The last prophecy caused a special stir, and Pius XI gave Felisa Guerri and María Naya a second audience. They had already visited him in February 1931 to show the crucifixes. The political prophecies gave the Rafols cult an enormously expanded audience. The texts, in booklets introduced by the Navarrese Jesuit Demetrio Zurbitu, went out by the tens of thousands in early 1932. What started as a pious fraud to make a saint turned into a rally to toughen Spanish Catholics against the secular Second Republic.[9]

A commission of experts appointed by the diocese of Zaragoza decided unanimously in January 1934 that the documents were forgeries, but their

________________________________________

― 71 ―

finding, since it was part of the beatification process, was kept secret. Clergy who openly questioned the documents included the French Benedictine Aimé Lambert; the preacher Francisco de Paula Vallet; the Dominican Luis Urbano, even more scornful of the Ezkioga visions that he had been of those of Limpias and Piedramillera; and the liturgical scholar Josep Tarré. In the Basque Country Canon Antonio Pildain spoke against the revelations in the cathedral of Vitoria in 1933, and in 1941 Manuel Lecuona, a Basque folklorist from Oiartzun and a former professor at the seminary in Vitoria, published proof of plagiarism.[10]

After the case reached Rome, in 1943 another panel of experts, including the Catalan Franciscan Josep Pou i Martí, was also unanimously negative. They based their finding on anachronisms, the use of metal pens, the use of the same batch of paper over what was ostensibly a span of forty years, the handwriting, and the outright copying of contemporary literature. The Vatican closed the case, but discreetly, never informing the general public of the fraud. María Naya lost her position with the novices and the order had to withdraw the crucifixes from veneration. But people still read the old books and pamphlets, as well as an occasional new book. Naya, who died in 1966, never spoke on the subject, never admitted her role, and never revealed who, if anyone, worked with her.[11]

María Naya hoodwinked Irurita into the Rafols deception by flattery and co-optation, just as she hoodwinked certain Jesuits and even Pius XI. In the message she found 2 January 1931, the last before the messages turned political, Naya had Jesus tell Rafols that "a holy prelate very zealous in the salvation of souls and devoted to his Divine Heart would help my Sisters with his advice and with the other means that [Jesus] would provide him in order to put into practice all the plans of his Divine Heart."[12] Irurita's support was important for the beatification, for Rafols had been born in his diocese. His support was also essential for the new convent and shrine at the homestead site. His personal promotion of the Rafols shrine and the crucifixes demonstrated his total identification with the prelate in the prophecy. Later, to erase any doubt, Naya inserted in the message of 2 October 1931 a reference to the "Lord Bishop who in those years [1931–1940] governs this diocese of Barcelona."[13]

The belief that he had a providential role to play in Spain's dramatic days sharpened Irurita's interest in the Ezkioga visions. He quickly noticed the convergence of the Basque vision messages and the Rafols prophecies. In the fall of 1931 both predicted visible public supernatural events and by that time both emphasized not Euskadi but Spain. In the Rafols message of 2 October 1931, when the Ezkioga multitudes expected miracles, the Sacred Heart of Jesus said he would, if he had to, save Spain from the devil. He would do so, he said, "with the help of portentous miracles that many people will see with their own eyes; and my Most Holy Mother will communicate to them what they must do to

________________________________________

― 72 ―

placate and make amends to my eternal Father." A Catalan correspondent wrote to Ramona about Irurita's attitude toward this vision:

I know that some time ago our Bishop warned your Vicar General to act very carefully since the revelations of the Sacred Heart to M. Rafols ultimately support the cause of Ezquioga. I do not know how he took it. Do not speak of this as it is a sensitive matter.[14]

The Rafols document of January 1932 warned of a chastisement of Spain which would precede a new age.

This writing will be found when the hour of my Reign in Spain approaches; but before that I will see that it is purified of all of its filth…. [M]y Eternal father will be forced, if they do not reform after this merciful warning, to destroy entire cities.[15]

Since October 1931 Ezkioga seers had been speaking about chastisements on a grand scale, including the destruction of three Spanish cities. The new Rafols revelation also pointed to a solution—prayer with arms in the form of a cross—that had been in use daily at Ezkioga for seven months by the time Naya produced the message: "The most powerful weapon to win the victory will be the reform of customs and public prayer. The faithful should gather and do petitionary processions and other devotions with their arms in the form of a cross." The Terrassa writer Salvador Cardús noted this similarity immediately and attempted in vain to point it out in the press.[16]

The convergence was not casual. By the time of the last two forgeries, María Naya was clearly aware of what the Ezkioga seers were saying. She and others in the order would have heard from Irurita himself about the visions. And groups of Catalan pilgrims stopped to see her on their way to Ezkioga. One of the group leaders recounted a visit to Zaragoza as follows:

Hermana Naya explained to us the details of her wonderful finds and how she would hear an interior voice that told her to pick up a certain key [to a cabinet or closet], and where and which ones were the writings she was looking for. And then, without our asking her, she expressed her conviction that the Ezkioga matter was certain, that an interior voice affirmed it, although she added prudently that there might exist a small proportion of exaggeration or fiction. And to a question by D. Luis Palà she answered that the interior voice that affirmed to her the reality of the Ezkioga matter was the same, exactly the same, as that which made her pick up a key and find the writings of Madre María Rafols.

In 1932 Naya produced yet another document that confirmed the Ezkioga visions more explicitly. On June 25 she told Ezkioga seers who visited her of a great new revelation, still secret. And on July 12 an Ezkioga enthusiast knew from a Jesuit

________________________________________

― 73 ―

friend that "in Rome there is another document of Madre Rafols and that this one is even clearer about Ezquioga. It seems that it will not be made public because it specifies many things and even events of great importance." While these visits and those of high churchmen to Hermana Naya were no doubt in good faith, they bring to mind Leonardo Sciascia's tale Il Consiglio d'Egitto , in which a Sicilian monk lets it be known he has discovered a manuscript of a Moslem history of Sicily and the nobles of the land pay him court and give him presents, hoping to get their families and landholdings mentioned.[17]

Naya and the pseudo-Rafols prophecies in return influenced the Ezkioga visions. When pictures of Rafols began to appear in the souvenir stands at the bottom of the hill, seers began to recognize her. On 1 October 1931 Benita Aguirre had a vision of a nun and later, when given a picture by a Catalan believer, claimed to recognize the nun as Rafols. The visionaries saw Madre Rafols particularly in the spring of 1932, when they were reading booklets and articles about the prophecies.[18]

In early 1932 the Ezkioga seers had another source of news of the Rafols prophecies, this one close at hand. A priest using the pseudonym Bartolomé de Andueza had written an article about Rafols for La Constancia in 1925. Starting in late February 1932 and ending in late June 1932 he published a series entitled "The Stupendous Prophecies of Madre María Rafols." Andueza seems to have known Irurita. He reported that the bishop had given a woman dying with tuberculosis a picture of Madre Rafols; when the picture touched the woman, it cured her. Referring to the prelate in the Rafols prophecy, Andueza wrote, "Both to you and to me, there comes to mind the very fervent Dr. Irurita, the present bishop of Barcelona."[19]

In an article in early March 1932 Andueza, aware of the latest developments at Ezkioga, detailed the parallels between the Ezkioga visions and the Rafols prophecies, suggesting that the Ezkioga seers and believers were those the Sacred Heart referred to as "just, pure, and chaste souls." And he suggested that the visions and visible miracles the seers expected at Ezkioga were those the Sacred Heart had predicted to Rafols.[20]

Andueza had begun the series to spread the news about Rafols to the Basques. When he mentioned a pamphlet about the Rafols crosses, the Librería Ignaciana in San Sebastián sold all 100 copies of the pamphlet in one hour and 1,000 that week. Andueza obtained excerpts of the second political prophecy from sources at the Vatican. He published them on 10 April 1932, scooping the rest of the country by a month. That issue sold out immediately, with copies going to Barcelona and Zaragoza. When in late May a pamphlet arrived in San Sebastián with the last prophecies, it too sold briskly, 1,500 copies by June 2. One gentleman bought 200 to distribute to friends, and some parish priests purchased as many as 50. For Spain's distressed Catholics the Rafols prophecies, like the Ezkioga visions, were a godsend.[21]

________________________________________

― 74 ―

In early May 1932 a prominent doctor drove Andueza with two other priests to Zaragoza. There they saw the holy crucifixes and the site of the document discoveries and spoke to Hermana Naya. Andueza's account of the trip inspired other visits, both from the upper class of San Sebastián and Bilbao ("very prestigious priests, doctors, lawyers, dukes, counts, marquises") and from the community of Ezkioga seers and believers.[22]

In the end the proponents of the Rafols prophecies had to repudiate the connection with Ezkioga because of the church's rejection of the visions. Domingo de Arrese published a triumphant series of newspaper articles at the height of the Civil War. In them he showed how Madre Rafols had predicted Franco's victory and the reign of the Sacred Heart in Spain for 1940. His book had at least two editions after the war ended. By then the diocese and the Vatican had rejected the Ezkioga visions, so Arrese took care from the start to separate them from Rafols, a clear instance of the pot calling the kettle black: "The case is totally different. Here [with the Rafols revelations] there are no spectacular apparitions, no stigmatizations in which fraud is a possibility."[23]

The Terrassa Connection

Other movements of religious enthusiasm in Catalonia found echo and support at Ezkioga. Rafael García Cascón, a wool dealer from Bejar who lived in Terrassa and had access to Bishop Irurita, made one of the first links. According to his daughter and other who knew him, García Cascón was a man of enormous enthusiasms and restless energy. Throughout his long life he dedicated as much time and money to religious excitement as he did to wool.[24]

In Terrassa García Cascón married Vicenta Marcet, daughter and sister of textile moguls. Her uncle, Antonio María Marcet, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, was one of the spiritual leaders of Catalonia. Catholics in Terrassa were proud of their devotion to the Virgin of Montserrat; the devotion explains in part their interest in the visions at Ezkioga.[25]

Like many militant Catholics worried by Catalonia's social and political plight, García Cascón was active in the Parish Exercises movement of the Jesuit Francisco de Paula Vallet. In the mid-1920s, in an effort to win back lost souls and head off a civil war, el Pare Vallet held hundreds of spiritual exercises for laymen of all social classes. For four or five years Vallet was the most famous preacher in Catalonia; his sermons, some of them broadcast on radio, were blunt and entertaining. Wherever he held missions he set up "Perseverance" chapters to prolong their spiritual effect, thus forming an extensive, self-financed network of laymen. In 1925 García Cascón asked Vallet to give exercises in Terrassa. Subsequently, he was one of Vallet's chief financial backers; he even paid for a trip to the Holy Land for Vallet and two disciples.[26]

________________________________________

― 75 ―

Vallet's Parish Exercises movement quickly grew large and powerful. Working largely in Catalan, it spread across diocesan boundaries. And Vallet himself was totally in charge. The Jesuits knew they could not control him. The church hierarchy, especially Cardinal Francesc de Asis Vidal i Barraquer, archbishop of Tarragona, distrusted Vallet's charisma and was afraid he would increase political tensions. And the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera was intransigent when it came to regional nationalism. Vallet first had to leave the Jesuits, then hand over his movement to diocesan and Jesuit control, and finally go into ecclesiastical exile, initially to Uruguay in 1929.

With Vallet in Uruguay, García Cascón went to Ezkioga with his family on 29 August 1931. There he met several of the main seers—the original brother and sister, the girl from Ataun, Patxi Goicoechea, Ramona Olazábal, Juana

________________________________________

― 76 ―

Ibarguren, a boy seer from Zumarraga, and Benita Aguirre. A month later García Cascón wrote Vallet from Terrassa about the apparitions and linked them to the inactivity of the Parish Exercises: "Little is being done here. Everything is sort of paralyzed. It is a good thing that God steps in to make up for our weaknesses."[27]

García Cascón's most trusted employee was Salvador Cardús. At the time of his employer's letter to Vallet, Card–s was at Ezkioga. This trip began Cardús's long, intense involvement with the Basque visionaries. And thanks to his meticulous archive and his extensive correspondence with the seers, Cardús became one of the great recorders of the entire Ezkioga phenomenon.

The life of this extraordinarily sensitive man encapsulated the political and social tensions of Terrassa and Catalonia at the beginning of the century. For at least eleven years, from 1899 to 1910, his father, Josep, was a weaver in the textile mill of Miquel Marcet. After Salvador's birth in 1900, his mother nursed, along with him, one of the sons of the mill owner. Marcet was implacably pious. He had the Sacred Heart of Jesus enthroned in the workplace and printed on his receipts and he pressured his employees to attend special spiritual exercises. But the weaver Josep Cardús attended the exercises only once and dared to send two of his children to a non-Catholic free school. In 1910 he was the only employee who was a union member. In November of that year a famous freethinking philanthropist and republican politician died in Terrassa, and Catholics and non-Catholics turned out for the civil funeral. Josep Cardús and many other mill workers attended. At this time an adjacent factory was in the midst of a long strike and Marcet feared the weaver might bring the strike to his factory. The mill owner therefore used attendance at the funeral as a pretext to lay Cardús off as a regular employee. A week later the weaver committed suicide, hanging himself prominently from the Vallparadis bridge. At a time of anticlerical and revolutionary fervor, his death became a cause célèbre.[28]

Salvador's mother was pregnant and miscarried when her husband committed suicide. Salvador, aged ten, had to leave school and work in a mill; when he was twelve a carding machine mangled his hand. After four years working in a pharmacy by day and studying by night, he became the assistant to García Cascón, whose wife was the niece of the pious mill owner who had fired Salvador's father, causing his suicide. Extremely devout, Salvador worried about his father's going to hell. Like so many of those who went to Ezkioga, he needed specific news from heaven.

The Ezkioga seers had convinced García Cascón that a great miracle was imminent. And García Cascón sent Cardús to find out when it would be. When Cardús arrived on October 3, he found a crowd of about ten thousand persons in prayer. The Terrassa pilgrims with him made special contact with Ramona Olazábal, her friend from Ataun, and Evarista Galdós. Cardús made a generic request for his family, and Ramona said that when she asked on his behalf, the

________________________________________

― 77 ―

Virgin smiled in response. Cardús returned to Ezkioga a few days later with the sole purpose of asking about his father. After her afternoon vision Ramona assured him his father was in heaven. Cardús was so happy he wanted to cry. Ramona shared his emotion and sealed a bond with this timid young father of three which lasted for several years.[29]

Patxi was then finishing his wooden deck at the vision site and Cardús heard the rumor that the great miracle would take place when the deck was ready. Cardús therefore called his employer to come quickly. García Cascón asked him to stay on and report back. On the night of October 13 Ramona told Cardús in confidence that he should stay until October 15. For then there would take place not the great miracle but a "little" miracle, an advertisement, as it were, for the big one. Cardús learned from the Ezkioga schoolmistress that Ramona had told her that the miracle would consist of receiving something in her hands. The same

________________________________________

― 78 ―

teacher had learned from Patxi that the government would learn nothing from the miracles and would imprison him and that there would be a brief holy war in which the Basques saved Spain.[30]

On the fifteenth Cardús was present when Ramona's hands bled. That night he could neither eat nor sleep. His friend Ramona, he felt sure, was a saint. Early the next morning he wept in the Zumarraga church: "I was praying with all my soul for the salvation of Catalonia." "So many Catalans," he wrote in his diary, "are coming to Ezquioga and praying fervently and asking the seers to pray for Catalonia, that I have no doubt that the most holy Virgin will listen to their appeals." Cardús asked Ramona if García Cascón should come, and she said "Yes, tell him to come." On that afternoon, October 16, a caravan of private cars carrying about 150 persons left Terrassa for Ezkioga. It arrived the next day, as did sixty thousand other pilgrims, in time to see the minor miracle of the scratch on the hand of the girl from Ataun. Cardús talked to two men from Terrassa who said they saw rosaries hanging in the air before the seer.[31]

When Cardús prepared to leave on October 18 after visions at which up to eighty thousand persons were present, García Cascón introduced him to a short, stocky man from Legazpi, José Garmendia.

The Blacksmith and the President of Catalonia

José Garmendia worked in the small foundry of Joaquín Bereciartu in Legazpi. Like many seers, he would have led a life of total obscurity except for the apparitions. Born in Segura in 1893 of an unwed mother, he was thirty-eight years old when he had his first visions at the end of July 1931. The press paid him little heed except to make light of a vision of his mother in purgatory. He was a figure of fun for his neighbors (his heavy drinking did not help), so he convinced few of his experiences. As García Cascón wrote, "He is such a humble man that in his own town no one believes him." In the 1980s few people in Legazpi remembered him by his given name. His nickname was "Belmonte," some said because Belmonte was his favorite bullfighter, others because of the little backward steps, like those of the bullfighter, he would take in his visions. But the Ezkioga believers elsewhere remembered him warmly. A single man, he had few if any local relatives, and in photographs from 1932 he poses with Catalans or with a baker and a real-estate broker from San Sebastián. He seems to have found his family in the community of visionaries. His visions typically included a struggle between good and evil, with the devil acting as a major protagonist.[32]

When García Cascón met him in mid-October 1931, Garmendia, overshadowed by attractive and convincing youths and children, was still one of the "invisible" seers. But he convinced García Cascón immediately when he said the Virgin had given him a special message to deliver to an important Catalan figure.

________________________________________

― 79 ―

This news pleased Cardús and the others from Terrassa but did not surprise them. "It was not strange that the Virgin should have a certain partiality for Catalonia," García Cascón wrote to Vallet, "precisely because so many Catalans had come to this miraculous mountain to pray on behalf of our land."[33] Cardús and the others from Terrassa guessed correctly that the "important figure" in question was the president of the autonomous region of Catalonia, Francesc Macià. García Cascón paid Garmendia's train fare to Barcelona, and on October 23 Cardús accompanied the seer to the office of the president. On being told it was a matter involving the Virgin of Ezkioga, Macià received Garmendia and Cardús at once, then Cardús withdrew, leaving the two to talk alone for fifteen minutes.

Garmendia was exhilarated afterward. According to him, Macià had listened with interest as on behalf of the Virgin Garmendia revealed some intimate personal details, warned that life was short, and assured him that he and his sister, a nun, would go to heaven. As Garmendia told it, Macià requested an image of

________________________________________

― 80 ―

the Virgin as she appeared in Ezkioga and asked what he could do. Garmendia asked him to help obtain permission for a chapel on the vision site. Garmendia had wanted a chapel virtually from his first visions in late July. So Macià wrote a note, "Autorizo la construcción de la capilla, Francesc Macià," which Garmendia showed to Cardús. The next day Macià, his wife, daughter, and granddaughter went to Montserrat to open an art exhibit and there he told Abbot Marcet about Garmendia's visit.[34]

Garmendia returned to Barcelona on November 14. José María Boada, a wealthy member of the Vallet movement, knew about the previous visit and invited Garmendia back to Barcelona. García Cascón accompanied the seer to Montserrat. There the abbot told them that Macià had spoken at length about Garmendia's first visit, repeating over and over, "I don't know what the Virgin wants me to do." Garmendia quickly observed, "Well, that is what I am here to tell him, what the Virgin wants him to do."

________________________________________

― 81 ―

Three days later Macià and his wife received Garmendia in their house, and Macià reportedly asked the seer if the Virgin was happy with him. Garmendia pleased him by answering that she was indeed. Garmendia said he had gone to Madrid the previous month and the Virgin was not so happy with the prime minister, Manuel Azañ, who had refused to receive him. Macià allegedly asked, "So he is worse than I am?" And Garmendia said yes, the Virgin had told him that Azaña would receive the punishment he deserved.[35]

Garmendia made other visits on behalf of the Virgin. On November 23 he went to see Justo de Echeguren, the Vitoria vicar general, who treated him abruptly. On December 6, this time with García Cascón and Boada, he went back. Echeguren was firm about the matter of Ramona's wounds, and the next day Garmendia claimed the Virgin told him, when he asked her to bless Echeguren, that "the apostles of her son were betraying both her son and her, and they will have to suffer for it later." Garcí Cascón sent the bad news to Echeguren along with prayers for enlightenment.[36]

Cardús and his employer kept in touch with Garmendia at least through 1934. Garmendia could barely write, so he dictated his letters. In June 1933 he said he was having fewer visions, only "when the Most Holy Virgin wants me to give some special message." But that fall he was again having visions daily, at home, in bed, outside, or in church. Garmendia did not always convince the Terrassa believers. But for García Cascón and Cardús, he remained a good friend and a valuable connection to heaven.[37]

Benita Aguirre

During García Cascón's stay at Ezkioga in late October he made another key contact for the Catalans, the child seer Benita Aguirre. Her visions had begun on July 12, two weeks after the first ones at the site. Aged nine, she was the fourth of eight surviving children of Bernarda Odria and Francisco Aguirre, a foreman at the tool foundry in Legazpi. Like many of the seers in the first weeks, Benita sometimes went to Ezkioga with her parish priest. In her vision she saw her stillborn baby brother as an angel near the Virgin. For two weeks she saw but did not hear the Virgin, who on occasion carried a handkerchief embroidered with words. On July 21 El Día introduced her to the public with a summary of her visions, including the Zumarraga doctor Sabel Aranzadi's clinical report:

Benita Aguirre y Odria, born in Legazpi, age nine, with height appropriate for her age, thin, with a pale face, of the neurotic kind; her second teeth are coming in; four years ago she suffered a horizontal nystagmus in one eye, which later disappeared; a year or two ago she suffered a generalized contraction in her entire body which lasted only briefly; she is trusting, not shy, good humored, correctly educated, and she explains herself fluently.[38]

________________________________________

― 82 ―

Image removed -- no rights

Benita Aguirre in vision, February 1932. Photo by Raymond de Rigné, all rights reserved.

On July 27 Benita began to hear the Virgin speak. A reporter described her at this time in a characteristic pose:

It is as though she were sleeping, with a smile and with her mouth open, as if marveling. Her eyes look up. Her mother suggests she say some things to the Virgin, and the girl does so without losing her attitude, which is half-surprised and half-joyful.[39]

By then observers were singling Benita out as particularly impressive, and she was having visions of a certain complexity. Her vision of August 6 was her sixteenth. The Barcelona Carlist newspaper printed the account she gave to the priests at Ezkioga:

First there appeared in the firmament a hole, then a great brightness came out of it, which when it came above the cross [at the vision site] became concentrated at the feet of the Virgin, who appeared with a black cape and a white bib. The child was dressed in white. Shortly afterward two angels came down with baskets of flowers and arranged themselves at the

________________________________________

― 83 ―

feet of the Virgin, one on each side. Shortly after that a man came down with a blue cape crossing from his right shoulder to his left dressed in white. Benita asked spontaneously without anyone prompting her who the man was, and the Virgin replied, "Saint Joseph."

Then Saint Joseph placed himself above the Virgin's head with his hands as one sees in images, but without the lily. Then two white crosses appeared. Then Saint Joseph disappeared. All the people disappeared in the hole in the firmament. The Virgin also disappeared, as did, a little later, the two crosses. The angels circled around and also disappeared.

Note: when the crosses appeared, the angels withdrew so as to leave the crosses placed where they had been.

When the apparition began I asked it, "Ama Maria guk ser egitea nai dezu [Mother Mary, what do you want us to do for you]?" and she replied, "Errezatzea [Pray]."

The Virgin smiled the entire time.

Benita asked for a blessing, and the Virgin shifted the Child from one arm to the other and gave a blessing.[40]

About the same time a Catalan priest heard Benita recount the following exchange: "My Mother, when will I enter a convent?" "When you are a little older."

About ten days later a canon from Lleida described her as sharp and lively (vivaracha ), and contrasted her correct use of Spanish with that of Patxi. Benita described for him her twenty-sixth vision.

Yesterday [August 16] I saw the Most Holy Virgin with the backs of her hands cut and bloody. She appeared with two swords, one through her heart and the other, with a bloody point, in her left hand. In her right hand she carried a bloody handkerchief. She was dressed in black and wore a crown, which had some long things that gave off light. To her right was Jesus Christ nailed to a cross. When I asked why she had so much blood and if it was for our sins, she answered, "Yes."[41]

As we have seen, active swordplay was common in the visions at the beginning of August. The heavy emphasis on blood is reminiscent of some of the visions of the Italian mystic Gemma Galgani. Benita's vision prefigured all the imagery for Ramona Olazábal's miracle in October: the bloody backs of hands, the bleeding swords, even the bloody handkerchiefs.

That evening the canon of Lleida Juan Bautista Altisent was next to Benita as she had another vision and he asked her questions while she was rapt. About three hundred persons were present. She saw a variant of her vision the previous night. Six angels carried the bloody swords. Benita moved her lips pronouncing unintelligible words, as if conversing with an invisible person. Altisent asked her what she was saying and hearing, and she said that the Virgin told her she could not tell anyone. Throughout the vision, which lasted a half hour, Benita's mother, at the canon's instructions, lifted her up so that everyone could "admire the

________________________________________

― 84 ―

transformation of that little angelic face." At the end the girl stretched out her arms as if trying to catch something going away and said, "Agur Ama [Farewell, Mother]," sadly, three times, "each time with more emotion and reaching out with her little hands as far as she could." Altisent said he had never felt such a strong emotion in his life. Benita told him that Our Holy Mother had been close to everyone, but especially close to him. The child returned to her normal state and dried her tears.[42]

Benita's visions after the first couple of weeks moved almost all who saw them. Even a reporter from El Liberal said they made him sad. In 1932 a priest from Barcelona, who was doubtful about much he saw, still wrote of Benita, "Truly it is impossible that a child of nine years could learn to act like that theatrically. The greatest actress after a brilliant career could not do it better. That is admirable." However he could not be sure whether the vision was the work of God or the devil.[43]

María de los Angeles de Delás from Barcelona heard Benita cry out a wrenching, "Mother, Mother, why are you so sad?" The girl leaned on the woman on the way down the hillside, and Delás noted the tears in her eyes. Like each of these contributors to El Correo Catalán , Delás went away feeling especially connected to the Virgin by personal contact with Benita Aguirre.

After speaking to the child I gave her a kiss, asking her to offer it on my behalf to the Most Holy Virgin, something I saw made her happy, and so we became friends. After that we smiled at each other when our glances crossed, and the next day she would accept the stool I offered for her to sit next to me during the third Rosary.

Here we glimpse the delicate courtship of glances, smiles, and favors constantly at work between the seers and the believers, in this case between a child seer and a believer with notebook in hand.[44]

At this time—the beginning of September—Rafael García Cascón first met Benita. On his return after Ramona's miracle in late October, his friendship with Benita deepened; he would pick her up, take her to lunch in Zumarraga, drive her to the vision site, and drive her home. He also invited her and her parents to a family gathering at the Hotel Urola in Zumarraga on his saint's day. On his last day Benita had supper and stayed over at the hotel, something he considered "another special favor of the Virgin."[45]

One day on the way to Ezkioga García Cascón asked Benita to ask the Virgin whether she was pleased with the work of Vallet and if so to bless him and his disciples. Garmendia overheard the request, and he asked the Virgin about Vallet as well. As García Cascón wrote Vallet, both seers separately said "that the Virgin had said that she was very pleased with what you have done in Catalonia and in South America and that if you continue this way you will have immense glory,

________________________________________

― 85 ―

and that the Virgin had given her blessing for you and your companions." García Cascón also reported what the Virgin told certain seers about himself and other Catalans:

The Virgin has said that she is very happy for what we have done for Garmendia and that we will be reminded of this. Imagine how pleased this made us, even though we did so little, but the Most Holy Virgin is most grateful.

We also know that the Virgin has said that those who have come from far away, making a great sacrifice and believing in her apparitions, will go to heaven without going through purgatory, and that of these there will be many. From Catalonia have come many people, perhaps more than from anywhere else, taking distance into account.

Benita wrote to García Cascón after his return to Terrassa that the Virgin had told her he should come back as soon as he could. Although only nine, Benita was hardly a passive protégée.[46]

In November García Cascón visited Bishop Irurita to relate his experiences

________________________________________

― 86 ―

at Ezkioga and tell him about the contact with the Catalonian president, Macià. By then there was great interest in Catalonia. In the fall of 1931 the press carried notices of excursions from Badalona, Calella, l'Espluga Calba, Lleida, Mollerussa, Mataró, Palamós, Reus, Sabadell (at least three trips), Tona (at least two), Torelló, Terrassa (two), and Vic (four). The followers of Vallet, however, organized the most sustained contacts with the visionaries. All Vallet did, far away in Uruguay, was to reprint in the magazine of his movement a newspaper article and a letter from García Cascón. More influential in this respect was Magdalena Aulina of Banyoles.[47]

Magdalena Aulina, the Mystic from Banyoles

The Vallet followers in Barcelona met in their social center, a downtown mansion known as the Casal Donya Dorotea. There García Cascón lectured on Ezkioga and there early in the previous year another industrialist had brought Magdalena Aulina i Saurina to tell of her miraculous cure and to speak about her new religious society.[48]

Developing religious orders drawn into the Ezkioga orbit got a boost of religious enthusiasm. But all came to regret the connection. Magdalena Aulina's institute obtained approval from Rome with great difficulty in 1962, and her successors in the Señoritas Operarias Parroquiales find it difficult to speak about the inspiration of Gemma Galgani and the trips to Ezkioga. They wished me to make clear that the institute existed before the visions at Ezkioga and was quite independent of them.

Magdalena Aulina was born in 1897, the daughter of a wood and coal dealer in the market and summer resort town of Banyoles (Girona). From an early age Magdalena had accompanied her sister, later to become a cloistered Carmelite, in works of charity among the poor. In 1916 she organized a Month of Mary for the children in her neighborhood and later a parish catechism group. By this time she was sure that she had a religious vocation. In part she was inspired by Gemma Galgani, a young woman from Lucca who died at age twenty-five in 1903 after a life dense with mystical phenomena. In 1912 Magdalena read Gemma's biography. In 1921 at age twenty-four Magdalena recovered from a heart condition after a novena to Gemma. This cure confirmed in her mind her spiritual link with the saintly Italian.[49]

The early twentieth century was an era of well-publicized miraculous cures at Lourdes. Very early on, the Barcelona pilgrimages prepared clinical dossiers to present to the Lourdes medical commission in case a cure should occur, and theAnnales of Lourdes record several cures of Catalans. Those cured became living proof of the Virgin's power and indeed of the existence of God in a doubting world. Miracles invested those cured with charisma. Aulina's cure

________________________________________

― 87 ―

brought her respectful visitors and she told them about Gemma Galgani's help. Banyoles was the headquarters of diocesan parish missioners, and they too spread the word.[50]

The year after Magdalena's cure, in 1922, with the aid of industrialists who were summer residents, she founded a kind of social house in Banyoles for women workers. In 1926 she helped to build a church in her neighborhood and organized a literacy program. She assisted Vallet when he gave parish exercises in Banyoles, and it is possible that he had her in mind to form an order of nuns to assist his movement.[51]

Aulina had plans of her own, however, and more than enough contacts to put them into practice. At a meeting of Catholic social workers in 1929 at

________________________________________

― 88 ―

Montserrat, she met Montserrat Boada, a member of a wealthy Barcelona family with influence in the Vatican. Through the Boadas and similar families, Aulina found support in exactly the same social stratum as Vallet had. When in early 1930 she told Vallet's supporters at the Casal about her spiritual link to Gemma Galgani, she made a deep impression. Shortly afterward José María Boada praised Gemma in the group's magazine, concluding, "Let us let her lead us sweetly through the paths of life."[52]

Gemma Galgani seemed to speak through Aulina, who acted more like a spirit medium than a seer. For instance, Cardús was present once at Banyoles when Gemma spoke through Aulina of the future of the institute. Thus, to follow Gemma was in effect to follow Aulina; through Aulina, believers sought Gemma's help in matters both ethereal and mundane.[53]

By 1931 some unmarried young women lived with Aulina in Banyoles fulltime, and three of them took the first private vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience in 1933. On weekends entire families of supporters would come to stay in Magdalena's house, the houses of relatives, hotels, and rented quarters. The supporters were typically doctors, industrialists, and lawyers from Barcelona, Girona (where the group had a clinic), Reus, Terrassa, Sabadell, and Tarragona. Visitors would remark on the sumptuousness of the religious services, with massed choristers in robes and much incense; every Sunday seemed a high feast. Those privileged to dine with Aulina might see her go in and out of trance at the table, as Cardús did, or even watch her in struggle with the devil.

José María Boada helped to persuade Aulina to send regular "expeditions" to Ezkioga. When he heard the praise that seers like Benita passed on from the Virgin about Pare Vallet, he went to Ezkioga to obtain more details. It may be that the seers led Boada to think that he himself had a divine mission; on December 9 Garmendia claimed to see the Virgin on his arm. After Boada reported back to Aulina and Aulina consulted Gemma's spirit, the Casal Donya Dorotea expeditions began on 12 December 1931. Two weeks previously the pope had read in Rome the official proclamation of Gemma's heroic virtues, a stage in the process of beatification, so there was a spate of articles about Gemma in the press which doubtless increased the fervor of Aulina's followers.[54]

Bartolomé de Andueza, the Rafols enthusiast, was aware of the role of Aulina and Gemma in the trips. In March 1932 he wrote in La Constancia of

the very devout expeditions of Catalans that arrive at Ezquioga weekly to do penance under the patronage of the angelic Gemma Galgani. They were suggested to their organizers by a soul in Barcelona living an extraordinary life who emulates the Italian virgin and has "inherited her spirit."[55]

There were eventually twenty-five trips of twenty-four to thirty persons. All included a lay "director" who led prayers (often Boada) and a technical manager, Luis Palà of the Casal. And, despite the prohibitions of the diocese of Vitoria,

________________________________________

― 89 ―

________________________________________

― 90 ―

there was a priest on most trips. Arturo Rodes Buxados, who went four times, acted on his own as a chronicler. Cardús and García Cascón were not core members of the group, although both for a time became devoted to Aulina-Gemma and both spent periods at the Banyoles complex. The trip took a day and a half each way, and the pilgrims spent four days at the site, staying at the Hotel Urola in Zumarraga. They maintained files of cures and visions and, following the practices of the Parish Exercises movement, posed for group photographs as a public witness of their commitment as Catholics.[56]

The trip members often prayed for as many as eight hours on the hillside, and some evenings for two hours more in the hotel. To outsiders their effusive piety seemed showy. The Piarist priest Marc Lliró of Barcelona watched Boada and Palà lead prayers at Ezkioga and later wrote disapprovingly: "Piety is not ridiculous, or tiresome, or exaggerated, or different from a peaceful normality. At Ezkioga it seemed to me … I found these kinds of false piety."[57] Aulina's mysticism spilled over to her followers in other ways. Many of them perceived a perfume on the bus trips and at other significant moments in their daily lives. Often a majority of passengers perceived the scent simultaneously, and to avoid confusion women did not wear perfume or cologne. They understood the scent as a sign of approval from Gemma. For these pilgrims Providence charged every moment of the trip and there was no place for chance. At least a dozen of the six hundred or so expedition members had visions at Ezkioga. Others were converted or cured.[58]

From the start these pilgrims cultivated the seers García Cascón and Boada had come to trust. They would pick them up in the morning and take them to the vision site. There they would have a private vision session. After lunch at the hotel, they would return the seers to the site for late afternoon prayers and then they would take them home. Often seers would also have visions on the bus. The seers quickly incorporated Gemma, as they had Madre Rafols, into their visual repertoire. At the end of October 1931 a Catalan assured the teenage seer Cruz Lete that if he said a novena and promoted devotion to Gemma, she in turn would set things straight at Ezkioga (presumably restore the credibility of the seers, damaged by the Ramona episode). When Lete finished the novena on November 17, he began to see Gemma Galgani in his visions. The Catalans worked to convince the seers that, as Cardús wrote in a letter, "Everything, everything, Ezkioga, Madre Rafols, and Gemma, are all the same thing."[59]

The seers nourished the sense of Providence in these pilgrims. Evarista Galdós predicted that certain of them would have visions, told others they would smell the scent of Gemma, and revealed to a young man his secrets. José Garmendia picked out the only doubter in one group, interceded with the Virgin to remove the devil from one Catalan's visions, and divined the secret prayers of a young Catalan male. On three occasions he pointed out trip members who would be seers.

________________________________________

― 91 ―

Garmendia's greatest success was with García Cascón's servant of six years, Carmen Visa de Dios, who went on the trip from 20 to 22 June 1932. Garmendia privately told two trip members that Visa would be a seer and all the members then signed his sealed prediction. The next day while Garmendia was having his vision, Visa had hers. She was a widow, age forty-seven, from Torrente de Cinca (Huesca). Her visions at Ezkioga were of Christ Crucified and the Sorrowing Mother, and for most of the return trip she saw Gemma Galgani hovering like a bird outside or on the hood of the bus. When the pilgrims offered Gemma prayers, Visa saw her nod in response, and as she saw Gemma say farewell on the outskirts of Barcelona, many members said they smelled the Gemma scent.[60]

Benita Aguirre, like Garmendia, interceded for Catalans with the Virgin. From the start she was the group's favorite seer, both because of earlier publicity and because of her message about Pare Vallet. Of the six sessions on the hillside of the first trip, Benita was the central figure in five. Right away the pilgrims invited her to visit Barcelona.

Like previous Catalan observers, the chroniclers of this trip admired her stance in vision. On the afternoon of December 15, as on earlier occasions, the Catalans had given her objects for the Virgin to bless. She laid out the crucifixes in front of her on the vision deck and draped the rosaries on her arms. According to a youth who was present, she then fell face forward and sat up again,

leaning slightly backward, resting in the arms of my friends, her head slightly raised, her eyes fixed on a point high up, but not so fixed that they did not move somewhat or blink occasionally. She speaks with the apparition; she smiles, suffers, sobs, but without tears, asks forgiveness with a sad and tender voice. Then she bends and takes one by one the objects lined in front of her, and each time raising her arm, presents them to the apparition to kiss and bless them. I have a crucifix about a palm long I bought there that Benita held in her hands that afternoon. It was kissed by the Virgin, Gemma (whom she saw again today), and the angels. I also have three red rosaries. The medals on the safety pin I wear were kissed by the Virgin and Gemma. All this as said by Benita.

The youth describing the trip had already stocked up on blessed objects at the two sessions with Benita he attended the previous day. In the morning he had obtained blessings for "three men's rosaries, twenty medals, a miniature image of the Virgin the nuns at Llivia gave me, and a small crucifix that belonged to my mother," all kissed by the Virgin and Gemma. In the afternoon he had "five black rosaries, with smaller beads" kissed by the Virgin, Gemma, and the baby Jesus. He wrote his aunt, "I'll send you some of each." He paid little heed to grand messages of chastisements and miracles scheduled for an indefinite future. As at Limpias a dozen years before, pilgrims were interested in the here-and-now, in resolving spiritual problems and obtaining holy souvenirs.[61]

________________________________________

― 92 ―

In mid-March Benita went to Barcelona in the group bus and stayed for three days. The group received her enthusiastically at the Casal. And Magdalena Aulina, it seems, enrolled her as a "Servidora de María" in the Obra. At Montserrat the dark Madonna did not impress her. Her Virgin, she said, did not look like that! She stayed with the Rodes family, and Lourdes Rodes, age nineteen, gave Benita her oversize four-foot doll.[62]

Lourdes Rodes finally got to go to Ezkioga from April 29 to May 4, and there, as Benita's father sheltered them from the rain with an umbrella, she supported Benita in vision. The experience was a spiritual one Lourdes remembered vividly over sixty years later:

Benita was looking upward and speaking in Basque while a man translated and my father took notes. I was filled with an intimate feeling of peace and tranquillity, like a ray of sunlight that warmed me. When the vision went away that feeling stopped. I was left very deeply moved and wanted to cry with happiness.[63]

Later, when Benita could no longer stay in Legazpi, Catalonia proved to be a second home, for she won the hearts of its pilgrims. A clerical observer of an expedition wrote in early October 1932, "I felt sorry for these people who, it seemed to me, believed more in Benita than in the mysteries of the faith."[64]

________________________________________

― 93 ―

María Recalde from Durango

María Recalde was another seer the Catalans favored. She was born into a poor rural family in Zenarruza (Bizkaia) in 1894. María could read but could write only her name. She lived in Durango, a clergy-centered town of five thousand. There none of the twenty-six parish priests, none of the Jesuits in the school, and only a handful of the nuns in the five houses believed in her visions. Recalde was one of the few married women to become famous as a seer at Ezkioga. She had had nine children, three stillborn. It was because her first child was born out of wedlock that many local people summarily dismissed her visions.

María's first vision took place on 9 August 1931, just after the intensive newspaper coverage ended. Like Garmendia, Recalde was "invisible" to the press. Only once did a newspaper mention her, although by December 13 she had already had 139 visions. (Counting seems to have been part of the religious ethos; the seers kept score of their visions the same way the Aliadas counted their rosaries and mortifications.) She became well known only after church opposition depleted the ranks of seers and believers.[65] She continued to go to Ezkioga for several years. Whether at Ezkioga, at home, or elsewhere, she had visions until her death in 1950. In the 1980s the older generation throughout eastern Bizkaia and the uplands of Gipuzkoa remembered her as a seer.

________________________________________

― 94 ―

María Recalde is a particularly engaging character in the Ezkioga story. She had a powerful vitality and combativeness as well as a preternatural shrewdness. She allegedly faced down the judge who interrogated her. She was also warm-hearted and generous. In many photographs she can be seen caring for other seers in vision. She was one of the seers about whom I knew the least until the day her granddaughter Mariví Jayo came to visit me in Las Palmas. Mariví brought with her a tape recording of her father talking about his mother and Ezkioga. Like many families of visionaries, the Jayos had felt the shame of being known as the family of an Ezkioga seer. It was a relief for Lorenzo Jayo to talk about his mother to me when we met subsequently.[66]

María's husband was a market gardener supplying milk and fresh vegetables to Durango. María, her son told me, "wore the pants in the family." When in

________________________________________

― 95 ―

early August 1931 she began to have visions at Ezkioga and took the train there every afternoon, the family adjusted. With her visions María gained the following of important commercial and manufacturing families in Bilbao and Elorrio, including Manuel and Luisa Arriola, who owned the Artiach cookie company, the Abaytuas, who were stockbrokers, and Matilde Uribe, whose husband owned a steel mill. Like other seers with loyal believers, María supplied these families with news from heaven, some of it obviously convincing. She also developed a following among the rural believers of the Goiherri, the Gipuzkoan uplands; they stood by her until her death.

Starting in November 1931 Recalde and Benita Aguirre began to take people aside and tell them their secret sins as signs from heaven that they should confess, repent, and make their peace with God. The sole newspaper article about Recalde told how she converted one of the souvenir stand operators, Vidal Castillo, by revealing his past sins. This kind of vision became general among the more sociable seers, but it remained Recalde's specialty.[67]

Recalde made each of her devotees feel special. For Arturo Rodes she was "the seer most favored by heaven with extraordinary confidences." He was impressed that, like many seers, she knew the date of her death and yet remained calm. He also respected her imperturbability in the face of mockery and slander. Recalde had singled him out; she saw in heaven his two children and four godchildren who were deceased and she promised all would meet him when he died. Similarly, she said the Virgin particularly liked a crucifix that Cardús carried. Another time Recalde picked out from the items Cardús gave her to be blessed a devotional card of Gemma Galgani that included a relic, telling him, "Gemma loves you dearly and considers you her brother." For Cardús, who considered Gemma his spiritual director, this was powerful medicine. Similarly, Recalde in vision informed García Cascón that a crucifix he carried was especially sacred. On his return he installed it in a place of honor in his house, and his visionary servant saw it sweat blood, like the bleeding crucifix of Madre Rafols.[68]

María Recalde made the connection with García Cascón and the Catalans during his stays in October 1931. In November she told him that she had seen the Virgin with Madre Rafols and Gemma Galgani together early that month and that the Virgin had said that trips would come with devotees of Gemma from a place where they love Gemma a lot. For this reason García Cascón and his friends thought of María Recalde as a kind of godmother to the Catalan expeditions. María's son winces when he recalls the buses week after week filling the narrow streets of Durango, when the pilgrims came to pick up his mother.[69] On 8 May 1932 she had a vision in which the Virgin told her where to look for jewels and an image buried in the church of Santa Ana of Barcelona 266 years earlier. And on May 23 she saw not only Gemma Galgani but Magdalena Aulina as well. Two weeks later she went back with a Catalan trip

________________________________________

― 96 ―

to Barcelona. There she visited Montserrat and the shrine to the souls in purgatory at Tibadabo. On her return to Ezkioga, she claimed, the Sacred Heart of Jesus asked for her hand and, with the Virgin and Gemma Galgani looking on and smiling, pierced it, giving her great joy. Jesus told her that she had much to suffer for Catalonia.[70]

Women as God's Victims

The Sacred Heart of Jesus piercing María Recalde's hand on behalf of Catalonia points to an ethos of female sacrifice that the Catalan devotees of Rafols and Gemma shared with the Basque seers. Francisco de Paula Vallet had come to believe that, with civil war inevitable, his parish exercises were preparing martyrs, men who would die at the hands of other men. Among Aulina's followers there was a different but complementary program for women. God would take their lives directly. The religiosity of Gemma Galgani, as expressed in the letters and vision texts that Aulina's disciples studied, had as a central premise that people could choose to be victims and stand in for the sins of others. Like Christ, Gemma and Magdalena suffered wounds, the torments of the devil, and illnesses on behalf of the human race. In a key passage from her letters that Cardús cited in his diary, Gemma said Jesus told her:

I have a need for victims, but strong victims to calm the holy and just wrath of my heavenly Father. I need souls to come forward whose sufferings, tribulations, and discomforts make up for the malice and ingratitude of sinners. Oh, if I could only get everyone to understand how indignant my celestial Father is with the world! Nothing is now able to contain his wrath. He is preparing a horrible chastisement against the human race![71]

For Gemma, Aulina, and doubtless many cloistered religious of their day, their willing sacrifice averted a chastisement. As José María Boada described Gemma in 1930, "It pleased Jesus to find in her a true image of his own passion; thus the blessed servant was able to fulfill her sharp desire to make herself like Jesus and suffer for Him."[72]

This taste for pain and sacrifice was much in the air. The printed picture of Thérèse de Lisieux in the Ezkioga souvenir stands bore the motto, "Suffering, together with love, is the only thing to be desired in this vale of tears." The mysterious nun known as Sulamitis wrote about "victims of love." At the turn of the century Cardinal Salvador Casañas of Barcelona cultivated "victim souls of Jesus."[73] And Antonio Amundarain used victim terminology throughout the literature of the Alianza. It was also an idiom of the Passionists, whose holy friar, Gabriele dell'Addolorata, appeared to Gemma and served as her spiritual guide. So too it was part of the language of the Reparadora nuns, to whose house Evarista,

________________________________________

― 97 ―

Ramona, and the seer from Ataun went for spiritual exercises. In this economy of substitute pain, it was largely Spain's Catholic women who chose to suffer.

The willing suffering of women had a certain logic, for it was a commonplace in more traditional circles that the indecency of modern female dress and behavior was the root cause of the nation's problems. A woman columnist in Navarra argued that low necklines on the dresses of liberal Catholics explained why the Christ was suffering at Limpias in 1919. The theme reappears in the last "revelation" of the Sacred Heart to María Naya:

Many are the offenses that I have received and that I will receive, above all from women with their shameless dresses, their nakedness, their frivolity and perverse intentions, by which they will achieve the demoralization of families and of men, and in large part this will arouse the Justice of my Eternal Father, who will be obliged to chastise mankind.[74]

Bartolomé de Andueza, the priest and writer who linked Rafols with Ezkioga, did not beat around the bush when he glossed this message in La Constancia . Women were to blame and how!

The indecent fashions of women are the great sin of the twentieth century.

With what offending stigmas are marked an enormous number of Catholic women who, ignoring the voice of the Pope, bishops, preachers, and confessors, have paraded through the streets, plazas, paseos, and beaches their nudity and the shamelessness of the dissolute pagan women of ancient Rome, the sewer for all the aberrations and the lowest and most repugnant moral turpitude.

You women who have worshiped fashion, you are the cause of the travail that our Nation now laments. The Divine Heart of Jesus says so solemnly. I am not one to hide the truth. You women are the reason for the dissolution of the Jesuits, for the removal of crucifixes, for the horrible sacrileges that have been done, for all the savage persecution, in short, that this poor Spanish nation has endured.[75]

This perception that women were corrupting contemporary society was common. Amado de Cristo Burguera, who will loom large in this story, attributed many of the ills of the times to a pagan renaissance. Prime examples were women athletes, women in cabarets, and women in film, all indecently glorified in illustrated magazines. He believed that "the decadence and the ruin of nations is in direct relation to the cultivation and the idealization of femininity." As soon as a civilization presented total nudity in paintings and statues, he said, the society began to go downhill. He detected in modern society an exaltation of woman "in all her profound vacuity, her great puerility, and her immense vanity (Forgive me, ladies)."[76] If women were to blame, then women should do the redeeming and the proxy suffering. Andueza suggested that the penances done by Ezkioga seers

________________________________________

― 98 ―

and believers were those that the Sacred Heart had called for through Madre Rafols.

This expiatory ethic was typical of contemporary mystic exemplars like the French, Italian, and German stigmatics Marie Julie Jahenny, Pio da Pietrelcina, Thérèse Neumann, and the French holy child Guy de Fontgalland. It contrasted with the ethic of active saints doing good in the world, whether by conquering infidels, converting heathens, or performing social work. Examples would be Jeanne d'Arc, Ignacio de Loyola, Francisco Javier, Vincent de Paul, Giovanni Bosco, Albert Schweitzer, or Mohandas Gandhi. Patxi as captain of the reconquest better fit this active model. By and large the former model was intended for women, the latter for men.

But throughout Catholic Europe women were also enrolling in unprecedented numbers in religious orders that enabled them to lead active, socially useful lives while remaining relatively independent of men. While Carmen Medina's two sisters were Reparadoras, cloistered nuns who did atonement for the sins of the world through prayer, her in-law Rafaela Ibarra was one of the many women for whom sanctity involved activity in the world. In Gipuzkoa houses of

________________________________________

― 99 ―

active nuns like the Daughters of Charity outnumbered those of contemplatives three to one.[77]

Nevertheless, the holy mode that caught the imagination of the Basque seers by the winter of 1932 was that of passive sacrifice. Often using language similar to that we find in Gemma's writings, they too began to describe themselves as victims. Both Ramona's attempted miracle with bloody hands and the spiritual exercises with the Reparadoras pointed the seers toward one obvious physical expression of the victim stance, the mimic crucifixions that began in January 1932. This mystic fad reached its climax on Good Friday. On that day dozens of seers, children, men, and women, writhed on the Ezkioga stage in simultaneous agony, feeling imaginary nails being driven through their hands and feet and lances piercing their sides. Previously, through Lent, seer after seer had led groups of followers up the hillside reciting the stations of the cross, with seers experiencing them as if they were Christ.

Benita explained the new development in a letter to García Cascón in February:

I suppose you know already how we are crucified, suffering a lot; we have to suffer still more. But this is nothing. In order to save a soul one can do much more. One day when they were crucifying me, the Virgin told me that I was suffering for a sinner in my village, and since then she does not tell me who it is for, but I know it is for the sinners.[78]

For the seers the concept of sinner changed subtly over time. In July of 1931 sinners were clearly those who burned convents, read La Voz de Guipúzcoa , wore low-cut dresses, or danced the foxtrot—in short, sinners as Catholics in general defined them. But as the diocese turned against the visions the definition of sinner seems to have broadened. The term conversion among Catalans generally meant the "conversion" of those members who were practicing Catholics but who did not believe in or who were unsure about the visions at Ezkioga. The new canon of belief was not just in the Virgin Mary in general but in this Mary in particular. Those who truly believed in this Mary would go straight to heaven. The crucifixions suffered by the seers in the winter of 1932 were not only atonement for the anticlericals who expelled the Jesuits and removed crucifixes from schools but also for clerics like the priests of Ezkioga who kept the vision stage under critical surveillance.

The Ezkioga seers also used the atonement idiom to explain the travails of their followers. A seer, probably Evarista Galdós, informed a young man from Reus that his nine-year-old sister, who was ill, was "the expiatory victim for the conversion of the family, and that before [the sister] died, her father would convert." Arturo Rodes states that the seer foretold the date of the little sister's death. The Catalan pilgrims did not find this calculus strange since they were fully caught up in its logic already. When the husband of a Catalan woman died, she

________________________________________

― 100 ―

feared he would go to hell because he had been lax. So she offered her children in exchange for her husband's soul. Soon after, her eldest daughter died.[79]

After Ramona's exposure the church and the press turned against the seers and fewer spectators came. The whole notion of what it was to be a seer changed. In the previous summer the seers were carrying with them the hopes and dreams of the vast majority of Basque and Spanish Catholics. Benita Aguirre was the most important and well-known person in Legazpi. It was exciting just to be her sister. But by the winter of 1932 the tide was turning. People were beginning to wonder, snicker, and point. And for the seers and their families life in these small, pious villages became a holy nightmare. The vision crucifixions in part reflected this crucifixion by public opinion.

To persist with visions was difficult. In mid-April 1932 Salvador Cardús summed up the point of view of the believers, by then a small, harassed minority: "Seer is now synonymous with hero, and a hero with a high ideal, an ideal of continuous pain and suffering here on earth from which happiness will not begin until heaven."[80] The presence of Gemma's followers week after week between mid-December 1931 and October 1932 became a major incentive for the seers close to them. Of necessity the seers shifted their points of human reference from their hometowns and their region to the dwindling community of believers.

The logical limit of the seers' sacrifices was that they would really die, not just die on stage. By the end of the first months some seers while in vision would ask to die. In October Evarista announced that a male seer would suffer five wounds, like Christ. Ramona had said that she would die after the miracles and that the Virgin would carry her to heaven. Not all the deaths the seers imagined were those of passive victims of God. On 25 January 1932 shortly after her spiritual exercises, Ramona believed a rumor that she would die the next day in mortal sin. All night she searched her conscience in vain. The next morning she went to confess, fully prepared to die, but the Virgin appeared to her and consoled her. Similarly Evarista told the Catalans that she, María Recalde, and other seers would die assassinated on the vision platform.[81]

In his Basque Oral Literature (1936) the folklorist Manuel Lecuona recounted an incident during Lent of 1932 which almost included a messianic sacrifice inspired by the events at Ezkioga. In the mountains of his town, Oiartzun, there was a group of charcoalers. Since they could not go to mass on Sundays, they would listen to a man famous for his memory sing religious verses written by the nineteenth-century poet Xenpelar.

One day the carter for the group, who had taken a load of charcoal down to the village, was surprised on his return to the mountain to find the charcoal pyre abandoned and totally aflame. When he voiced his surprise, they berated him, "Forget about the charcoal. Don't you know that the end of the world is at hand, and that this man has to die this afternoon?" One of

________________________________________

― 103 ―

the men considered himself the Messiah, and that afternoon his two companions were going to crucify him.[82]

In these first years two seers did die, both of tuberculosis. The first was the teenager María Celaya, who had visions both at Ezkioga and in her home village in Navarra starting on 16 October 1931. She died 23 September 1932. Cruz Lete Sarasola of Itsasondo had visions at Ezkioga from late October 1931 to February 1932, when he entered the order of Brothers Hospitallers. He died devoutly on 30 October 1933. For seers and believers both Celaya and Lete died in willing sacrifice for the sins of others, victims for the visions.

El Pare Vallet at Ezkioga

Shortly after the visionary crucifixions on Good Friday and shortly before people read about the Rafols prophecy of chastisement, Ezkioga's suffering seers had a surprise visitor. Francisco de Paula Vallet had come to realize that his project was being sidetracked and he returned from Uruguay to investigate. From García Cascón and other followers, Vallet had heard about the trips to Ezkioga, the "grace" obtained on the visits, and the growing influence of Magdalena Aulina. Whereas in the fall of 1931 he was receptive to the Ezkioga visions, his doubts about the path the Barcelona Casal group was taking increased over the winter. In early April 1932 Vallet made an unannounced visit. At once three close followers drove with him to Ezkioga so he could see for himself what was going on there. On the way they stopped in Zaragoza, where he talked with Hermana Naya. She did not impress him. At Ezkioga he watched several of the seers from the base of the hill and he questioned them when they came down.[83]

Vallet talked at greatest length to Benita and her parents. They had heard much about him from the Catalans and were quite upset when he tried to persuade them that the visions were the work of the devil. In Legazpi that night Benita and her parents spent the night praying to the Virgin and asking for a sign. The next morning Vallet appeared at their house, begging forgiveness for the way he had spoken the night before and asking insistently for Benita to intercede for him with the Virgin. He came away, I am told, convinced that the older seers, whom he fooled with captious questions, were not having divine visions. But the original boy visionary as well as Benita impressed him.[84]

Back in Barcelona Vallet worked hard against Ezkioga and attempted to win back his followers. For erstwhile admirers like García Cascón, Cardús, Boada, and Arturo Rodes, who trusted the Ezkioga seers and Aulina-Gemma, there was little choice. They lost their faith in his discernment and seriousness. At Ezkioga the visionaries were finely tuned to events in this important circle of followers far away. On 10 April 1932 Garmendia asked the Virgin about Vallet and said that she replied, "He has saved many souls, but because of him, many will be

________________________________________

― 104 ―

lost." The next day he asked whether Vallet would change his mind, but the Virgin allegedly pointed out Lucifer to him and said, "This one will control him."[85]

Despite Vallet's attempts to reconcile his followers with the diocese, he gained no ground with Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona. And Bishop Irurita refused him permission to remain in the diocese. In 1934 Vallet left for France. There he established his order under the aegis of the bishop of Valence. Vallet remained firmly opposed to Ezkioga and to the Rafols prophecies. Alone of the opponents of María Naya's forgeries, Vallet recognized her debt to the Basque visionaries, noting in the prophecies "some vague statements taken from the predictions of the Ezquioga people, which she thought were true."[86]

Magdalena Aulina and Francisco de Paula Vallet, the would-be founders of two orders, were in fact competing for the same followers. One family epitomizes that struggle. Bartolomeu Terradas had been an active member and financial backer of Vallet's movement in the 1920s and he was president of the Casal in 1930. His son Joan went with Vallet to the Holy Land in 1928 and later to Uruguay. The father drove Vallet and son Joan to Ezkioga on 6 April 1932. But by April 10, because of Vallet's stance on the visions, Terradas had removed his son from Vallet's order. Eventually the son attended the Barcelona diocesan seminary. The father dedicated the rest of his life and money to Magdalena Aulina. The son eventually rejoined Vallet and became his chief disciple. Another son, Miguel, also a priest, became a chaplain to Aulina's order.[87]

Ezkioga, Euskadi, and Catalunya

Many Basques believed that the Virgin chose to appear at Ezkioga to reward and strengthen Basque nationalism. But nowhere in the letters and diaries of Catalan believers is there any interest in or comment on the relation of the Virgin to the Basques, even though they sometimes took the trouble to learn the Basque hymns, and some spelled Ezkioga the Basque way with a k . The Catalans had no sense that they, from another nation, were intruding on a privileged relationship between Mary and the Basques, and they certainly had no sense that the Virgin was appearing for the Basques in particular.

Implicit in the Catalans' many references to the Virgin and Catalonia was the notion that the Virgin's message was not set. The Catalans assumed that they could change and bend it. They knew that she was appearing for all humanity or at least for Europe and that they could affect by prayer, penance, and sacrifice her influence over Christ, miracles, punishments, and the future in general. The Catalans went to Ezkioga representing their nation, as proxies for the Catholics there, even for the entire population.

This understanding that the Virgin's message was contingent on human response was general. The seers said as much. Benita declared in April 1932, "If

________________________________________

― 105 ―

the Catalans had not gone to Ezquioga, the inhabitants of Barcelona would now be in heaven, hell, or purgatory, because Barcelona would have been leveled." This too was the attitude of Antonio Amundarain when he wrote that the Ezkioga rosary "must find in heaven an almost omnipotent echo." Although believers came to expect a chastisement, they assumed that through prayer people could affect when and whom it would strike.[88]

The seers the Catalans chose to listen to were those who could provide the kind of messages that the Catalans would want to hear. García Cascón's selection in early September seems to have left out Patxi, the seer most oriented to the Basques. García Cascón could not have extensive, intimate contact with other seers whom he could not understand. He chose two kinds: those like Benita, whose messages were oriented more toward Spain, and those like María Recalde, who were eager and able to address the needs of particular people. Some of the most adaptable seers were not selected by García Cascón but rather selected him. Patxi, whose messages were for the Basque deputies in the Constituent Cortes, had no need for Catalan intermediaries. Garmendia, whose scope was wider and included Macià, did.

Thousands of pilgrims went to Ezkioga from Catalonia and the Basques welcomed the Catalans as brothers and sisters. Cardús described a Terrassa bus arriving in a town where a Nationalist festival was in progress; the Basques performed a special dance in their honor, receiving them and sending them on their way with "Visca Catalunya! [Long Live Catalonia!]" The Catalans replied, "Gora Euzkadi! [Up with Euzkadi!]"[89] However much they were interested in Madre Rafols's messages for Spain as a whole, the Catalans on the Aulina trips wanted to attract the Virgin's favor for Catalonia. Cardús wrote to the brother of the owner of the vision site:

Catalonia will be saved, and the words of our great bishop Torras y Bages will find full confirmation, "Catalonia will exist if it is Catholic." … We may take more or less time, but in the end the victory will be ours, and Euskadi and Catalonia will continue like good brothers on the same path.[90]

The Catalans took no interest in the visions in Toledo in late August. When Carmen Medina took Patxi there he rather sniffed at the whole thing. Both for Basque and Catalan Catholics strong regional identities made it logical to pray to and give homage to a Virgin who appeared in order to reproach and punish the atheist Republic at the Center.

There was, however, a difference between urban Catalan and rural Basque pilgrims. For the Catalans a trip to Ezkioga was one from a land of apostasy to a land of faith. Canon Altisent of Lleida wrote in September 1931, "Ezquioga is putting the Catholics of other regions of Spain in contact with the noble integrity and deeply rooted faith of the Basque people, at present so admired in the world." When he and his companions visited Loyola, they worried that some

________________________________________

― 106 ―

day the rabble might burn it down. In the spirit of the "Not Here!" cartoon, their Basque guide reassured them, "Have no fear, they will not get in here, unless it is over the dead bodies of all the sons of this Catholic land." Just as Catholics from all over secular France refreshed themselves at Lourdes, where every night tens of thousands of believers created an infectious mood of piety, so the Catalans refreshed and renewed their faith in the massed fervor of Ezkioga's hymns and rosaries.[91]

The members of Vallet's movement were particularly heartened to find so many Basque men at Ezkioga—about half of adult spectators by my count from crowd photographs. In Catalonia male Catholics were in short supply. Indeed, the entire thrust of Vallet's movement was to convert lukewarm male Catholics into militant visible witnesses. Of the exercises Vallet gave in Catalonia, all but three or four were for men.

The way the Catholics of the two regions experienced the threat from the Republic was quite different. Rural Basques thought of the anticlericalism they read about—thefts from churches, the burning of religious houses, and assassinations of clergy as well as the removal of crucifixes from schools, the separation of church and state, and the dissolution of the Jesuits—as external, things that happened on the outside or policies that came from the outside. They received divine messages to defend the mountain heights of Euskadi from the invaders or to follow the angelic host and retake Spain. They redefined the enemy within—Basque republicans and socialists—as foreign. In the summer of 1931 apprehensive landowners from southern Spain also considered the conservative Basque Country a safe haven.

In Catalonia church and monastery burnings in the nineteenth century and in 1909 had accustomed Catholics to the idea of internal, Catalan anticlericals. Catholics there knew their own language was a vehicle just as appropriate for blasphemy as for prayer, for the scurrilous L'Esquella de la Torraxa as well as the pious El Matí . They knew from experience that impiety was part of the body politic in Catalonia, indeed, in the 1930s a major part. As Cardús wrote Ramona, "At present our land is like a volcano, and some day this volcano will erupt, and I do not know what will happen in Catalonia. God forgive us for the offenses he has received from our land, which cannot be imagined."[92] The communities of Terrassa, Sabadell, Badalona, and Mataró, which early sent contingents to Ezkioga, were mill towns in the very crater of the volcano, with strong anarchist or socialist movements. There Catholic men were outnumbered, visible, and vulnerable.

Vallet himself had organized many of the males through exercises; he always had a clear awareness of the upcoming contest. Whereas for the rural Basques the notion of a religious civil war was thrust upon them on 11–13 May 1931, the days when crowds burned and sacked religious houses in Madrid and other cities to the south, the people of Catalonia's industrial towns and cities had been

________________________________________

― 107 ―

experiencing a civil war of sorts—sporadic worker uprisings, anarchist killings, and state terror—for over twenty years. Vallet saw conversion as the only hope. He and other activist Catholics considered recourse to prophecies, apparitions, and mystics like Magdalena Aulina an abandonment of the struggle.[93]

But for Cardús and many the veterans of Vallet's movement, the prayers at Ezkioga were a continuation of, not a break from, what they had learned in spiritual exercises:

I had done closed exercises twice and one series with the great apostle Padre Vallet. But even though I always gained good spiritual benefit I can say that the best exercises I have done are those I have done in Ezquioga, and what I say goes as well for many of the Exercise friends who have been to Ezquioga.[94]

The active involvement of the Catalans at Ezkioga proper ended with the government crackdown of October 1932. Thereafter García Cascón and José María Boada visited their visionary friends in jail and interceded for them at the mental hospital, but they sent no more expeditions. The decision was made by Aulina-Gemma. The seers, by then dependent on the trips, wrote wistfully on their Virgin's behalf declaring that the Catalans would return or ought to. Their friends wrote back expressions of support but also of reproach.

All of us would come, but you well know that it is Gemma who is in charge, and if the director does not order us to go, or rather, says that this is not the right time, what can we do? … You well know that the expeditions do not come because of the quarrels and the disgusting hatred that for a considerable time now have been evident even out on the hillside.[95]

The quarrels and hatreds involved not only the seers but also their patrons. With Antonio Amundarain and Carmen Medina on the sidelines, the most important promoters were Raymond de Rigné and Amado de Cristo Burguera y Serrano. Both thrived on conflict.

________________________________________

― 108 ―

5.

Promoters and Seers III:

Monsieur Rigné and Padre Burguera

Antonio Aundarian always kept his distance from the visionaries. Although Carmen Medina became close to some seers, she did not stay at Ezkioga for long periods. García Cascón, Cardús, and Magdalena Aulina lived in distant Catalonia. But Monsieur Rigné and Padre Burguera moved right in and became social landmarks. Both were obsessive. Their grand obsession with the visions of Ezkioga consumed the remainder of their lives.

Self-appointed impresarios like the promoters at Ezkioga exist all around us, and those working on a more grand scale have left their mark around the world and throughout history. William James wrote about such persons, "[They] do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, and they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age."[1] At Ezkioga we observe these passionate characters at work in unusual circumstances. When they went there to confirm their ideas, they came up against canny and inspired rural seers—the canniest and most inspired of a cast of hundreds. The interests of the seers and

________________________________________

― 109 ―

the patrons did not exactly coincide, but each needed the other. Seers, of course, have left their mark on the world as well. These two rare metals made complex, unstable, alloys that we can watch solidify and break down.

My aim is to probe the dynamics of such relations. For although these metals are rare, when they combine, the effects on human history can be explosive. Someone with a line to the gods together with a virtuosic organizer who knows the right questions can do more than just change the world; on occasion they have even been able to reconfigure heaven.

Monsieur Rigné

When Raymond de Rigné and Marie-Geneviève Thirouin arrived at Ezkioga on 10 August 1931, he was forty-seven and she was thirty-six. The Irish Hispanist Walter Starkie had just left, Antonio Amundarain and Carmen Medina were both involved with seers, and the Catalans were reading about Ezkioga in their newspapers. Rigné came to the visions like a moth to a flame on a dark night.[2]

Rigné inherited his enthusiasm for seers from his father, Raymond de la Ville, a general who dedicated his retirement to investments and literature. When de la Ville rashly invested in Andalusian railroads, the fall of the peseta drove him in distress to a spirit medium. She so convinced him with her insight on Spain's geography and political economy that he came to consult her on family matters as well. His son too turned to female visionaries in time of trouble and made a similarly ruinous investment of time and energy in Spain.[3]

Rigné's father had made no secret of his Catholicism and felt that his career had suffered because of it. Rigné filshimself lost his faith as an adolescent but regained it at age fifteen, thereafter becoming a believer on his own terms. He enjoyed conflict with the church hierarchy. Until his death in 1956 he skirmished in particular against rigorist and "morose" Catholicism. In 1910 he published a defense of Huysmans's La Foule de Lourdes . Rigné, like Huysmans, disliked Catholic sexual morality, and in 1917 he began to publish fiction about purity, prurience, nudism, and beauty. His aim was to unite Greco-Roman aesthetics with Christianity, so he chose for the name of his personal press "La Renaissance Universelle."[4]

In 1921 Rigné laid out a grandiose plan for a set of novels that would deal with people's souls. Entitled Le Cité Vivant , it would be a kind of spiritual sequel to the work of Balzac. (Everything he did was grandiose—one of the nicknames the Basque Ezkioguistas gave him was "Le Maréchal.") The eccentric books in his scheme mixed fact with fantasy. They were written supposedly by his own characters, who had fancy names like Jean d'Arvil and Supplicien Costèceque. In all he published a dozen books and drew most if not all of the illustrations.[5]

In 1911 Rigné married a Protestant woman, with whom he had six children, and he thereafter advocated the merging of Christian faiths. He described his wife

________________________________________

― 110 ―

as his "most precious collaborator" and his work and life as "a religious experience."[6] But in 1927 his marriage fell apart. The self-published books, which went unnoticed, were a continuous financial drain. And the inheritance his father had promised disappeared in the investment program managed by spirits. According to the autobiographical novel Mariage Nul, when Rigné was away on one of his many trips, his wife left him, taking the children, and over the next two years obtained a civil divorce.

In 1929 under the stress of this separation Rigné visited the German stigmatic Thérèse Neumann. In trance she told him to keep on writing and to pray, not to look for a job and not to try to force his family's return. That year he advertised for a literary collaborator and secretary and in Marie-Geneviève Thirouin, a devout and romantic poet, he found a soul mate for the remainder of his life. According to Mariage Nul , she was the great-granddaughter of a novelist and one of four daughters of an army colonel. Before meeting Rigné she had published a book of poetry and some theater sketches. The new couple considered it a sign that they had witnessed the same miracle cure at Lourdes in 1910. Since they could not marry in a religious ceremony, they invented one of their own and exchanged vows at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1930. Rigné told the people of Ezkioga that he chose his first wife himself but that the Virgin chose the second one for him.[7]

Rigné had an acute sense of chivalry that he deployed first in defense of Joris Karl Huysmans and later in defense of Alfred Dreyfus. In the late 1920s he focused on Jeanne d'Arc and wrote about her in a way both serious and playful. He claimed that after praying on the tomb of Cardinal Stanislas Touchet (who maneuvered Jeanne d'Arc's canonization in 1920), he "discovered" (or was divinely inspired to compose) a manuscript journal of Pierre Cauchon, the bishop who prosecuted Jeanne. This journal explained and filled in the major gaps in the historical record. Rigné's books on Jeanne, which he published in 1928 and 1929, combined his distaste for theologians (Jeanne's rehabilitation proved them mistaken) and his trust in visionaries.[8]

Rigné had an especially deep affinity for Jeanne d'Arc. For she had lived simultaneously on two planes, with humans and with spirits. Rigné saw himself in the same light. He held that God inspired great writers with knowledge: "The mystical life is the basic element of our existence as writers." As he wrote, he was "present at events that really occurred, in the prescience of the divine."[9] Rigné was aware of the difficulty his readers had in separating fact from fiction. But because the "fiction" part in his mind came from the divine and thus was just as true as the "fact," the difference between the two was perhaps not entirely clear to him. His multiple identities, each with a separate point of view, blurred the line between reality and fantasy.[10]

Jeanne d'Arc's mixture of reality and inspiration no doubt enhanced her appeal for Rigné. In an analogous way he could attribute failure as a writer to

________________________________________

― 111 ―

disbelief in his inspirational powers or to the challenges that he posed to staid morality or established ideas. Such challenges were at the heart of his enterprise. As he wrote in 1921, neatly equating his vocation as a gadfly to that of his military forebears, "It is easier to go to death on the field of battle than to go against public opinion." Jeanne d'Arc's glory became his as well, and he appointed himself "Secretary General to the International Committee for the Centenary of Jehanne d'Arc."[11]

At the time of the Ezkioga visions of 1931 Rigné was still smarting from the pain of his failed marriage and the indignity of his common-law remarriage. In Mariage Nul he and Thirouin recounted his experience in order to show how the civil marriage required in France, because it could end in civil divorce, vitiated the parallel Catholic one. In this way they justified publicly their own new "mystical" marriage and challenged the system that prevented their obtaining an annulment. The newlyweds also wrote the futuristic "Encyclical on Conjugal Morality." The putative author was one of Rigné's characters, a converted Protestant who became Pope Innocent XIV. They deemphasized the negative aspects of original sin and proposed a Christian education in the positive aspects of the body, a delight in conjugal sex, and contraception when the couple could support no further children or when childbirth would threaten the life of the spouse. Rigné proclaimed himself "a convinced believer and a thinker truly free before God." He and Thirouin saw themselves as freelance Catholic activists subordinate only to the pope or—if opposed by the pope—subordinate only to God. Except for the issue of birth control, the arguments of this joint work were much like Rigné's before they met.[12]

On 9 August 1931 Rigné and Thirouin went to Lourdes so the Virgin would bless their union. At the grotto Rigné claimed verbal approval from the Virgin Mary for a lifetime mission against civil marriages for Catholics. According to him, the Virgin instructed them to enter Spain the next day and make their way to Ezkioga.[13] There Rigné sought the same kind of certainty that his father found in spirit mediums and that he himself had known with Thérèse Neumann and Our Lady of Lourdes. He was known in various dioceses as a nuisance, and he had estranged first his parents and siblings and then his own children. As human props to his edifice gave way, Rigné found heavenly props to replace them.[14]

Rigné quickly decided that the Basque visions were genuine and that part of his mission from Lourdes was to publicize them. Through an interpreter the girl from Ataun told the couple from the Virgin that they should keep on their course and pray a lot and that they would have two children. The couple went to France to get photographic equipment, eager to document for the world the visions that provided them with moral passports.[15]

By September 6 they were back. On that day they met Ramona Olazábal. Rigné was proud that Ramona trusted him from their first meeting. Two days later he said the Virgin blessed sealed envelopes of his improvised marriage

________________________________________

― 112 ―

certificate and contract. He had suggested to Ramona that she try to have her vision at noon, permitting daylight photographs. Over the next four years he took hundreds of pictures of more than eighty visionaries. He considered the mystical and aesthetic appearance of the seers in the photos irrefutable proof of the apparitions.[16]

Rigné met Carment Medina at Ezkioga, but he disapproved of her monarchist plotting. He got along better with a freethinking waiter who had worked in Paris and could translate for him. During the winter of 1931–1932 Rigné and his wife moved to Ormaiztegi, first to an inn and eventually to an apartment. Their landlord was José Olaizola, a conservative republican who became mayor of the village. That year Olaizola married Manuela Lasa, the former schoolteacher of Ezkioga. This educated young couple, skeptical of the visions and bemused by them, provided Rigné and Thirouin with company and French conversation. Rigné left debtors behind in France (more than likely he owed child support), and

________________________________________

― 113 ―

he wanted to safeguard his camera, typewriter, phonograph, record collection, and period furniture. Residence in Spain gave him extra protection, and his friendship with local officials like Olaizola stood him in good stead in his numerous scrapes with the government.

Monsieur Rigné was memorable for all who knew him. The priest Daniel Ayerbe remembered him as "a demented person of intellectual standing," more vehement even than Ayerbe's own father, Juan Bautista Ayerbe. Manuela Lasa remembers him as "a fanatic." "Nos zarandeó a todos"—"He was always pushing us around. Why was he so sure about the visions?" she wondered. But he and Thirouin nonetheless delighted Lasa. They left her, "enchantée, très enchantée."[17]Rigné's flamboyance, his letters to the editor, his extensive correspondence with the diocese, at first collaborative then openly hostile, made him conspicuous. He was an easy target for those who needed to explain the persistence of the seers. Vallet even suspected him of hypnotizing them. But within the believer community there was little such suspicion, for Rigné's lack of Spanish or Basque impeded his influence on messages for the general public.

Rigné's arrival on the scene in the early fall of 1931 coincided with the rise of Ramona. After he took his first photographs of her he left once more, but someone alerted him that a miracle would occur in mid-October. He returned and recorded the critical days from October 13 to 18 in which first Ramona and then other seers experienced "miracles." He was one of the last persons to see her before she went up the hill on her fateful mission. And he and his wife were present on October 17 when Ramona's friend from Ataun received a scratch on the hand from the baby Jesus; he immortalized their triumph with photos.

When the vicar general proclaimed the miracle a fraud, Rigné became indignant and began to collect statements from witnesses. In line with his concept of assisted history, he asked seers to ask the Virgin to reconstruct the events. They then narrated to him in vision what happened. On 28 October 1931 he and his wife published the results in El Pueblo Vasco . In early December Ramona, who must have been grateful for this defense, heard the Virgin say that she blessed the couple's marriage every single day.[18]

Rigné himself took copies of his photographs to the exiled Bishop Múgica in La Puye on November 6 and he sent others to the vicar general Echeguren in Vitoria. He had no fear of writing to the diocese or talking to local priests. He was apparently capable of putting the bishop enough at ease that Múgica mimicked a folk dance for him. This kind of aplomb contrasts with the awe of the rural visionaries, who when they met with church officials would normally take along upper-class companions.[19]

As a result of Carmen Medina's visits to Bishop Múgica, the diocesan investigator was in Ormaiztegi on 26 December 1931. Rigné testified that Patxi had made, then retracted, an announcement of a miracle for that day. He was unaware that he himself was a target. A servant in the Ormaiztegi inn had noticed

________________________________________

― 114 ―

that he occasionally got up in the night to drink water or snack, breaking the fast, although he and his wife were daily communicants in the parish church; and no one saw them in confession.[20]

About this time in late December, Rigné received a boost from José Garmendia, who learned that the Virgin would help Rigné to write a book about the apparitions. Garmendia reported that all those who helped to spread the truth about the Virgin would go to heaven and that Rigné would have enemies but should not fear them. "The book" became a major theme in the visions relating to Rigné. Here was a clear symbiosis. The seers needed social respect. Rigné needed to know that his mission was divine and that he was doing it well. At one point he even asked a seer to ask the Virgin to find him a publisher. The awareness that Rigné and Thirouin were "liburuak eskribitzen dituenak [people who wrote books]," as the Ataun girl heard the Virgin say in August 1931, could not be far from the minds of the seers when around the couple. This knowledge gave Rigné and Thirouin a kind of leverage that Carmen Medina lacked. By then the seers had learned the power of the printed word and had tasted the addictive nectar of fame.[21]

In 1932 Rigné and Thirouin received more encouragement from Evarista and Ramona. After Ramona's visions ended on August 15, the couple continued to visit her at her sister's house in Tolosa. But in late 1932 they fell out with Evarista, who was gravitating into the orbit of the rival author, Padre Burguera.[22]

Ramona was the only seer about whom Rigné wrote anything substantial. In December 1932, in the wake of the government crackdown on the visions, he distributed a four-page leaflet in Spanish that attacked the vicar general and named those who had observed Ramona's wounding. Echeguren sent a priest to cross-check Rigné's "sworn" witnesses. While some held to the substance of their statements, all said they had not sworn anything, and Echeguren used this discrepancy against Rigné, threatening to tell the press if he distributed the leaflet further.[23]

By April 1933 Rigné had completed a draft of the book on Ramona; in January 1934 he issued it in French under a pseudonym as Une Nouvelle Affaire Jeanne d'Arc . In it he drew parallels between Ramona and Jeanne and between the theologians who condemned Jeanne and the diocese of Vitoria. Just as Jeanne was right to obey her voices rather than the bishop of Beauvais, so Rigné was right to submit his book to the Virgin rather than to the bishop of Vitoria. Rigné "served God first, exactly like Jeanne d'Arc." In late 1933 the prospect of this book brought him the full and terrible scrutiny of Bishop Mateo Múgica.[24]

Rigné's interest in the vision messages was limited. Like other spectators he was caught up in the tantalizing wait for miracles, and because he was one of the only literate believers permanently on location, he issued periodic summons to the Catalans to attend divine events. But the prophetic visions did not interest him. In mid-1933 he added to his manuscript on Ramona a chapter about the

________________________________________

― 115 ―

upcoming chastisement, which he related to La Salette, Madre Rafols, and older prophecies. But his addition was almost an afterthought, one more vindication of Ramona (and thereby of his own marriage).[25]

Nor was Rigné's interest in the visions political. He was hostile to the monarchists, and he leaned neither to the Carlists nor the Basque Nationalists. He saw no reason, he told the civil governor of Gipuzkoa in late 1932, why a shrine at Ezkioga should be incompatible with the Republic. In fact, he thought that the Republic could promote the visions in order to win over the Catholic peasantry. In this he was consistent. In 1921 he had written that there was absolute truth in religion but not in politics.[26]

What attracted Rigné to the seers was more visceral: he identified with them as underdogs in a contest with church and state. In visionaries like Ramona he found a pure cause for his skill as a writer, artist, and photographer. With the seers and believers who accepted his marriage and his mission, he was all heart.

________________________________________

― 116 ―

He and Marie-Geneviève maintained close ties with several local families for decades: they gave wedding presents, wrote to sons in the army, and remembered the dead. Among these families Rigné and Thirouin found a quiet refuge. But Rigné could not resist a fight. He seemed only able to gain the recognition he yearned for as a writer or artist by creating enemies and provoking their responses.[27]

Padre Burguera

Raymond de Rigné was not the only person who thought he had a divine mission to chronicle the apparitions. In late October 1931 a sometime-Franciscan made his first appearance. He, even more than Rigné, became a central figure in the affair and the bête noire of diocesan authorities. Like the other promoters, he brought his own philosophical casserole to the great spiritual potluck that the visions had become.

Amado de Cristo Burguera y Serrano was born in 1872 into a Carlist family in the agricultural market town of Sueca, Valencia. At age sixteen he entered the seminary in Valencia; three years later he joined the Franciscan order. By then he was already gathering material for what would be his first work, a seven-volume encyclopedia of the Eucharist, which he published with family money in 1906, when he was thirty-three years old. Thereafter Burguera returned to Valencia and Sueca, supposedly because of chronic laryngitis, and the diocese allowed him to live apart from his order. He served as diocesan censor of books and in 1910 and 1911 published moral evaluations of eleven thousand plays and work of literature in four volumes.

From 1917 to 1925 Burguera wrote biographies of two Sueca women (one of them had been the family seamstress) whom he chose to dub "Venerable" and "Servant of God." In these credulous books the holy women revealed the future, saw images weep and show emotion, played with the baby Jesus, heard the Child reveal private sins, and suffered from the devil's interference. Burguera later found these features at Ezkioga, where he considered unmasking the devil one of his major tasks.[28]

As the official chronicler of Sueca, Burguera wrote a two-volume town history. This work too reflected his intense, passionate nature. Like nearby Gandí and Cullera, Sueca has the feel of a Renaissance city-state, a nation unto itself that creates deep loyalties in its citizens and sharp rivalries with its neighbors. Burguera was a product of this environment, an extreme form of Iberian sociocentrism. His successor as chronicler, Fermín Cortés, told me that local people had considered Burguera slightly unbalanced but nonetheless sincere and of pure and good faith. Burguera he said, wrote from vital necessity. While normally good-natured and entertaining, Burguera was extremely excitable on matters of religion and brooked no contradiction. Never one to avoid a battle,

________________________________________

― 117 ―

he took on local spiritist healers in his sermons. He offered them a prize of one thousand pesetas if they could demonstrate one genuine cure. Cortés thought Burguera was the kind of person whom in earlier times the Inquisition would have burned at the stake.[29]

As we might expect from someone who undertook a magnum opus on the Eucharist, Burguera was not reluctant to apply his vigor or to invest his self-importance in matters beyond local history. Poor health seems to have been a pretext not only to avoid the direct supervision of superiors but also to see the world. In 1914 Burguera went for his health to Lourdes, to Paris, and finally to Paray-le-Monial, where he knew there was an institute for Eucharistic studies. Its director was the elderly Baron Alexis de Sarachaga, a half-Russian, half-Basque retired diplomat who had converted from a frivolous liberalism to a

________________________________________

― 118 ―

devout integrism. Beginning in 1873 Sarachaga spent a fortune on apologetic publications, a museum to the Eucharist for pilgrims, and an association for the Social Reign of Jesus Christ, all at the Paray-le-Monial shrine to the Sacred Heart.[30]

If Burguera thought that a one-man encyclopedia was impressive, he was unprepared for the baron's scheme, which was to show that the entire history of natural and human creation was a preparation for the Social Reign of the Sacred Heart. Burguera (here "we") described Sarachaga in words similar to those used by others to describe himself: "We thought, as we listened, that we were hearing a lecture from a man who was a little nutty, but we were intrigued by so much knowledge, however strange, and we were convinced, finally, that our intellectual equipment was no match for that of Sarachaga."

By the time the baron died in 1918 he had produced twenty-eight volumes of studies, mostly "scientific" and archaeological, as part of the project for universal knowledge. When Burguera and Sarachaga met in 1914, Sarachaga was casting about for ways to generate more of an impact. Few persons seem to have heard about, much less taken seriously, his "École Bardique" or his "Instruction Supérieure Diplomatique" ("according to the rules and disciplines of the Sacred Heart"). Sarachaga found a willing disciple when he told Burguera the visit was providential and asked him to hold a "Chair of Eucharistic Pomp" in Spain. Burguera needed little encouragement to sense that he had a mission. He felt that the esoteric Ars Magna of the thirteenth-century savant from Mallorca, Ramon Llull, would appeal to Sarachaga. It did, and the baron encouraged Burguera to use the work to seek out a universal sacred language.[31]

As a result of this unusual stimulation, Burguera decided after the death of Sarachaga to write the projected universal divine history himself. He published the first two volumes in 1932. They are most curious (disparatados,Spaniards would call them). Burguera identifies a sacred ur-language linking, for instance, Chinese with Berber, and he asserts that Catalan-Valencian-Mallorcan is not a Romance but an Iberian language, like Basque. He claims the words in Llull's glossary were used in the Garden of Eden. He identifies a kind of sacred world geography of four prototypic natural features—"the pyramid," "the boat," "the crater-grail," and "the sphinx"—which he calls "telluric symbol-signs." And he shows great interest in the lost continent of Atlantis. Much of this work Burguera drived from Sarachaga's fanciful research, but some came from his own studies and visits to museums throughout Europe and in the Holy Land. There are similarities with the later pop archaeology of Eric von Dániken and Jorge María Rivero San José. Yet in this long and strange work there are also moments of beauty, as when Burguera goes into detail about the number of plant and animal species in the world and then points to the complexity and perfection of each. And the overall plan, while crude, has a distant resemblance to that of the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin.[32]

________________________________________

― 119 ―

Burguera connected this project to a school, Studium Catholicum, which he founded in one of his family's orange groves outside Sueca. He designed it as a day school similar to those of the contemporary reformer Padre Andrés Manjón. It was also to train catechists. With so much of Spain falling away from Catholicism, Amundarain, Aulina, and Burguera's future adversary, Echeguren, had all given time and thought to catechism for adults. Topped by a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the building was completed in 1931, hardly an auspicious year. Three days after the burning of religious houses (11 May 1931), Burguera gave an intemperate sermon against the Republic and the town authorities temporarily banished him.[33]

At the request of an acquaintance, this curious, intense, authoritarian, opinionated, and credulous man went to Ezkioga. He arrived on 13 November 1931, after attendance had fallen off in the wake of the Ramona fiasco. He met Iñaki Jaca, a boy seer, Patxi, Ramona, and a young girl seer from Ormaiztegi and he learned about José Garmendia's visit to Francesc Macià in Barcelona. He quickly classed the seers he observed by their type of trance and evaluated their visions as divine, diabolical, or human. His learning impressed the local doctor, Sabel Aranzadi, who asked him to sit for two days on the commission examining the seers.[34]

Burguera received several "proofs" of the apparitions. Two took place in the village of Bakaiku (then Bacaicoa) in Navarra. There on November 17 he observed eight children, first in the schoolhouse and then down by the river, who saw the Infant Jesus of Prague. Burguera's prior study of the Infant Jesus in Sueca must have quickened his interest. When the children were running and playing, not in trance, one of them came up to Padre Amado and said, "It was my mother who carried your suitcase in l'Espluga de Francolí." Burguera was astonished, for the boy referred to an incident that took place thirteen years earlier and that he had never been able to fathom.[35]

According to what his disciple Juan Castells told me in Sueca, Burguera had gone to take the baths at l'Espluga in Tarragona. He arrived by train in the evening and found no way to get to his lodgings. The station manager advised him to go back to Barcelona, for thieves made it unsafe to go into town on foot. A woman turned up to ask him if he wanted to go to town, but he was abrupt with her, telling her it was none of her business. He was about to take a train back to Barcelona when the woman returned, asked him again if he wanted to go to town, picked up his bag, and set off walking fast. He followed. It was raining, but it seems neither she nor he got wet. The woman left him at the hotel saying, "Remember me to God." The desk clerk assured him that there was no woman like that in the town. The episode, rather like Manuel Irurita's mysterious train stop, had troubled Burguera, and other priests he consulted had not been able to explain it. So when the child seer told him that it had been the child's (spiritual) mother, Burguera recognized a sign to believe in the visions.

________________________________________

― 120 ―

Burguera often retold the second proof in Bakaiku. There he observed María Celaya in trance, and on November 19 he accompanied her to Ezkioga, where she had visions as well. When he saw her again at Bakaiku on November 22, she revealed to him that eight days earlier there had been an attempt to break into and burn down his Studium Catholicum in Sueca but that the vandals had been repelled by the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Burguera quickly returned to Sueca to see what had happened. Indeed, he said, he found hatchet marks on the door and the mark of flames. It appeared to him that the flames had come at the vandals from inside, from the Sacred Heart.[36]

Burguera's first stay in Ezkioga and Navarra did not make much of an impression on the seers or their more prominent followers. At that point he was just one more curious cleric. The second volume of his universal divine history had already passed ecclesiastical review, so he smuggled into it sixteen pages on the apparitions. He did so in a chapter on the beauty of God's art in creation, emphasizing the beauty the seers saw in the face of the Virgin Mary. He noted approvingly that two child seers had visions in which the child Jesus and the Virgin referred to the "official dishonoring of God" by the Constituent Cortes. But he snorted at the deputy Antonio de la Villa's idea that "the miracles of Ezquioga were a way of rallying the forces of the Traditionalists and the Basque-Navarrese Nationalists to rise up against the Republic." Rather, he saw the apparitions in the longer perspective. The evil, he pointed out, "was not just of this century, but also in all of the previous ones. We have reached a point in which science, art, history, literature, and social development are all Satanized."[37]

The multivolume opus itself, so long in the writing, was still Burguera's main preoccupation in 1931; it took him a while to assimilate what he had seen in Ezkioga and adjust his enterprise to the virtually unlimited scope for knowledge of the divine that the many seers offered. At any rate, he did not return to Ezkioga until 27 June 1932, but when he did, he was ready to write a defense of the visions as a work on its own. Over time he came to consider Ezkioga the climax of world history, the logical crowning point of all his previous endeavors, and the means by which God would once and for all reunite the human and the divine.

In the long run Burguera planned to write "a big book, well-documented and carefully verified," on the apparitions. In the short run he wanted to write a rebuttal of the Jesuit José Antonio Laburu's lectures discrediting the visionaries (see chapter 6). On his arrival in Ezkioga Burguera immediately started evaluating the seers, separating "the dross (not much and naturally occurring) from the gold." An expedition of Catalans was in Ezkioga on the day of his arrival, and either that week or the next they showed him the manuscript defense of the visions by the wealthy Carlist politician Mariano Bordas Flaquer. On very short acquaintance, they asked Burguera to write a prologue. Within three weeks the diocese of Segorbe had approved the booklet and the prologue.[38]

________________________________________

― 121 ―

A visit with Burguera became a fixture of the Catalans' weekly tours. He would tell them the latest messages, explain the different kinds of trances, and place the visions in a wider context. On July 17 he told them that four days earlier he had been working on his book when he heard that three schoolgirls on an excursion from Pamplona were in trance on the vision deck. Twice he went out to examine and test the seers and speak to the entire group about the mercy of the Mother of God. After many hours the visions ended and a nun came to say that two of the seers had messages for him. The first was Pilar Ciordia, a woman who lived at a Pamplona convent school. She claimed that she had been present in spirit when Burguera had delivered the sermon in Sueca that had caused his banishment and that the Virgin had then pointed him out as her (the Virgin's) defender in Ezkioga. Ciordia said she had recognized him at once when he got up on the vision deck. Burguera believed her.

Burguera also believed the second seer, Gloria Viñals, a student at a different school in Pamplona. She claimed that in February of 1932 she too had had a

________________________________________

― 122 ―

vision of Burguera in Sueca in which the Virgin had also pointed him out as her defender in Ezkioga. Viñals's proof was that the Virgin told her that once she had carried him through the air to a lodging house, which Burguera again must have taken to refer to the episode in l'Espluga de Francolí. These seers persuaded Burguera that the Virgin wanted the "big book" he planned to write about Ezkioga. Note here a cumulative process. Burguera believed the visionaries essentially because they said the Virgin had chosen him to lead others to believe the visionaries. The Catalans believed Burguera in turn because he said that the seers said that the Virgin said the Catalans had been specially chosen to be told to believe the visions or to tell others about them.[39]

As the chronicler authorized by the Virgin of Ezkioga, Burguera needed the texts of the messages of the seers. In 1932 few of the thousands of vision texts had circulated. He had no chance to obtain the messages in the notebooks and printed questionnaires of the informal commission; by 1932 the parish priest of Ezkioga, firmly opposed to the visions, held this material closely. But he could obtain some of the messages seers wrote in their own notebooks or dictated to friends and confessors. Burguera obtained the messages of the Pamplona seers when they were in Ezkioga or when he went to see them in Navarra. Sympathetic priests provided him with the messages of Evarista Galdós, Martín Ayerbe, and Marcelina Mendívil. And his friendship with the Catalans gained him access to their favorite seers, Benita Aguirre, José Garmendia, and María Recalde. With Recalde a priest from Valladolid, Baudilio Sedano de la Peña, was especially helpful.

Baudilio Sedano de la Peña and Cruz Lete

I went to see Don Baudilio in 1982 at the instance of the family with whom he had boarded at Ezkioga. A short, chubby man with a dirty worn cassock, unctuous and jovial, but with darting eyes, he was then seventy-six years old. He lived in Valladolid in a squalid apartment above a convent of Franciscan nuns, for whom he served as chaplain. As we talked, the smells of the pastries and cookies they baked drifted up from the kitchens below. I later learned of his extreme secretiveness about the large portion of time he gave to visions and visionaries and that only the name of that one Basque family (which, like many others I talked to, wishes to remain anonymous) would have got me in the door. As it was, on my repeated visits from Madrid he let me into his confidence only gradually and partially. He loaned me first some prints and then the glass plates of photographs of visionaries, but it transpired later that they were not in fact his. I never got to see his store of documents and he eventually gave me copies of the Burguera book only at exorbitant cost. Nevertheless, he did let me look at a typewritten memoir of his involvement with the Ezkioga visionaries and Padre Burguera.[40]

________________________________________

― 123 ―

Sedano was born in a village of the province of Burgos in 1906 and trained as a priest and a contralto for cathedral choirs. His first post was in Sigüenza and his second was in the cathedral of Valladolid, where he was also chaplain of the convent. In 1931 he read newspaper reports of the visions. With money he had won after buying a lottery ticket with Ezkioga in mind, he went there at the end of July.

Like Burguera, he felt he had particular proof that the apparitions were true. He saw Benita Aguirre after a vision run down the hill, pick a man out of the crowd, and give him a private message. Sedano kept an eye on the man, who prayed on the hillside with tears streaming down his face. When Sedano approached him, the man said he was from Tenerife and that there was no way Benita could have known him, yet she had revealed secrets about the state of his soul. For the first year or so Sedano went to Ezkioga every two weeks and stayed about four days. He did so with utmost discretion, fearing reprisals from his diocese or protests from the priests at Ezkioga. He took down María Recalde's messages as early as September and arranged for her to save them for him. María's son remembers that he came to Durango about once a month.[41]

________________________________________

― 124 ―

Sedano also provided Burguera with the messages from the seer many people considered the most convincing, Cruz Lete Sarasola of Itsasondo. Lete studied first at a grammar school in Ordizia and then at a normal school in Pamplona. He was thus one of the most educated seers, and the solid reputation of his family enhanced his credibility. When he was home in the summer or fall of 1931, he went to the apparition site out of curiosity and began to have visions. He told Sedano that the Virgin instructed him not to resume his studies in Pamplona and above all not to return to the apartment of the freethinking family where he had been boarding. At the insistence of his parents, he did go back to Pamplona, but when he was going up to the flat, the Virgin appeared to him and he fell down the stairs. When he tried to study, he found that all he could see in his books was blank pages. He said that in his first vision at Ezkioga after his return, the Virgin asked him jokingly, "Did you study a lot?"

Tall, thin, and austere, Lete was a striking seer. Many of his visions were of Christ and he often settled into Christlike stances. A Catalan referred to him in vision as having "an angelic tenderness." And Sedano said that "just hearing him pray the seven Hail Marys of the Sorrows of the Holy Virgin gave you such a feeling of sadness that it was obvious that it did not come from him but that he was seeing something extraordinary that could only be the Holy Virgin." Like others, Lete said the Virgin had told him that he would die soon. A Basque sheepman recalled Lete's private messages from the Virgin to those around him: "Some people would laugh, but he got them serious and weeping."[42]

In the fall of 1931 Lete had a vision of the Virgin in which she pointed out a heavenly friar as Juan de Dios, the founder of the Brothers Hospitallers, and asked Lete whether he wanted to join the order. He did, and she instructed him to write the superior of the house in Ciempozuelos near Madrid. Lete and some of his friends were admitted. They are said to have participated in spiritual exercises with the Jesuits at Loyola before leaving. Lete's last vision at Ezkioga, of Roman soldiers crucifying him, may reflect the visual imagination of the exercises (see text in appendix).[43]

Sedano had been taking down Lete's visions and was present at this one. He accompanied Lete as far as Valladolid, where he put him up for a night. In Sedano's chapel Lete said in vision that many who believed in the apparitions would later disavow them. He went on to Madrid, reappearing in the Ezkioga story only a year and a half later when his edifying death (he died confidently singing a hymn) provided the believers with their first saint.[44]

Burguera was frustrated in his attempts to gain documents from other seers, including some of the most famous ones. Their refusal placed him in a quandary—how could those who saw the Virgin not cooperate with someone the Virgin herself had chosen? Ramona Olazábal's spiritual director was the curate of Beizama, Francisco Otaño, and he retained her vision texts in case there was an official inquiry. Allegedly on the Virgin's orders, Ramona kept Otaño's role

________________________________________

― 125 ―

secret and gave messages to no one else. Because she would not cooperate with him, Burguera judged her visions diabolical. But he left her the option of changing her mind.[45]

In the summer and fall of 1932 most of the believers recognized Burguera as their expert defender. Free from the supervision of a religious order and without a fixed post in Valencia, he was less vulnerable than other believing priests. Thus he was active in the planning of the chapel at the vision site and he contacted the sculptor who made the image of the Virgin. With the chapel complete and the arrival of the image imminent, the spirits of the believers revived. In honor of the Virgin's birthday, a female seer claimed that the Virgin wanted Burguera to run a kind of festive contest of three theological questions. The Virgin would provide a prize. On September 4, after all had performed the stations of the cross, Burguera read out the questions to about three hundred persons on the vision

________________________________________

― 126 ―

deck. Four days later three thousand persons came to hear the replies. For three hours seers and believers proposed their answers. No one guessed what the seer wanted to hear, so, she said, the prize was hers. This strange episode exemplifies Burguera's two sides: on the one hand, the authoritarian leader of thousands of docile believers, a master of sacred ceremonies; on the other, an innocent subject to the most flimsy of visionary claims.[46]

Burguera and Rigné were similar in a number of ways. Both wrote and paid to publish numerous books. Both had independent wealth, although Rigné seems to have started out with more. Both sought in vain recognition and respect. Both had been to Lourdes and had a great openness toward extraordinary manifestations of the supernatural. And both were about to come head to head with church and state.

But there were contrasts as well. Rigné was an advocate for chaste nudity, while Burguera considered nudism the ultimate sign of Satan's dominion. While both were the stuff of heretics, Burguera, like Calvin, also was the stuff of the inquisitor general. Both were constitutionally incapable of taking orders, but in Burguera's case it was because he preferred to give them, whereas Rigné was too playful or obstreperous for hierarchy in any form. Burguera saw himself as a grand spiritual director who distinguished the good from the bad, the sacred from the profane, the just from the unjust. Rigné was constantly challenging these categories and taking pokes at the classifiers.

Like the other patrons, Rigné and Burguera were in such close symbiosis with seers that without them some seers would not have maintained—in some cases would not have gained—their fame. And wittingly or not, each guided the seers into pronouncements of a certain nature and away from other themes and other directions. They connected the rural seers to the wider literate society. But they filtered and bent the light that passed through them. This distortion became especially evident as the diocese closed in on seers and patrons alike.

________________________________________

― 127 ―

6.

Suppression by Church and State

Over the first year the vicar general marked his distance from the visions and successfully turned public opinion against them. Then the governor investigated promoters for conspiracy and dispatched some seers to a mental hospital. Finally the bishop decreed the visions devoid of supernatural content. Government persecution brought the believers together. Diocesan persecution split them apart. Relations between promoters, between seers, and between promoters and seers were strained to the breaking point. Visions of the devil and accusations that visions were diabolical mirrored these strains. The bishop eventually singled out the two most visible promoters, Raymond de Rigné and Padre Amado de Cristo Burguera, for special treatment.

The Vicar General

The visions at Ezkioga took place at a time when the church in Spain in general and in the Basque Country in particular was on the defensive. Visions began after the expulsion of the bishop and the burning of churches

________________________________________

― 128 ―

and convents. They reached a peak during the discussions leading to the separation of church and state in October 1931. And they flared up again in the spring of 1932 as the government removed crucifixes from public buildings and disbanded the Jesuits. The church's vulnerability during this period may help explain why the hierarchy tolerated the visions for so long and why ultimately it suppressed them with such vigor.

While the bishop of Vitoria was in exile, the vicar general took charge of the running of the diocese. Elderly priests remember Justo de Echeguren for his rectitude and tell me he was an Integrista with friendly contact with the Basque nationalists. Some emphasize his diligence and activity, others his humaneness, studiousness, and intelligence.[1] He allowed Antonio Amundarain to organize the visions at Ezkioga for the first few months, as long as Amundarain did not say where he obtained his authority. Waiting to see what would happen, Echeguren did not stop priests from leading the rosaries at the ceremonies or Catholic newspapers from reporting the visions in detail. He had regular channels for making his wishes known to the Catholic press, and El Día, the newspaper of his protégé, gave the visions the most coverage of all.[2]

Much of this news was favorable. In July, August, and September 1931 the Catholic press throughout Spain liked the outpouring of piety at the visions. Leftist newspapers did not make an issue of the matter. When the deputy Antonio de la Villa protested in the Cortes, Manuel Azaña, then minister of war, thought him vulgar, and other deputies, including the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, thought him ridiculous. The minister of the interior pointed out that the French republic tolerated Lourdes and an entire district lived off the popularity of the site. The political slant of the visions in late July did not reach the press, so they did not embarrass the diocese.[3]

Echeguren maintained one consistent policy—he deprived the vision prayers of the legitimacy that external Christian symbols would have provided—but otherwise he underestimated the depth of public interest and the potential of the visions for disruption. When his friend and protégé Pío Montoya called him urgently on the evening of Ramona Olazábal's wounding, Echeguren refused to go to Ezkioga because he had to adjudicate a marriage annulment proceeding. Only Montoya's excited insistence brought him on the morning train. At Ezkioga he dealt with Ramona expeditiously and decisively, but by his own admission he had come with his mind open to the possibility that here at last was the confirming miracle.

As a result of Echeguren's press release against Ramona, El Día stopped reporting on the visions and Rafael Picavea thereafter prepared his entertaining articles for El Pueblo Vasco . About this time the vicar general forbade priests to lead the rosaries and ordered the seer Patxi Goicoechea to take down the vision stage. But not until Carmen Medina and the seers went to see the exiled Bishop Múgica in France in mid-December 1931 did the vicar general and the bishop

________________________________________

― 129 ―

choose to go on the offensive. By then Rigné had published his defense of Ramona and had shown Múgica photographs, and Catalan gentry had accompanied José Garmendia to see the vicar general in Vitoria. There was lobbying as well from Bishop Irurita of Barcelona. The leaders of the diocese of Vitoria now realized that the seers would not stay home and their supporters would not stay quiet.[4]

When Patxi announced a miracle for December 26, the bishop sent his fiscal to Ormaiztegi to expose and discredit the seers in general. Such predictions, coming in a series of relays, had been maintaining the hopes of believers from the start of the visions. José María de Sertucha took testimony from Carmen Medina, Rigné, Ramona, Evarista, and Patxi about the prediction. By then Patxi had amended the date to a month later. The day after the Sertucha mission the vicar general prohibited all priests from going to the vision site. He asked the Jesuit Padre Laburu to reason with an industrialist in Bilbao, Manuel Arriola, who supported the visions. The industrialist promised to stop going to Ezkioga if the miracle did not occur in January.[5]

The Jesuit Expert, José Antonio Laburu

Forty-eight years old, José Antonio Laburu was then at the height of his popularity as one of Spain's most eloquent preachers. He was also a kind of popular scientist whose specialties in 1931 were "psychology, psychobiology, and characterology." He gave lectures to audiences in the thousands, with simultaneous radio broadcasts, on subjects that ranged from morality on the beaches to the psychology of fighting bulls. His oratory was "eminently popular, attractive, full of overwhelming conviction, within reach of the illiterate worker as well as the university professor." He taught biology at the Jesuit school in Oña (Burgos) and traveled widely the rest of the year. In 1930 many of his thirty-seven lectures were in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, to audiences top-heavy with university, government, and military leaders. His psychology leaned more to the Germanic than the French, but he was dismissive of Freud and occasionally cited Pierre Janet. In the ecclesiastical firmament, he was a very bright star. Oña was close to Vitoria and Laburu had fluid relations with the diocese. In Holy Week of 1930, according to the diocesan bulletin, his spiritual exercises in San Sebastián "were the sole topic of conversation in cafés and workshops, factories, and offices."[6]

Apparently Laburu's natural curiosity led him to try to capture the experience of the visionaries on film, perhaps as material for his lectures. He first went to Ezkioga with a priest from San Sebastían on 17 and 18 October 1931, just after Ramona's wounding, when he filmed Ramona and Evarista Galdós. Evarista, he said, obligingly rescheduled her visions to midafternoon so there would be enough light.[7] He returned to Ezkioga around January 4 to show the films to the

________________________________________

― 130 ―

seers and their friends. On the next day he filmed some more, in part at the request of the seers. This time he included Benita Aguirre, who also rescheduled her visions for him. Skeptical from the start and perhaps inspired by the photographs of religious hysterics in books by Janet and other French psychologists, he intended to compare the seers to mental patients. Seers and believers considered his presence a good sign. They still hoped for a favorable verdict. After all, Bishop Múgica had treated Rigné, Carmen Medina, and the sample seers gently; and even the vicar general's delegate Sertucha had been convivial while drawing up his affidavits.[8]

In the first months of 1932 activity picked up at the apparition site. The nonstop stations of the cross proved attractive not only to the Catalans but also to the Basque and Navarrese. The removal of crucifixes from public buildings helped focus attention on the living crucifixes at Ezkioga. The Rafols prophecies fed this enthusiasm. Echeguren needed a master stroke, so he asked Laburu to give a series of public lectures critical of the visions. At the beginning of April he sent Laburu the evidence he had against content of the visions and the seers' conduct. Since much of this was rumor and some of it actionable, Echeguren specified what Laburu could mention but not print and which names he could use. Laburu himself gathered more information from the seers' former employers or skeptics in the Bilbao and San Sebastián bourgeoisie, to whom he had easy access.[9]

The Vitoria vicar general hoped that Laburu's first lecture, in the seminary in Vitoria, would serve to disenchant those professors, parish priests, and seminarians who believed in or were confused about the visions and persuade influential laypersons then providing moral and logistical support to the seers. Echeguren posted the parish priest of Ezkioga at the door to keep the seers out.[10]

Both in its debut on April 20 and in repeat performances at the Teatro Victoria Eugenia in San Sebastián on 21 and 28 June 1932 Laburu's lecture against the "mental contagion" at Ezkioga was a devastating success.[11] With daunting theological and psychological vocabulary, Laburu laid out the characteristics of true visions, citing Thomas Aquinas and Teresa de Avila, and showed how those at Ezkioga did not measure up. Rather, he said, they were purely natural, if unusual, mental processes. He went down a list of aspects that disqualified the visions:

1. The seers' certainty about when their visions would occur. They had a special stage and they could have their visions virtually at will. He cited in particular the behavior of Ramona, Evarista, and Benita from the time when he made his films.

2. The childishness of what the seers asked about and saw. He cited their asking whether the duke of Tárifa would survive an operation and whether

________________________________________

― 131 ―

various relatives were in purgatory. He mentioned visions in inappropriate places, visions of persons in hell or heaven or still alive, visions of the devil making faces at Benita through a bus window, visions of the Virgin walking through a house in Ormaiztegi and blessing the rooms, and visions of divine figures with the wrong attributes (Jesús Elcoro allegedly described the Virgin Mary with a Sacred Heart of Jesus pierced with a sword). And he referred to "the alleged delivery of medals, ribbons, rosaries, without any purpose other than the gift of these objects to 'seers' whose spiritual life was an open question."[12]

3. The falsity of what the apparition was supposed to have said. His examples: the Virgin said she would not forgive those who did not believe in Ezkioga, whereas the church did not require belief even of "approved" apparitions; a seer saw someone in purgatory who was actually alive; and a seer said that Carmen Medina's brother-in-law would survive, though he did not.

4. The behavior of the seers before and after the visions. Here Laburu referred, at least in his unpublished text, to the reputation of Patxi and Garmendia as drinkers; to Ramona's dancing soon after her wounding; to the seers' showing off in gestures, photographs, and on film; to boasts as to the length of time in trance; to female seers being alone behind closed doors with male seers or believers; and to male seers kissing female believers.

5. Obvious frauds: Ramona's wounds and rosary; a false report in a Catalan newspaper.

6. "The total absence in the 'seers' of supernatural behavior, whether in (1) humility; (2) recollection; (3) prayer; (4) penance; or (5) obedience; and their distinguishing themselves by overt exhibitionism, utilitarianism, and dissipation."[13]He also remarked on a kind of habitual dullness (abobamiento ) on the part of several seers caused by their repeated trances.

7. "The enormous emotional pressure on the seers to have visions." Here he mentioned as examples: that believers gave slickers, shoes, stockings, and wool socks to Ramona and Evarista; that Carmen Medina took the girl from Ataun to live with her; that believers admired or praised the seers as if holy and asked them to pray for people; that believers kissed Patxi; that believers offered Patxi the use of automobiles; and that the seers gave the general impression of being on holiday.

Finally, in a kind of catchall category, Laburu cited the refusal of the seers to remove the cross and the stage; the scheduling of apparitions of the Virgin at ten o'clock at night or later, "an hour at which it has been the prudent and traditional custom of the church to suggest that young women should be in their houses" (what can happen at these gatherings, he added darkly, is obvious); and the repeated announcements of extraordinary events for all to see, none of which had occurred.[14]

________________________________________

― 132 ―

Although the Jesuit referred favorably to the public display of faith at Ezkioga, he warned that people could not deduce from this piety that the visions were supernatural. He distinguished "a true faith, solidly reasoned and cemented, a faith instructed and conscious," from "faith of pure emotionality or family tradition [held by] sentimental and mawkish persons who confuse secondary and unimportant things with what is essential and basic in dogma." After reviewing diocesan policy in regard to Ezkioga, he emphasized that the diocese had made no formal inquiry because there was no trace of the supernatural to investigate. Finally he showed his films of the seers and compared them with a film of patients in insane asylums.[15]

Laburu stayed at the seminary in Vitoria and made himself available to answer individual questions or doubts of the professors and seminarians. One professor had brought back a blood-soaked handkerchief from Ramona's wounding. The seminarians were divided. Attitudes of the clergy in the zone around Ezkioga ranged from tenacious opposition to tacit approval.

But Laburu convinced many. Francisco Ezcurdia was then a seminarian and had been a frequent observer of the visions. The Rignés lived in his parents' boardinghouse in Ormaiztegi in the winter of 1931–1932. He had been especially puzzled by the case of an acquaintance, a cattle dealer from Santa Lucía whom María Recalde repeatedly tried to see. The man did all he could to avoid her, but she finally caught up with him and told him a secret about himself. The event so changed the dealer that thereafter he received Communion daily. Through his teacher José Miguel de Barandiarán, Ezcurdia asked Laburu how this knowledge of conscience was possible. Laburu's commonsense response was that there were other, natural ways, such as gossip, to find out people's sins. Ramona's spiritual director also had a chance to consult Laburu personally. He too was convinced by the Jesuit, if only temporarily. Another priest who was a seminarian at the time told me that although he personally found Laburu's talk superficial and pseudoscientific, it convinced the other students.[16]

Laburu's impact went a far beyond the seminary. Major regional newspapers repeated his main points. So did local periodicals in areas where there were supporters of the visions, like a Basque-language weekly in Bizkaia and the parish bulletin of Terrassa in Catalonia. El Matí, at first enthusiastic about Ezkioga, by then opposed it. Even El Correo Catalánsummarized the talk. It was clear that Laburu spoke for the diocese, and his lecture permitted priests and laypersons opposed to the visions to speak out. And the lecture changed the minds of many believers, like the priest of Sant Andreu, in Barcelona, who in his parish hall spoke first in favor of the visions in December 1931 and then, on the basis of Laburu's lecture, against them six months later.[17]

Among Ezkioga enthusiasts the lecture provoked consternation, disillusionment, and anger. For those whom the visions touched in a personal way or who felt that they were witnesses to miracles, Laburu's arguments were thin stuff.

________________________________________

― 133 ―

Only greater miracles could have persuaded them to disavow the seers. The rector of Pasai Donibane warned Laburu not to give the lectures in San Sebastián.

You have no right to come and play the Vitoria phonograph record as if we the priests of Gipuzkoa could not demand more respect for matters related to the Mother of God…. If your reverence wants to preach in a theater, preach against the terrible torments that in hell await those who adore the flesh, but let Most Holy Mary appear to whomever she wishes at Ezkioga, although she did not appear to your reverence who went to Ezkioga with a movie camera.

Never shy about writing anyone, Rigné asked Laburu to study the problem with greater care, rebutted specific points regarding Ramona and Evarista, and informed the Jesuit that "the Most Holy Virgin spoke to me herself at Lourdes last August 9, the feast day of the saintly Curé d'Ars for whom I have a special devotion. She entrusted me with a certain mission and now I know why." In the same vein a Catalan pharmacist informed Laburu of an Ezkioga spring that allegedly went cloudy when an unbelieving soldier approached it. In sizzling terms an art restorer from Vitoria denounced "official science and the pedantry of this collection of dolts with pretensions of wisdom who monopolize the diffusion of knowledge they do not possess." He blamed Laburu and the diocese for not orienting the seers from the beginning and then making fun of them for being disoriented.[18]

Ezkioga believers were not the only ones upset by the speech. The novelist Pío Baroja's sister had gone to Ezkioga from Bera and returned impressed with the piety. Baroja thought it ridiculous that Laburu should adduce proofs against the seers, and he said so in a shortbook, Los visionarios: "The exact measurement of a miracle is sort of thickheaded. The only ones who would think of that are these poor Jesuits we have now, who are pedantry personified." His nephew later wrote, "Everyone knew that my uncle did not believe in miracles; but in that case, as in others, what irritated him was the pseudo-positivism of those who denied them, not the denial in itself."[19]

After the first talk in San Sebastián, the Ezkioga parish priest, Sinforoso de Ibarguren, wrote to Laburu that he had stirred up a hornet's nest.

You must surely be tired of having hot ears, as they say; this is inevitable after the storm you have raised with your talk. The Ezquioguistas are of course infuriated. Even the farm folk have heard about the lecture and comment on it. And the Catalans tear into you on every occasion. They would skin you alive.

Ibarguren ended with a thought about the long-term consequences: "Church authority comes out of all this badly shaken. Great damage is being done; how will it be repaired?"[20]

________________________________________

― 134 ―

Because Laburu was so effective, believers scrambled to find a priest to counter his arguments in public. Some asked a learned Carmelite, Rainaldo de San Justo, which worried the vicar general enough for him to contact the Carmelite provincial in Bilbao. The provincial reported that Padre Rainaldo said he would not speak unless his superiors in the order and the diocese asked him to. With the diocese thus on the alert, the rebuttal could come only in print. Mariano Bordas Flaquer was one of the leaders of the weekly Catalan trips. A lawyer, former member of parliament, and former assistant mayor of Barcelona, Bordas had led a pilgrimage to Limpias in 1920. In June 1932 he prepared a series of articles refuting Laburu. The diocese of Barcelona approved the series for El Correo Catalán, but for some reason the newspaper did not publish the articles. Burguera added a preface that gave Bordas some theological legitimacy, but The Truth about Ezkioga did not come out as a pamphlet until October 1932.[21]

________________________________________

― 135 ―

Bordas distinguished seers who were true, naming ten Basques and the Catalan seers in the weekly groups, and others who, he admitted, were not. But he denied that the great majority of seers asked childish questions or had visions at any set time. He explained the vision messages containing errors in dogma as misunderstandings on the part of seers or mistakes in copying. He accused Laburu of slandering the seers but said that in any case their behavior before and after the visions was irrelevant to the truth of the visions themselves. He argued that even if there were seers who said someone alive was in purgatory this would not disqualify the others.

As proofs for the visions he gave the seers' clairvoyance, their knowledge of unconfessed sins, and their conversions of sinners. He adduced three instances of the seers' preternatural knowledge: a seer's answer of a Catalan youth's unspoken question about the fate of his mother; Benita Aguirre's and María Recalde's knowledge of the pious death in Extremadura of a Catalan's relative; and María Recalde's reply in vision to an unread, carefully folded, query.

As their popularity and even their respectability melted away, the seers reacted in their own way against the lectures. Already before the first lecture, Garmendia had worried about its effect. According to a visitor, in the week after the Laburu talk the only people around Ezkioga who believed in the visions were Joaquín Sicart the photographer, the Zumarraga hotel owners, the taxi drivers, and some of the inhabitants of the Santa Lucía hamlet. Benita Aguirre wrote plaintively that in her town of Legazpi "no one believes; almost all have grown cold."[22]

María Recalde told her Catalan friends that two weeks after his lecture in Vitoria Laburu called her to a convent in Durango and reproved her for sending him a disrespectful letter. Feeling divinely inspired, she allegedly rebuked him for making Christ suffer on the cross during his talk, and what she said led Laburu to renounce the lectures planned for San Sebastián. Since he subsequently gave them, the account is of dubious accuracy. But it captures the depth of the seers' distress.[23]

After Laburu spoke in San Sebastián, the Virgin supposedly told one seer that he was a sinner and another that in the end he would change his mind. Subsequent rumor among seers and believers had it that Laburu had a cancer of the tongue as punishment, that he wanted to retract what he had said and to study Ezkioga seriously. In visions in 1933 Benita Aguirre and Pilar Ciordia said the Virgin gave messages for Laburu to mend his ways and help Padre Burguera with the book. But this was all wishful thinking.[24]

The Governor

Seers and believers now worked with a new urgency to dignify their holy place. The vicar general denied permission repeatedly for a chapel, and the

________________________________________

― 136 ―

lectures showed that he had made up his mind. So finally, following José Garmendia's inspirations, Juan José Echezarreta started building the chapel anyway. Vigilant to the point of obsession, the Ezkioga pastor notified the diocese at once, and in an official note on June 10 the vicar general prohibited the chapel. Echezarreta pushed ahead and by the end of the month the chapel was virtually complete. Garmendia also described the image in detail; an artist sketched it in his presence, and a sculptor in Valencia, José María Ponsoda, prepared the image. Again Echezarreta footed the bill. The parish priest must have been suspicious about the large pedestal, often wreathed in flowers, waiting in the structure.[25]

In September 1932 it became clear that the next offensive against the seers would come from the government. In August General José Sanjurjo had led an attempt to overthrow the Second Republic from Seville. Sanjurjo was surprised when the uprising fizzled from lack of support, which he had expected in particular

________________________________________

― 137 ―

from Navarra and the north. This was the rebellion that Carmen Medina was sure the Virgin of Ezkioga was announcing in 1931. At that time, when the visions were drawing tens of thousands of spectators, the government had not been worried or at least had not acted. Paradoxically, when the Republic did crack down in 1932, there were far fewer spectators and the visions were much less of a threat. There was no longer the kind of chemistry among newspapers, seers, and social anxiety that a year before had turned seers into political subversives. The difference in the government's reaction may lie in its greater insecurity after the coup attempt or, more simply, in the personality of the new governor.[26]

Pedro del Pozo Rodríguez came to Gipuzkoa as governor on 20 August 1932 from Avila, where he had been governor since the creation of the Second Republic. Spanish governadores civiles , like prefects in France, are above all in charge of public order and police. During the Republic they were generally young, well-educated members of political parties in the government. Those in the provinces of the north, where the majority of citizens opposed the Republic and the political landscape was as complicated and rugged as the physical one, were men in the confidence of key members of the cabinet. La Voz de Guipúzcoa noted that del Pozo was "bound by ties of close personal and political friendship with [the prime minister] Señor Azaña" and that Azaña had personally briefed him.[27]

Just one month later del Pozo served notice in the press on the Ezkioga seers and believers, who had been gathering in greater numbers at the new chapel:

MORE MIRACLES AT EZQUIOGA?

Word has reached the governor's office that there is a renewal at Ezquioga of reactionary religious movements, using as a pretext apparitions recently discredited by an official of the church.

It is surprising after the presidential visit to Guipúzcoa, a visit that was a triumph without precedent, after the approval of the Statute of Catalonia and a renewed governmental interest in coming to terms with the Basque Country, that once more the name of Ezquioga should be heard from the lips of deceivers who with the pretext of the alleged apparitions are undertaking a political campaign.

The governor is ready to act in this matter and will tolerate no more "miracles." Our enemies must play fair. They cannot be allowed to play politics with religious images that deserve their total respect. Seeking to maintain the faith, in fact they destroy and undermine it with their maneuvers.

"As long as I am in this post," Señor del Pozo told us, "I will not tolerate this kind of politics disguised as religion."

Very severe measures will be taken.[28]

On October 1, ten days after this warning, the Bordas and Burguera booklet on Ezkioga came out, and on October 6 or 7 Echezarreta installed the new image of the Virgin on its pedestal to "ardent tears, continuous prayers, pious hymns,

________________________________________

― 138 ―

and fervent applause." All of the slow accretions of liturgical respectability had come to this climax, an image in a shrine, complete with a Way of the Cross on its approach, a holy spring, and a photographer standing by at the foot of the hill.[29]

The final straw for del Pozo was an incident on a train from Zumarraga to San Sebastián on the afternoon of October 8. Tomás Imaz and two other believers, brothers who owned a bakery in San Sebastián, were returning to the city with the seer Marcelina Eraso. As they prayed out loud, Marcelina fell into a vision. At least one of the passengers began complaining vociferously that Imaz was exploiting the seer, and in San Sebastián police hauled off the little group for disturbing the peace. Dr. José Bago, the head of medicine for the government in the province and a republican hero, examined Eraso and sent her for observation to the provincial mental hospital. The governor reprimanded Imaz and fined him five hundred pesetas.[30]

The following afternoon Governor del Pozo stopped at Ezkioga to see for himself what was going on. There was quite a crowd, and when Echezarreta came forward, del Pozo ordered him to remove the image by daybreak, to forbid entry to the site, and to take down the souvenir stands. If he did not, the government would dynamite the chapel. Perhaps not understanding the fine points of the matter, del Pozo told him to put the outlaw image in the parish church. He suggested that if Echezarreta wanted to be altruistic he could offer the property for a school. The photographer from Terrassa, Joaquín Sicart, his livelihood in immediate danger, alerted the Catalan supporters.[31]

Echezarreta agreed to remove the image, but he had not counted on the opposition of the believers, who swore to defend it. When he returned with workers from his paper mill, there was a tense standoff. Echezarreta paused to pray part of a rosary so as not to offend the Virgin, whereupon the believers declared they would pray fifty rosaries for the Virgin to strike dead the first to touch her. The workmen then refused to help. Burguera intervened to calm things down and persuaded Echezarreta not to remove anything; rather he should let the governor do it. The standoff around the image continued from October 10 to 13 with round-the-clock prayers and visions. Del Pozo insisted not only that Echezarreta take the statue away but also that he raze the chapel and wall off the site. Four seers told Echezarreta from the Virgin that he should not give in. Civil guards protected the workers as they dismantled the stands at the foot of the hill.[32]

José Garmendia defended his image and temple as best he could by visiting President Francesc Macià once more in Catalonia. He arrived in Barcelona on October 12, and that evening, in the private chapel of a wealthy believer, he asked the Virgin whether the image was still at the Ezkioga site. He said she refused to tell him in order to spare his feelings. The next day believers drove Garmendia and Salvador Cardús to Macià's country home at Vallmanya in the province of

________________________________________

― 139 ―

Lleida. There Garmendia and Macià spoke for about fifteen minutes in the patio. According to Garmendia, Macià said that he preferred not to approach the prime minister, Manuel Azaña, who was a republican of the "red" variety but would speak instead to the president of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, "who always goes to mass," and ask him to intervene "to leave you in peace." Garmendia gave him a photograph of the image and the Bordas pamphlet. That night at Ezkioga about thirty believers and seers stayed with the image. Many but not all present thought they saw the image weep, and at three in the morning they sent for Burguera. He too saw the weeping and drew up an affidavit that those present signed.[33]

Cardús arrived the next day just after workmen had removed the statue from the chapel. He just had time to kiss the images of the surrounding angels before the workers took them away. Citing the diocesan ban on objects associated with the visions, Sinforoso de Ibarguren had refused to let the image into the parish church, so the workers had carried it to the nearest farm. They did so reverently, on their knees, praying the rosary to the tears of the onlookers. Shortly afterward, they sawed down the great cross that Patxi had erected a year before, and it broke into pieces as it fell. Many of the several hundred persons present gathered splinters as relics. For the seers and believers, who so often had simulated crucifixion or acted out the stations of the cross, the Passion was taking place yet again at Ezkioga. They saw Echezarreta as a coward and Ibarguren as Judas. Cardús described the fall of the cross with the words of Christ: "Consummatum est, it is finished." Many seers had visions and all of them wept. The believers held continuous rosaries, some fearing divine punishment, others pleading for the Virgin to make herself visible. "In the meantime the blows of the hammers and chisels that began to demolish the building cut into people's hearts." That evening the mayor of Ezkioga announced on behalf of the governor that as of the next day all seers who had visions in public would be jailed. After dinner Cardús returned to find the image adorned with flowers and lit by a multitude of candles. Believers prayed before it in the rain.[34]

On October 15, the feast of Teresa de Avila and the anniversary of Ramona's wounds, Salvador Cardús was surprised to encounter his spiritual director, Magdalena Aulina herself. She had come incognito as "María Boada," and with her were José María, Tomás, and Carmen Boada and Ignasi Llanza. Together in the rain they watched the workers remove the iron grille from the chapel. Around noon, on orders from the governor, the workers stopped. Burguera speculated that Macià's intercession with the government had had some effect, but it could also have been the result of the meeting in San Sebastián of Echezarreta, the mayor and town secretary of Ezkioga, and the governor. Nevertheless, civil guards prevented people from going up the hill. Sometime during the day Echezarreta had his workers take the image in a wheelbarrow down to a house on the road and install it in what had been Burguera's room.[35]

________________________________________

― 140 ―

The Boada party invited Cardús, Garmendia, and Burguera to lunch in Zumarraga. There Burguera told them that his superior, the archbishop of Valencia, Prudencio Melo y Alcalde, had ordered him to go home. He was not obeying. According to Cardús,

P. Burguera also revealed his contacts in regard to the events at Ezkioga with the papal nuncio, who several times has expressed interest in them, even though he had said he could not intervene in the internal affairs of the diocese. The nuncio had a note given to P. Burguera to pass on with this significant message for Ramona Olazábal, dated 25 July 1932. "Tell Ramona from me to suffer with patience everything that Our Lord God sends her, and if she is innocent He will help her and she will triumph over all ."[36]

On their return to Ezkioga, the party found believers and onlookers had arrived by car and bus and were milling about on the road. The houses along the road were full of believers praying and in almost every one a seer was having visions. A few defied the ban on outdoor visions. The original boy seer had his at the back door, facing the nearby apple trees. Evarista Galdós had hers under apple trees near the road and told Cardús that the Virgin told her to tell Burguera not to worry, that she (the Virgin) would watch over him. To the others she said, "Don't forget that the Virgin has said that there would be martyrs here!" Benita excitedly told José María Boada that she would write him from jail and that the Virgin had told her, "This is the hour of my soldiers." Even though she had met Magdalena Aulina in Barcelona, Benita did not see through the disguise; she even asked to be remembered to her. The guards heard that Patxi had had an outdoor vision and they tried to find him, but he escaped through a house to the hills. Then they tried in vain to locate Evarista, whom Cardús found huddling in a bus, "like a dove waiting to be sacrificed." That evening Burguera and his family were praying before the image and again saw that it seemed to weep, although there was no liquid on it. Burguera pronounced that here was not one miracle, an image weeping, but as many miracles as people who were seeing the image weep, for separate miracles were affecting the eyes of each.[37]

To round out this eventful day, around midnight Cardús went with Garmendia to the foot of the hill. Garmendia had had a vision in the afternoon and expected another. Since the houses were all closed for the night, they prayed by the road. Garmendia saw Gemma Galgani and the Virgin. He said the Virgin told him she was happy they had come out so late. As Cardús said good-bye to Garmendia on the dark road, a car went by and they heard one occupant say to another, "Poor man, what a shame!" It was the son of Garmendia's employer in Legazpi.[38]

The next day the Catalan party, including Magdalena Aulina in disguise, stopped to say good-bye to Burguera and Cardús. They said the rosary, and

________________________________________

― 141 ―

Garmendia entered into a lengthy trance in which he described the Virgin, Gemma Galgani, and the devil, who threatened him. Aulina almost gave herself away by pointing and saying, "Look! Our Mother!" After the rosary, pilgrims arrived from Pamplona with a letter from Pilar Ciordia, who claimed that the previous day the Virgin had said to tell Burguera that she was at his side. Burguera pointed out to the visitors that Evarista had said the same thing and that seers regularly coincided in this way. The Boada party left an observer but took Cardús, our witness, back with them to Barcelona.[39]

The governor opened a judicial inquiry on October 11. Because of the Gipuzkoa newspaper strike, we catch only glimpses of the witnesses. Echezarreta testified on October 14 and October 18. Garmendia, Patxi, the child Conchita Mateos from Beasain, and María Luisa of Zaldibia appeared on October 21. Patxi had a vision before the magistrate, who sent all these seers to the mental hospital. Burguera wrote Cardús theatrically about the catacombs and of "repeating the early days of the church" and forwarded a letter from Garmendia asking further help from Macià.[40]

Over the next week the magistrate called Ignacio Galdós, Evarista, Benita, Recalde, Rosario Gurruchaga, and Vicente Gurruchaga. When seers took the train for San Sebastián, small groups of believers greeted them at many stations with flowers. On October 28 del Pozo appointed a trusted republican and fellow Freemason, Alfonso Rodríguez Dranguet, as special magistrate. By then the case centered principally on Burguera and other organizers for "fraud and sedition." This judge saw witnesses for about a month and finally remanded the case to the court in Azpeitia. Believers estimated that thirty to forty persons testified in all.[41]

Burguera compiled a list of the magistrates' questions and noted the following themes: how the Virgin looked; how the visions took place; how the visions related to the Republic and if and when anyone sang the royalist anthem, "Marcha Real"; what Padre Burguera's role was; whether the seers gained any benefit from the visions; how the seers and believers organized their meetings and who were the ringleaders; whether they disobeyed church authority; and what the Catalans were up to.

The magistrate and the governor did not know what to do with seers who talked back, fell into swoons, and were ready for the worst. The telling and retelling of the dialogues, however improved or apocryphal, gave the seers an aura of martyrdom. The girls and women enjoyed going beyond the passive role of victims of God to become, like the men, active witnesses against iniquity. The believers appreciated this shift, which was in keeping with the well-publicized imprisonment of women for holding religious processions and returning crucifixes to schools.[42]

The authorities released several seers after questioning them. The judge questioned Evarista on October 26. She claimed later that the Virgin told her what to answer. When the judge asked her whether she had seen a devil, she said

________________________________________

― 142 ―

she had. When he asked whether the devil was naked or clothed, she allegedly said, "He was dressed like you." After more questions he let her go. A young woman from rural Urrestilla, Rosario Gurruchaga, seems to have had a fit. After ten minutes only the neighbor who accompanied her was able to unclasp Rosario's hands by touching them with a crucifix. The judge did not commit Rosario either. Benita was euphoric before she went. She wrote García Cascón, "Thank God we are not crazy; knowing this I am ready to go anywhere, as if on a social call. I am so happy I cannot explain it." The magistrate quizzed her on general knowledge, such as the capital of France, and sent her home too.[43]

On November 25 Ramona's spiritual director went with her to San Sebastián. This was Ramona's second appearance, and the priest relayed some of the exchanges to Cardús.

Ramona told me that the judge asked her if she sees the Virgin. She said she did. [He asked] at what distance she saw it, was it within shooting range? I think at that moment Ramona had some kind of divine inspiration. She replied that yes, that she saw it close enough to fire on a civil guard, but it was the Virgin. The curious thing about this is that the man who asked this question some days before the Republic was established in Spain killed a civil guard in a riot in San Sebastián.[44]

The Catalans heard that when the judge asked María Recalde if she had lost any weight on her repeated trips to Ezkioga, she said she had. Portly like her, the judge said that maybe he too should go. She told him it would do him good—his body would lose weight and his soul would gain it. Allegedly via a vision on October 22 Recalde was sure that Justo de Echeguren was behind the government offensive.

Judge: What did the Virgin tell you about the Republic?

Recalde: She told us nothing.

J: But she must have said that now we are worse than before.

R: No. Before you acted against the clergy; now it is the clergy that has gotten you to act against us.

J: who told you that?

R: I have my sources.

J: Well, the vicar general told me he would not tell anybody.

In Burguera's account she went on to say that she laughed at her accusers, that she feared her heavenly judge, not the earthly one. She spent a night in a holding cell and went on to the mental home.[45]

Burguera, the big fish, was called to San Sebastián on November 3 along with José Joaquín Azpiazu, the justice of the peace in whose house he was staying.

________________________________________

― 143 ―

Burguera claims that the court typist told him that three priests from around Ezkioga had already been there to testify against him. The governor held Burguera responsible for the resurgence of the visions in the summer of 1932 and thought he had "manipulated people who were mentally ill in order to maintain the fiction of the visions." He said Burguera had "created more seers, held clandestine meetings, and organized apparitions, in some cases where the Marcha Real was played during the visions." He therefore jailed Burguera, releasing him seven nights later on condition that he leave Gipuzkoa. By that time the press had held Burguera up to ridicule. El Socialista of Madrid printed a satirical poem "The Last Miracle-Worker," which referred to "Padre Amado," who first lost his license to say mass "because he wanted to do miracles on his own without the permission of the holy mother church" and then was "thrown in the clink" for conspiring against the government.[46]

Shortly after the governor released Burguera, the mental hospital released the seers, virtually all with a clean bill of health. Recalde had visions there, convincing some of the nuns who were nurses. Catalans from the Aulina group had gone to intercede with the staff. Del Pozo fined five prominent believers a thousand pesetas each, substantial sums. He told the press he had received a letter from Navarra saying that a female seer saw devils dragging his soul into hell. After he was transferred to the province of Cádiz on December 7 the government left the seers alone. Civil guards stopped patrolling the site in late November because the towns could not pay them.[47]

Like Recalde, the other seers and believers were convinced the diocese was behind the government's actions, something Bishop Múgica vigorously denied. A more elaborate theory was that the diocese sponsored the Laburu lectures in exchange for the bishop's return from France. Múgica entered Spain on 13 May 1932 through the intercession of Cardinal-archbishop Vidal i Barraquer and of the nuncio with Prime Minister Azaña. But he could not go back to his diocese of Vitoria for a year, and it is unlikely that Ezkioga, after 1931 a negligible threat to public order, had anything to do with his return.[48]

Padre Burguera in Charge

Burguera's imprisonment consecrated him as the defender of the seers. Benita had a vision that he would be a martyr, Patxi said the Virgin had a crown for him, and Garmendia said the Virgin called Burguera "your apostle." When he got out of jail, Burguera seems to have concentrated on finishing his book, and he went at once to Barcelona for copies of the Catalans' documents of cures and predictions. A month later, in mid-December 1932, he took his manuscript to a bishop he thought would be sympathetic, probably Luis Amigó of Segorbe. On 1 April 1933 he found out that the diocese would not give him permission to

________________________________________

― 144 ―

publish, and a month later the seers had visions that he should print the book anyway.[49]

All this time he was away from Ezkioga, but he did not forget his flock of seers and believers. He wrote many individually; he also sent an apostolic letter to the group. Assuming his position by divine right, he reproved the seers for denigrating one another, urged humility, and told them not to let themselves be photographed. The devil, he warned, was always ready to disturb their friendships and imitate true visions. He urged them to check against the devil by asking the apparition to repeat a pious phrase, by examining their own feelings after a vision, by vetting messages through other seers in trance, by consulting with their personal spiritual director, and by clearing messages for the general public with him, their "general director." He warned that if they did not behave well, God would take away their gift, and he closed commending them to "Gemma, the efficacious protector of our work" (see text in appendix).

The Mission of Juan Bautista Ayerbe

In Burguera's absence a new defender came forward. Juan Bautista Ayerbe Irastorza was the secretary of the small town of Urnieta, forty kilometers northeast of Ezkioga. There his brother Juan José was the parish priest. Previously, while town secretary of Segura, Ayerbe had rescued the municipal archive and published a book of local history. In August 1919 he visited Limpias and he wrote about those visions in national newspapers.[50]

From his enormous output of mimeographed, dittoed, and typewritten semi-public letters and leaflets, it seems Ayerbe started circulating news of the Ezkioga visions in December 1932. He was led to believe in his own divine mission by Patxi.

On Saturday, the third of this month of December [1932], the seer Francisco Goicoechea went up the apparition mountain at four in the afternoon. During his ecstasy, which lasted about forty minutes, he received four messages. The third of these was for a J. B. A., who lived near San Sebastiÿn, who thereby satisfied a wish made to the Holy Virgin on the same day at ten in the morning without contact with the seer. The message has a close connection with these notes.[51]

It took courage and commitment to defend this cause when many seers were in the mental hospital and Burguera himself was just out of jail.

A visiting expert helped confirm Ayerbe's belief in the visions. In mid-December 1932 Father Thomas Matyschok, "Professor of Psychic Sciences" from Germany, told him that the ecstasies of Conchita Mateos of Beasain were supernatural. That month Ayerbe wrote his first pamphlet, "The Marvelous

________________________________________

― 145 ―

Apparitions of the Most Holy Virgin in Ezkioga," and distributed two hundred dittoed copies in January.

Conchita Mateos was the twelve-year-old daughter of a worker in a Beasain factory. Ayerbe wrote, "She is the seer with whom I have most contact and whom I like the best because of her angelic manner and a prudence truly unusual in a girl her age." She was the youngest seer sent to the insane asylum. The real-estate agent Tomás Imaz took down some of her vision messages in December 1932 and subsequently Ayerbe went weekly to visions in her house in Beasain. About twenty persons generally attended these visions. She also had them in Ayerbe's house in Urnieta, where the Virgin showed a special partiality for Ayerbe's family. Ayerbe also distributed the vision messages of Luis Irurzun of Navarra, Esperanza Aranda, an older woman who then had most of her visions in San Sebastián, and others to believers in Terrassa, Barcelona, Madrid, and San Sebastián.[52]

________________________________________

― 146 ―

His children grew up in a house where the presence of rapt visionaries was normal. According to his son Daniel, Ayerbe was devoted to anyone who was a believer. "He would not leave you alone, bringing you one thing after another until he overwhelmed you. But if you did not take an interest, you were public enemy number one." As Ayerbe wrote García Cascón, "I cannot disguise my sincere love for all who share my fervor for the apparitions. Maybe it is because there are so few of us or because we are so persecuted…. Is it because we imitate to some extent the first Christians of the catacombs?"[53]

In spite of his "obsessive," "fanatical" (the words are his son's) activity in favor of the visions, an activity that lasted the rest of his life, Ayerbe never took sides among the seers or the leaders and was relatively modest. He did not want to threaten the careers of his brothers, so he usually remained just inside the limits of what might bring a public rebuke from the diocese. Because of the priests in his family, however, he was able to get away with more than others. He did not have a personal agenda for the visions, like Rigné, or a political one, like Carmen Medina; he was simply a scribe. Although he was an Integrist, his involvement in the visions stemmed from an interest in the politics not of Spain but of heaven—the broader designs that God held out for humanity. He wanted Ezkioga, as he had wanted Limpias, to be the Spanish Lourdes, but this time he went deeper and circulated messages about chastisements and Antichrists.

Ayerbe kept in touch with Pedro Balda, town secretary of Iraneta (Navarra), who served as the seer Luis Irurzun's scribe. In the rural north town secretaries were professionals with typewriters and time to use them. As the representatives of literate bureaucracy in rural villages, Ayerbe and Balda provided the seers with some local credibility. But their influence in the wider society was slight. On that level people like Medina, Burguera, and Rigné had more impact.

Away from Ezkioga in the winter and spring of 1933, Burguera worried about bad news he heard about the seers. From March 25 to 27 he accompanied a small group to Lourdes. At the grotto he felt that the Virgin confirmed his mission again. For when he asked the Virgin through a female seer in his group whether they might stay longer, the Virgin purportedly answered, "Tell the Padre that his duty is to go at once to Ezquioga, and when he has the Ezquioga matter all fixed up as at Lourdes, then he may come here."[54]

Burguera no doubt knew that in mid-March 1933 one of the teenage seers had given birth to a child. Believers explained away the pregnancy by rape and dignified the birth by claiming it occurred without pain during a vision. But for the general public the pregnancy was a disgrace that affected the apparitions as a whole.[55] The scandal, which roused the many people in the region who had become skeptical, showed up in the broadsides of verses which are a Basque tradition. In October and November 1931 both the famous bertsolari (oral versifiers) José Manuel Lujanbio Retegi ("Txirrita") and his relative from Ordizia

________________________________________

― 147 ―

Patxi Erauskin Errota, had published verses in praise of the seers Ramona and Patxi. Now José Urdanpilleta responded with two sheets. No doubt the most effective was the unsigned, scurrilous "The Great Miracle of the Virgin of Ezquioga," in which he identified by village two girls who had become pregnant and one boy who, he said, was a licentious as a ram and had even corrupted two nuns. Urdanpilleta had at least one public verse debate on the subject with Txirrita, and old-timers still remember lines from the argument. The Albiztur enthusiast Luistar published verses in support of the seers in 1931; but Laburu persuaded him to change his mind and in 1933 he published a long verse sequence against the seers. For Luistar and Urdanpilleta the great issue was immorality Txirrita had claimed the visions were true because they led to conversion; these poets claimed the visions were false because they led to sin.[56]

Prior to clearing up the scandals, Burguera had to recover his dignity. He attempted to do so in a four-page printed encomium signed by Ayerbe. It called for serious study of the Ezkioga visions and presented Burguera as "extraordinarily expert in the theological and ascetic-mystic matters so necessary for clarifying and resolving the apparitions … very well known by the intellectual elite of the Catholic world … armed with stunning erudition and perspicacity … with an apostolic zeal and an iron will." It described the Studium Catholicum, listed Burguera's published and unpublished works, and reproduced the entry for Burguera in the main Spanish encyclopedia ("a wise theologian").[57]

The scandals, following the attacks by the church and the Republic, convinced Burguera that he had to do some serious "weeding" of the seers. His perplexity because some seers refused him their vision messages grew to a conviction that the devil was at work. After a month taking counsel with the Virgin in the visions of Ciordia, Benita, Aranda, and Garmendia, Burguera called a general meeting of seers. There he tried to rein in those who had taken advantage of their special status to lead freer lives. He told the girls who had found lodgings in order to be close to the vision site to go home, and he forbade seers to go on any more excursions.

Burguera claimed that some of the seers disobeyed him and started a "schism" because they did not want to give up their newfound liberty. In fact, any unity was in his own mind. He himself wrote that by this time there were three kinds of seers, the docile and obedient ones (obedient to him, that is), the untutored and credulous ones (by which I think he refers to the more rural, less classy or attractive seers, including those who spoke only Basque and trusted other, Basque-speaking leaders like Tomás Imaz and Juan Bautista Ayerbe), and the crafty and proud ones (he meant in particular Ramona and Patxi), who enjoyed the limelight and let no one direct them. As he began to do his weeding, the seers he rejected came out openly against him.[58]

By now Burguera made no move without divine authority from trusted visionaries. He first tested the seers in vision by burning them on the hand with

________________________________________

― 148 ―

the flame of a candle. Those passed who did not react and felt no pain after the vision. For him this did not mean automatically that the visions were divine, but it did mean that the seers were worthy of further study.[59] When he tested Esperanza Aranda on 5 May 1933 in San Sebastián, two believing priests were witnesses. The flame burned "skin, flesh, and cartilage, causing a blister and a wound." Aranda did not react and her pulse remained steady. Lorenzo Jayo was present when Burguera tested his mother, María Recalde, at Ezkioga and remembers vividly the fat in her finger melting and a wound forming. A French writer saw the badly burned hand of José Garmendia. Rigné photographed Burguera burning with a candle the clasped hands of a boy in trance. In Albiztur he did the tests in the home of the parish priest. By July 14 sixteen seers had passed; others took the test later.[60]

These tests coincided with a new diocesan offensive. Starting in May 1933, less than a month after his return to Vitoria, Bishop Múgica instructed parish priests to obtain signed statements from the prominent seers, including Benita, Evarista, Ramona, and Gloria Viñals. The seers should retract their visions and vow not to go to the hillside. Benita signed that she would not go but added that she did so on the Virgin's instruction. She continued to have visions at home and when her parish priest found out and she refused to declare her visions diabolical

________________________________________

― 149 ―

or illusory, he excluded her from the church. Accompanied by prominent Bilbao believers, her parents went to the bishop to protest, but Múgica went a step further and denied the child all the sacraments. Most other seers agreed to suspend their trips to the site, but few if any retracted the visions.

The combined pressure from Burguera to prove some visions "false" and from the bishop to force seers to retract the visions sent many seers into a kind of tailspin. They desperately sought divine messages that would please Burguera and affirm his authority. Garmendia, for instance, told him that the Virgin had said that all seers should obey Burguera and that whenever she had a message for Burguera, she would appear to Garmendia as long as necessary.[61]

By the end of May Burguera's most trusted seers began to help by specifying the number of "true" seers who remained. Then, supposedly repeating what the Virgin told them, they began to finger the false ones. Pilar Ciordia declared that Conchita Mateos's visions were diabolical and that others should not go to the house. Burguera broke the bad news to the family, and Conchita agreed to a fire test. She passed and delivered a message: Burguera did well to test seers and those who disobeyed were not true seers. But Burguera nevertheless excluded her because of others he trusted more.[62]

The accusing continued, as in a witch-hunt. On June 3 Benita heard the Virgin say that Burguera should remove all reference to Patxi from the book because of the things he made up ("sus mixtificaciones"). Two days later Benita learned from the Virgin that of nine true seers only four would remain. The three others she had in mind would have been Evarista, whose visions she was explicitly confirming, Pilar Ciordia, who came from Pamplona to stay at her house from time to time, and her friend María Recalde. These four gradually eliminated others. On June 29 Burguera informed the Bilbao supporter Sebastián López de Lerena that his protégée Gloria Viñals was no longer a true seer. Burguera based this judgment on a vision by Evarista in Irun. On the same day Evarista and Garmendia declared that Burguera should remove from the book those who did not obey him.[63]

Seers had more spectacular visions under the stress of denouncing their friends. On July 14 Burguera and others watched an eight-hour Passion trance of Pilar and Evarista. The seers had announced the event twelve days in advance; lying on the floor they described the devil in the form of a great serpent encircling and strangling them. As they went through the motions of the Passion and were attacked by twelve devils (whose tortures with giant needles must have been reminiscent of Burguera's tests), they narrated their experience through a running dialogue with the Virgin. The Virgin took part in the crucifying. The ordeal was a sign for the upcoming chastisement of the sinful people in "packed theaters and movie houses and crowded beaches" who did not believe the apparitions. The Virgin was most bitter about the disobedient ex-seers who had once believed but then after falling into evil company abandoned her. But Pilar and Evarista were

________________________________________

― 150 ―

obedient. "No Mother, we wish to be very good. Rather than stop seeing thee, we prefer a thousand deaths."[64]

The core seers heard the Virgin say where to print the book and warned Burguera not to open certain letters, for the diocese wanted to pack him off to Valencia. Burguera was present in Navarra when Evarista in Basque and Pilar in Spanish both claimed to see eight devils drag the vicar general (yet again) to hell.[65]

Burguera also felt the pressure, for the seers confirmed that the devil was out to stop him. Benita Aguirre, who had taken refuge with believers in Girona when denied Communion in Legazpi, wrote that in a vision she had seen him writing his book with good angels on one side and bad angels on the other. She and Evarista had seen a false Ezkioga book held by the devil, whom Evarista saw disguised as Gemma Galgani. Because the devil might interfere with his revisions, Burguera had to check his proofs and arguments with seers.[66]

On 16 July 1933 Burguera, Garmendia, and Baudilio Sedano were in the hallway of the Hotel Urola in Zumarraga on their way to lunch. An uncouth man came in and warned Burguera he should "stop persecuting at Ezkioga." Burguera told the hotel owner to call the police because of the threat, but the man had disappeared (mysteriously, Burguera thought). The man could well have been a relative or follower of one of the seers whom Burguera was busy repudiating, but Burguera was convinced that he had seen the devil in human form, something María Recalde confirmed in a vision two days later.[67]

The conflict between Burguera's seers and those he excluded came to a head a week later when on the apparition hillside Benita Aguirre's father read a warning from the Virgin that those who disobeyed Padre Burguera would suffer terrible divine punishment. The rumor was out that Burguera had asked as a special grace that only the seers who cooperated with him could see the Virgin. That would have simplified his job of discernment considerably. The first to react was Rigné, who on July 25 printed an open letter warning the seers that priests in rebellion against the church were misleading them. Instead, he said that they should consider Bishop Múgica Christ's representative and pray that he change his mind. The true history of the apparitions, he wrote, could only come from a canonical inquiry. Rigné was convinced that the seers who refused to obey Burguera were the most trustworthy.[68]

Sebastián López de Lerena, an electrical engineer from Bizkaia who was perhaps the most balanced and realistic of the opinion leaders among the believers, wrote a stinging letter to Burguera denouncing his errors, his self-appointed authority over the seers, his improper trials by fire, not approved by theologians, and his attempt to blackmail seers into giving him their vision messages for his book under threat of declaring them nonseers. Above all López de Lerena charged that Burguera had unwittingly suggested many of the visions. He blamed the padre for dividing believers when more than ever they needed to stand together. These attacks increased Burguera's testiness. In the ensuing days

________________________________________

― 151 ―

he had a falling out with José Garmendia. Two weeks later Pilar Ciordia told him that he had just avoided an ambush on his way from Zumarraga to Benita's house.[69]

The Bishop

While the seers and their leaders were squabbling, Bishop Múgica of Vitoria was preparing a dossier against the Ezkioga apparitions. On 19 August 1933 he sent the Holy Office an extensive account in Latin of the visions. In mid-September he published in the diocesan bulletin "On the Alleged Supernaturalness of What Is Going On at Ezquioga." In this circular he denied the visions any supernatural content and prohibited Catholics from retaining any pictures, photographs, images, hymns, leaflets, books, or mimeo material relating to the visions. Further, he instructed parish priests to notify seers in the presence of two witnesses that they could not go to the sites of visions on penalty of being denied Holy Communion, and he requested the remaining believers to avoid vision sites or conclaves.

After repeating in summary form many of Laburu's arguments, Múgica dwelt at greater length on the blatant disobedience of the seers and "their self-appointed protectors, panegyrists, and publicists." He attacked Burguera by name as

in open rebellion without permission from his Bishop and without Ours, violating the prohibition imposed on priests personally delivered to him on several occasions, arrogating to himself the position, which no one has given him, of spiritual director of the "seers." For his obstinacy and contumacy We are obliged to denounce and publicly rebuke his scandalous conduct.[70]

I suspect that Múgica had not counted on publishing this strong stand as soon as he did. But on September 8 and 9 he faced a new promoter who might radically expand the audience for the visions.[71]

The International Challenge: Lóon Degrelle

The challenge came from Léon Degrelle, an energetic Catholic militant already well known in his Belgian homeland. As a student at Louvain, Degrelle had supported the French rightist Charles Maurras, and he was famous for anti-communist pranks. He was also active in the Catholic Action movement, and in 1929 he had gone to Mexico, where he spent several months with the Cristero Catholic rebels. After he graduated in 1931 he revitalized the Catholic Action publishing house, Éditions Rex. In the fall of 1933 Rex was in financial difficulties, which Degrelle alleviated partially by promoting and profiting from the new apparitions in Belgium.[72]

________________________________________

― 152 ―

The first of a series of Belgian visions began at Beauraing in an artificial grotto to the Virgin of Lourdes on 29 November 1932. There, before a total audience of 150,000 persons, five children, aged nine to fifteen, had visions until 3 January 1933. Then from January 15 to March 2 an eleven-year-old girl had eight visions at Banneux. At Beauraing there was a new seer in the summer of 1933, an adult male who was supposedly cured on June 11 and who had visions in June, July, and August, drawing a crowd of 300,000 on August 5. Subsequently individuals had visions in Onkerzele and Etichove in Flemish Belgium as well as at other sites.[73]

News of the Beauraing visions reached San Sebastián in mid-December 1932 as "An Ezquioga in Belgium." Even foreign Catholic commentators observed that the Belgian "epidemic of heavenly communications" was like "occurrences of a somewhat similar nature at Ezquioga." Supporters of the Belgian visions preferred to compare them with those at Lourdes. The Walloon dioceses of Belgium had some of the highest rates of attendance and some of the greatest numbers of Lourdes pilgrimages outside of France. In this they were similar to the dioceses of Vitoria and Barcelona. There were other similarities. Like the Basque Country, Belgium was peopled by two groups with different languages. Both had highly devout rural areas check by jowl with industrial development. And for Spanish Catholics hoping to recapture the allegiance of the working class, Belgium was a model to follow.[74]

The Ezkioga believers had shown immediate interest in Beauraing. In June 1933 the photographer Joaquín Sicart printed a sheet that compared the two sets of visions. He pointed to the numerical superiority of Ezkioga in terms of visionaries and visions and contrasted the publicity and the sympathetic diocesan attitude in Belgium to the paltry number of pamphlets and the harassment of seers in Spain.[75]

As soon as Degrelle read about the visions in Beauraing, which lay close to his hometown in the Ardennes, he left for the site. As at Ezkioga, so at Beauraing: in the absence of an official inquity the local doctor played a central role in evaluating the visionaries and served as a liaison with the press. Degrelle persuaded him to write a quick description and published it while the visions were still in progress. The pamphlet sold phenomenally both in Belgium and in France. As apparitions unfurled across the land, Degrelle published at least six other pamphlets on visions at Beauraing, Banneux, and other sites.[76]

Articles in the French photo magazine VU may have alerted Degrelle to the potential of the Ezkioga visions. In any case, at the beginning of September 1933 he showed up with a team of writers. His group observed a seer in Tolosa and visited Gloria Viñals in Bilbao. She surprised them by telling of a set of visions in Belgium they did not know about. Luis Irurzun cooperated with a vision that confirmed the authenticity of the Belgian apparitions. On the night of September 9 the group put up a cross where that of Patxi had been cut down. Some of the

________________________________________

― 153 ―

local Ezkioga believers at once wrote the bishop, asking him to allow the cross to remain and informing him proudly that the Belgians were in Ezkioga "gathering ample information about the apparitions which they will distribute throughout Europe."[77] Múgica's pastoral letter forestalled Degrelle, who had time to issue only photographs of four seers in his magazine Soirées with a note announcing a major series of articles. He never published the series.[78]

The bishop's circular placed the Ezkioga visions out of bounds for ordinary people. By having it read in all parish churches on September 17 and 24 and once again in the month of October, Múgica ensured that no Catholic in his diocese failed to hear about it. The circular made official the discredit from Laburu's talk, from the governmental offensive, and from slanderous verses. Many believers did as they were told and handed in postcards, leaflets, books, and other memorabilia. Others gave their souvenirs and vision material to friends in neighboring

________________________________________

― 154 ―

dioceses to keep. On October 12 when Luis Irurzun had a vision on the hillside, only twenty-two persons were there to watch.[79]

The bishop's decree stunned the vision community. It was Múgica's first public act against the visions since his return to the diocese. Rigné was dismayed at the blanket dismissal of all seers and believers and at what seemed to be a reference to himself, though he felt Burguera got what he deserved. He and his wife went to mass in another town so they would not have to hear it read in front of their neighbors.[80]

As Laburu had done after his talk, Múgica attempted after his decree to silence particular visionaries. On 18 September 1933 when he was in Durango he called María Recalde to the church of Santa María; three priests were present. I have only her version of events—that he tried to get her not to go to the vision hillside or to meet with believers, under denial of Holy Communion, and that he was particularly interested in Padre Burguera and her written vision messages. She told him that just as the apostles had to shed their blood to spread belief in Christ, so the seers were ready to shed theirs for Ezkioga. Similarly, the parish priest of Legazpi confronted Pilar Ciordia, who was staying at Benita's house. Her replies, at least as Burguera reported them, were just as spunky. Other parish priests notified prominent believers to stay away from the site.[81]

The seers looked once more to the Virgin for a response. Luis Irurzun heard her say that this was a test, that the seers should obey the bishop and pray and that the truth would triumph. Luis believed that the bishop's edict did not apply to Navarrese, so he himself continued to go to Ezkioga, one of the few who did so. In the long run, he said, "The writings that go against the apparition are like wet paper that falls apart and the ink washes away. That will happen with this document." The child Martín Ayerbe reported that Múgica would change his mind eventually. Another seer said this about-face would happen in November, when everyone would go to Ezkioga and the catastrophe would finally occur. But Pilar and Benita were less sanguine and heard the Virgin say the bishop would be punished.[82]

Those who had no hope that Múgica would alter his opinion could imagine his replacement by a bishop favorable to the visions. Such rumors circulated among Basque believers in mid-November 1933. Someone, probably Carmen Medina, took Evarista Galdós to Granada sometime late that year to see the auxiliary bishop there, Lino Rodrigo Ruesca. Rodrigo reputedly had visited the north, spoken to seers, and believed in the visions. Evarista hoped he would be named bishop of Vitoria.[83]

A shift of bishops would have had to come from the nuncio, Federico Tedeschini, and from Rome. Medina told Ezkioga believers in the summer of 1932 that Tedeschini thought the Ezkioga visions were "from heaven." Rumor had it that Evarista had helped to cure him after an automobile accident on 23 August 1933 in Miranda del Ebro. Tedeschini spent almost a month recuperating

________________________________________

― 155 ―

in San Sebastián in the clinic of Benigno Oreja, who was or had been a believer himself. At that point Carmen Medina lent the nuncio Evarista's crucifix, one of many that Ezkioga seers and believers claimed had given off blood. According to Carmen, the nuncio kept it next to his bed.[84]

We can only speculate what Tedeschini really thought about the Ezkioga visions. He was working to achieve a modus vivendi with the Republic and as such was diametrically opposed to the Integrists who were die-hard supporters of Ezkioga in 1933. The aristocratic, sociable, and extraordinarily flexible nuncio may have been using Medina to put pressure on Ezkioga publicists to hand over their writings and may have misled Medina about his sympathies. What we know for certain is that some Ezkioga promoters considered him an ally.[85]

Burguera, on the contrary, was sure that the nuncio was part of a plot to suppress the book. Burguera pinned his hopes instead on Pius XI, to whom he and five seers sent a petition. But on 21 December 1933 Cardinal Donato Sbarreti, secretary of the Holy Office, wrote Múgica that, after examining the dossier from Vitoria in August and the circular of September, the Vatican approved the bishop's decisions.

After parish priests read the bishop's attack on him three times from every pulpit, Burguera went into hiding. He depended almost daily on visions to guide him through the last details of his book and to help him publish it. Pilar Ciordia, who appears to have cultivated his paranoia, warned him on 10 October 1933 of impending danger, and he fled from the Hotel Urola in Zumarraga to Legazpi. There he learned from Benita and Recalde that Baudilio Sedano would find a printer for the book in Valladolid and that the believers would pay for publication.[86]

Fernand Remisch and L'Enigme d'Ezkioga

Bishop Múgica's fears of foreign interest in the visions were justified. In late 1933 the Belgian Fernand Remisch, a young man drawn to apparitions and mystical events, published a new periodical exclusively about Ezkioga. Remisch was born about 1903 in Arlon, Belgium, the son of a white-collar railway worker and a devoutly Catholic mother. He worked for the steel firm Aciéries de Longwy, first in Longwy, then in Brussels, then in Lyon. It was on a trip with his superiors in the firm that he became interested in Lourdes. He thereafter stopped there whenever in the vicinity, and once he cured his legs of near-paralysis in the holy baths. Lourdes was the impulse for a lifelong spiritual quest that took him all over Europe. Remisch visited the German mystic Thérèse Neumann in 1927, wrote about her, and remained devoted to her until her death. He also became deeply interested in the Belgian visions and wrote for Annales de Beauraing et Banneux . In 1933 he published a short book on Beauraing in which he criticized the gathering of evidence and compared the visions to those of Neumann. Because

________________________________________

― 156 ―

he did not want to compromise his business career, he signed his writings with a pseudonym, F. Dorola.[87]

Raymond de Rigné was in touch with Remisch and his companion Ennemond Boniface in July of 1933 and no doubt encouraged them to visit Ezkioga. Remisch first went on August 13 and again the same month with Boniface. He wrote favorable articles for a Luxembourg newspaper and the Annales de Beauraing . But once Múgica had condemned the Ezkioga visions, it was not politic to write about them in a journal promoting the Belgian ones. Remisch chose to issue a separate journal in newspaper format, L'Enigme d'Ezkioga .[88]

The journal appeared at quarterly intervals from December 1933 until the start of the Spanish Civil War, eleven issues in all. Remisch printed Múgica's circular, a summary of the visions, and articles by the abbé Daniel Goens, the theologian Gustave Thibon, and several French doctors. There was also news, not always accurate, of events in Spain and the diocese of Vitoria, reviews of articles and books on Ezkioga, and notices of similar events elsewhere, including stigmatics and "bleeding" crucifixes.[89]

Remisch's tactic was to argue for scientific study. His widow told me he had church permission to read books on the Index. The journal did not have the imprimatur. Judging from letters to the editor, its readers were in Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and the northeast of France. Spanish readers included Burguera, Luis Irurzun, and even the parish priest of Ezkioga, evidently keeping an eye on the opposition. Rigné at first advertised his photographs in it, but later broke off contact. The journal included photographs and articles about seers Burguera had rejected, so he too declined to collaborate.[90]

The Bishop and the Books

Even more threatening than this journal for Múgica were the books that Rigné and Burguera had announced. The first book published after Múgica's

________________________________________

― 157 ―

circular was G. L. Boué's short guide in French, Miracles and Prodigies of Ezkioga . Boué, who lived in Tarbes, drew most of his information from souvenir booklets and Ayerbe's tracts. He had already published a book on Madre Rafols.

In January 1934 Rigné published anonymously A New Jeanne d'Arc Affair . In an accompanying flyer he explained that the work did not require church permission, and he cited the more relaxed attitude of the Belgian bishops toward visions, vision shrines, and vision publications. He ended with a bold challenge to Múgica: "Obedience to the laws of the holy Roman Church: YES, ALWAYS ! To human error and misjudgment: NO, NEVER !"[91]

Rigné and Múgica had similar personalities. Both were mercurial, alternately choleric and charming, but Múgica totally lacked Rigné's sense of humor, and they had radically different ideas. Rigné's defense of sensuality put him squarely at odds with the prudish, grim views of Múgica and Amundarain. Rigné was a vain literary peacock strutting provocatively in an austere Basque churchyard. Luckily for him, there is no hint that the diocese ever saw his more daring books. But first Justo de Echeguren and then Mateo Múgica came to consider him a personal enemy. He brazenly defied diocesan authority in its rural heartland—all the time attending church and receiving Communion. He was waving a red flag before bulls.

Múgica seems to have judged that the most expedient way to neutralize Rigné was to discredit his character. The bishop had heard rumors from Ormaiztegi about Rigné's marriage. He also saw the result of an informal ecclesiastical inquiry. A "learned and worthy" Paris religious, possibly one who had spiritual dealings with Thirouin when she was a tertiary, wrote that Rigné had published books that were "strange," especially on the subject of marriage, that the person with him was probably not his wife, and that they claimed a "'mystical' betrothal." When Múgica then wrote to church officials in Paris in December 1933 asking about Rigné, he received a sizzling indictment:

With an extreme audacity and an appearance of exaggerated piety and faith, this character is capable of the most hateful calumnies and the most fraudulent deeds. He spitefully attacked Mgr. Baudrillart with calumnious accusations when Jeanne d'Arc was published. He uses blackmail. In brief, one must mistrust him and keep him as much at a distance as possible.[92]

Múgica had two diocesan officials armed with this information visit Rigné on 23 January 1934. They asked for the death certificate of Rigné's first wife and the proof of his canonical marriage to Thirouin. According to Rigné, they also wanted him to retract in the diocesan bulletin his previous writings. They told him that Múgica had a decree from the Holy Office that would permit him to excommunicate all who persisted with the Ezkioga affair. In turn Rigné warned them that according to the visionaries God would punish them with violent

________________________________________

― 158 ―

deaths. Rigné failed to deliver the documents and on 6 February 1934 the diocese notified him that he that he could no longer receive Communion. He responded by denouncing to the diocesan prosecutor both Justo de Echeguren and Juan Thalamas Landibar, the priest who had spoken with him, for disobedience to the Holy Office and for blackmail.[93]

At the same time Rigné marshaled all the vision messages he could to back up his marriage. In March 1934 he went to Pamplona looking for the seer Gloria Viñals. He thought that the bishop there, Tomás Muniz y Pablos, was following Gloria's visions, and he wrote asking for a message Gloria had received about his marriage. He also made a desperate, unsuccessful effort to see the nuncio in Madrid.

Meanwhile Múgica put out the news of Rigné's irregular union. To Muniz y Pablos, who had inquired just who this Rigné was, Múgica sent copies of the reports from Paris and this summary of Rigné's activities at Ezkioga.

At first he made a lot of money taking photographs of "seers" and selling them for a good price and publicizing Ezquioga in illustrated magazines in Belgium and Paris. He is the one who sustains Ezquioga by having foreigners come here, since now, with few exceptions, others do not.

Múgica revealed that he was about to condemn Rigné's book and ended his letter: "This Frenchman wants to disturb the peace of a very devout village, receiving Communion there with gestures, announcements, and displays of a piety that he does not have or know about." Some Catalan notables went to persuade Múgica to change his mind on the visions; Múgica told them too about Rigné's marriage. They then went to Rigné and asked him to leave Ezkioga. They also told Salvador Cardús, who wrote to the curate in Beizama so that he could warn Ramona. The best Rigné could do under these circumstances was to explain his situation to close friends. He told them he had indeed obtained an annulment of his first marriage, not in Paris, where Múgica had blocked him and he had enemies, but elsewhere in France. He would not tell Múgica where lest Múgica have the annulment reversed.[94]

Together with a pamphlet on Cruz Lete, the Boué and Rigné books led Múgica to issue a circular on 9 March 1934 in which he prohibited the three works and ordered people to hand copies over to their parish priests. He dedicated five pages to answering Rigné's version of fact and canon law. Múgica emphasized that there had never been any discrepancy between him and Justo de Echeguren on how to treat the visions, defended the investigation of Ramona, backed up Laburu, and denied that the diocese and the government were in collusion. In a follow-up circular he reminded priests to refuse seers Holy Communion if they persisted in going to the apparition site or other vision meetings. He pursued his inquiries about Rigné, made a pastoral visit to Legazpi and Zumarraga, and solicited help from Rome.[95]

________________________________________

― 159 ―

On 13 June 1934 the Holy Office settled the matter by issuing a decree that "declared the alleged apparitions and revelations of the Holy Virgin Mary in the place called Ezquioga devoid of all supernatural character and prohibited ipso jure three books about them." Pius XI backed the decree on June 14. On July 2 Múgica published it as a special number of his diocesan bulletin. He forbade any Catholic to go to the vision site. And he prohibited "as superstitious" any "acts of private cult which, based on the false supposition of supernaturalness, some people have been holding in spite of our circular of 7 September 1933 and the individual warnings that we have given to them, in some cases repeatedly." He sent these decrees to all parish priests to read at mass.[96]

Burguera lost the race to publish his book before the Vatican acted. The seers had encouraged him for more than a year, allegedly at the Virgin's behest. In November 1933 Baudilio Sedano found a printer in Valladolid, a devout widow who not only promised to be discreet (she did not let her Jesuit son know about it) but also took the job on credit. And he collected money from believers. One worker in Bilbao, whom María Recalde had converted, donated his life savings of a thousand pesetas.[97]

Burguera's decision to publish without church permission lost him the support of the Catalans, who had done their best to talk him out of it. He had already decided that their seer, Magdalena Aulina, was not a true one; and Magdalena Aulina in turn had expressed her doubts about him. Cardús found it difficult to speak ill of anyone, but he wrote Ayerbe that he regretted Burguera's impetuosity and pride, "which will only get him into trouble and endanger the cause he defends…. I always kept my distance from him and was somewhat suspicious."[98] In the meantime Burguera continued to anathematize seers and alienate their supporters. By December 1933 Benita Aguirre and María Recalde were his only visionary guides. He had ruled that even Pilar and Evarista had ceased to have true visions.

In February and March 1934 Burguera was with Benita Aguirre in Girona and Lleida. There on four occasions he and others claimed to have seen crucifixes bleed, as Benita had predicted. In and around Ezkioga the rash of bleeding crucifixes had begun in 1933. Witnesses agreed there was actual blood on the images; how it got there was another question. The appearance of blood on cricifixes was in fact a European phenomenon that included a case that a bishop approved in Asti, in Italy, and numerous instances in Belgium and France. For the Ezkioga seers the bleeding crucifixes, which included photographs and lithographs of the Christ of Limpias, served as a kind of supernatural counterpoint to their travails. The bleeding was one more escalation in the effort to maintain the allegiance of believers and convert the doubters.[99]

There were other innovations. In 1933 a seer who had visions in Tolosa began to receive in vision what she claimed was a mystical Communion in the form of a host-shaped object on her tongue. This happened to her not only in Tolosa but

________________________________________

― 160 ―

also in Limpias, Itsasondo, and Ordizia before believers and devout visitors like the Rex group, the superior of the Carmelite house in San Sebastián, and pious photographers. The latter sold postcards and published portraits of the phenomenon. Later she distributed water scented with violets, which Gemma Galgani supposedly provided during the night.[100]

During the months of April, May, and June 1934 Burguera and Benita Aguirre lived in a flat that Baudilio Sedano had found in Valladolid and they went over the proofs of the book. Before Burguera returned each set, Benita would fall into a vision. Through her the Virgin would pass on the final text and edit or remove questionable material. Burguera considered that the book had the imprimatur of the Virgin Mary herself. By then he and Sedano were totally subject to the girl's guidance.[101]

The eight-hundred-page book, The Events at Ezquioga in the Light of Reason and Faith , was published in June 1934, the very month Rome declared the visions not supernatural. In October Baudilio Sedano took the copies in a truck to Elorrio, near Durango, where the believer Matilde Uribe stored them in her mansion. Burguera and Sedano went to Rome in March 1935 to plead their case. Cardinal Segura supported them and obtained an audience for them with Cardinal Sbarreti of the Holy Office. But Sbaretti gave them short shrift.

In the meantime, Rigné and Thirouin retreated to France after the book on Ramona was banned. But by the end of 1934 they were back. The Basque Country was then under martial law and Rigné's conspicuous activity put all the Ezquioguistas at risk. One of them wrote him a jocular warning through a mutual friend:

In the meantime, as always, serenity and energy! Without imprudence. Do not fail to preach the latter to Dr. Arvil, because if he insists in his senseless "offensives," which are really just vanity and literary ambition, he may end up getting denounced by us as the promoter of all the rebellion.[102]

Eventually on 19 July 1935 the military governor expelled Rigné from Spain. In his last months he had caused incidents in the Santa Lucía church by seeking Communion and then denouncing the priests who denied it to him.

Rigné wrote to his friends in 1936 from Orléans that he and Marie-Geneviève were living in poverty, preparing a play about Jeanne d'Arc, and working on a scheme of mutual credit that would abolish money in Europe. He had nothing further to do with Ezkioga, he said. But in fact in March 1936 he had disguised his prohibited book with a new cover and title, Open Sky above the Abyss . In spite of the couple's troubles, they ended the preface with an exuberant flourish:[103]

In spite of our initials [the first book was signed with the initials B. M.] Mgr. Múgica has accused us of maintaining "ignobly" our anonymity. No

________________________________________

― 161 ―

doubt he judges the anonymity of The Imitation of Christ "ignoble." But we have nothing to hide, quite on the contrary. And before the Universal Church, we now accuse Mgr. Múgica of having betrayed all his duties in the Ezquioga affair. We sign proudly,

Bénédicte de Marsay 25 March 1936

Promoters and Seers

The promoters brought a trajectory and momentum to the visions. The seers confirmed the trajectories and renewed the momentum. A decade earlier at Limpias religious leaders and publicists had found in the mute glances of the Christ of Agony similar support for their organizations, their campaigns, and their devotions. At Ezkioga the promoters had words, not just gestures, to work with. We will see how the same process worked with some members of religious orders and with simple laypersons with practical or spiritual problems.

People like Padre Burguera, Antonio Amundarain, and Carmen Medina had strong, preset ideas about how the earth and the heavens were configured. Their notions served as templates for the malleable products of the visionaries. The seers in trance provided what the promoters wanted to hear and became, wittingly or not, their mouthpieces. Armed with this divine authority, the promoters presented their schemes ever more convincingly. In turn, they elicited divine backing in yet other seers.

Organizers with simpler needs, like Salvador Cardús, Raymond de Rigné, or Juan Bautista Ayerbe, who were wrestling with personal spiritual problems or who enjoyed the trances as aesthetic or cathartic experiences, felt no need to exert authority over the seers. On the contrary, they found themselves dependent on the seers, their only means of obtaining divine blessing, love, forgiveness, or knowledge. In turn seers gained access to a broader audience from all the organizers. Patrons and seers found complex, mutual satisfaction.

In the first month of the visions the newspapers and the public rewarded seers who addressed the threat from the secular Republic to the Basques and their religion. Hence there was early interest in the visions by Basque Nationalist ideologues, priests, and party organs. In contrast, not one of the major promoters had any interest in the visions as a Basque phenomenon. Their interests were either more particular or more universal and in some cases both. All of them were aware of the ongoing class warfare and the prospect of a nationwide civil war.

For many believers, as we will see, the Virgin of Ezkioga announced punishment on an apocalyptic, worldwide scale. The chastisement would transcend the place and occasion of Spain with its class warfare and moral turpitude to change the course of time itself. But most of the organizers had smaller, secondary hopes for the visions—Amundarain for the Aliadas and the role they would play in maintaining an island of purity in the morass of modern indecency; Carmen

________________________________________

― 162 ―

Medina for the return of a government she liked; Rigné for peace of mind and the beauty of harmony between body and spirit; Magdalena Aulina for her new institution and the glory of Gemma Galgani; and Cardús for the profound satisfaction of a life suffused with significance.

All of these promoters—at once patrons and clients—and among them especially Rigné and Ayerbe, were caught up also in a stubborn support for the seers as cultural underdogs. The promoters formed close relationships with children, teenagers, and women from poor rural families, some of whom spoke little Spanish. The refusal of the wider world and the church to believe the seers helped to confirm for these promoters the validity of the visions. The organizers had the power of money and experience in the wider world; the seers had the power of divine privilege. Some seers stopped giving messages to certain promoters and some promoters stopped helping certain seers. But Ayerbe with Conchita Mateos and Esperanza Aranda, Burguera with Benita, and Rigné with some seer families in Zumarraga remained friends for decades.

The removal of the visions from the arena of mass media and regional politics was easy for the diocese of Vitoria. The vicar general's note discrediting Ramona's "miracle" did the job. The newspapers, already skeptical, took their cue and dismantled the prestige of the star seers. The Jesuit José Antonio Laburu then convinced many waverers among clergy and bourgeoisie with his critical lectures.

But the small knots of believers, intense, secretive, and nourished with constant grace by a particular seer, were tightly knit. These cuadrillas bothered the local clergy, for whom they were tiny rival sects with independent revelation. They did not bother the bishop all that much at first. The diocese merely denied these groups public use of liturgical symbols. The groups became dangerous for the diocese only when they had access to the media—when they linked up to one of the promoters. With proper publicity the news of the visions could get back into the newspapers or become news elsewhere in Spain, Europe, or Latin America, the purview of other, possibly more sympathetic bishops. Therefore the friendships between seers and publicists were of extreme concern to the diocesan leaders. The repeated attacks in Sunday masses across the Basque Country as well as sporadic government crackdowns led to a collective historical repression. For the people of Euskadi the visions and the hopes and the enthusiasm they provoked in 1931 became an embarrassment and Ezkioga became taboo.

________________________________________

― 163 ―

7.

The Proliferation of Visions

Any if not most of the great vision sequences in modern Europe have provoked waves of replication. Visions in the Papal States and at La Salette, Lourdes, Marpingen, Knock, Fatima, Limpias, Beauraing, and Siracusa each produced a skein of similar events. Those at Medjugorje especially, because of televised publicity, elicited hundreds if not thousands of other visions. In all these cases there seems to be a chain reaction. Visions that gain public attention spark others that provoke yet others, until the media becomes jaded and stops reporting them and the pent-up emotional energy of consumers is exhausted. A careful look at the emergence of subsequent visions as news of Ezkioga spread reveals processes that may also be at work in the transmission, particularly by children, of other complex paranormal constructs like airborne witches or, more recently, Satanic baby killers.

Seers at Ezkioga came from all the areas that sent pilgrims, including the neighboring provinces of Alava, Navarra, and Bizkaia. But newspapers mentioned many of these seers only once, their visions often being weak

________________________________________

― 165 ―

and vague. There were invisible barriers that excluded many and favored the regular Gipuzkoan crowd at Ezkioga. The language of the ceremonies and the visions was predominantly Basque, which left out the Castilian speakers of Alava and most of Navarra. There was no regular public transport from Navarra. There were trains from Bizkaia to Zumarraga, but Bizkaians spoke a different dialect and had a quite separate identity that made the provincial boundary a cultural frontier. With few exceptions the better known seers, those with habitual "strong" visions, came from the southern, highland, half of Gipuzkoa, the Goiherri, where villages or towns sent buses daily or weekly to Ezkioga through the fall of 1931. Each of these seers came with an entourage, or cuadrilla, of relatives, friends, neighbors, and converts.[1]

Visions spread out from Ezkioga in three ways: newspapers reported the events throughout Spain, pilgrim seers returned from Ezkioga to their home villages, and later seers abandoned Ezkioga because of church edicts. In all there were dozens of mini-Ezkiogas. They took place out of the public eye, almost totally unrecorded. The only way to find out about them was through the hazy memories of participants fifty years later. In several towns people were reluctant to speak of the visions, as the child seers were now adult neighbors. I can only hope that those towns where people did talk to me are representative of the others. In any case, the reader will have to forgive me if I am imprecise with dates and discreet about names.

Visions Spread or Brought to Light by News

While the visions were in part behavior that was learned, they were also behavior that was permitted and rewarded. Some people already knew how to have visions but had done so only in private. The publicity Ezkioga received allowed people to share their religious experiences and showed them uses for their contacts with another plane of reality. It was not necessary for all such people to go to Ezkioga; it was sometimes enough that they knew of the free-for-all inspiration by word of mouth, by radio, or by newspaper. The effect of the sensational news was a sensitizing to the subject throughout Spain in seers, potential seers, and the media alike. This effect worked quickly, often at considerable distance. Within weeks of the first reports in July 1931, the press was noting visions in many other places.

Bachicabo, a hamlet in Alava, was one of the first places to reproduce the visions. Located in the valley of Valdegovia on the border with Burgos, it was beyond the zone from which buses took people to Ezkioga. The first to see the Virgin there was the fourteen-year-old son of an emigrant to Sestao, a Bilbao industrial suburb; the boy was back in the village for the summer. On about 2 August 1931 he was tending oxen a kilometer from the village near a spring called Petrás, where the villagers often stopped on their annual pilgrimage to the shrine

________________________________________

― 166 ―

of Nuestra Señora de Angosto. In a cavity of a large boulder he saw a flower, and when he went to touch it, the Virgin Mary appeared in its place.

The villagers did not heed the boy, but a group of them paused before the boulder on the evening of August 6 on their way to the fiesta of San Salvador in Espejo. One of them, Ignacio, aged about twenty-two, went to the rock, put his hand in the cavity, and said, "Aquí no hay Virgen ni hostias!" This was a blasphemous way of saying that the Virgin was not there. But then he shouted that she was indeed there and lay down, weeping, on the ground. His friends wrapped him in a blanket.

A woman and a man who had been present described that moment to me with great gusto and a certain amount of jocular hindsight.[2] They themselves saw nothing but took the matter seriously. That evening the boy from Sestao, accompanied by the Bachicabo sexton Timoteo, recounted his original vision to the parish priest in Espejo. The priest was skeptical: "You must have heard about the people seeing apparitions in Ezkioga." Nevertheless, the fiesta was interrupted as everybody, including the priest, went to the boulder and said the rosary.

As in the rest of the nuclear villages in northern Spain, the people of Bachicabo were used to doing things together and in combination with neighboring communities. They had common land they used for pasture and commons they shared with other villages; they helped one another with harvests; they shared shrines with other villages; and, of course, they prayed together in mass and in the rosary. Whether they themselves or the boy from Sestao had heard of the Virgin of Ezkioga, as is likely, or not, there were precedents in their own local geography for divine visions. They knew that the Virgin de Angosto was supposed to have appeared in ancient times to the shepherd Cecilio and that in a nearby village an image of San Lorenzo was supposed to have returned by itself to its mountain site at night.

What the Bachicabo villagers decided to do was similar to what the people at Ezkioga had done. Every night for at least three months they gathered to say the rosary, led by a youth, while several seers, all of them males, had visions of the "Virgen de Petrás." For the first month they met at the original vision site. Bachicabo had 170 inhabitants (in 1983 there were only twelve families), and at night after supper the village would empty out. One woman I talked to felt so impelled to go that she would leave her fifteen-day-old baby behind alone. People came from the surrounding villages, Barrio, Tobalina, Salcedo, Salinas de Añana, Espejo, and even from the town of Miranda del Ebro. Later, in September, they held the evening prayer sessions in the village itself, and the Virgin appeared to seers in various houses. In late October people were collecting money (probably to build a chapel), but by the winter the visions were over.[3]

People in Bachicabo most enjoy recalling the funny incidents: the night a seer in trance said, "Boost me up into the pine tree, for I am going to throw myself

________________________________________

― 167 ―

down" (they did, he did not); how one seer's announcement, "The Virgin of Petrás is arriving now, wearing sandals," tended to coincide with the flash of headlights on a distant highway; the time they went to the site and found a crudely lettered sign that read, "By the intercession of the Virgin, the spring water of Petrás make you powerfully hungry"; the night a male seer asked the Virgin how she was going to punish those who had spoken ill of him, provoking a lady to have a fit and scream, "O Virgen Santísima, no, for we are all sinners!"; the night a shoemaker from Espejo ordered spectators to come down from the pine trees where they were perched; the time a seer had a vision that everybody had to harvest Eusebio's potatoes (they did). They also recall the night that the seer Ignacio's father announced in the Petrás pine grove, "My son has sent me to say that the Virgin has said that this is more sacred than the church." And they remember that the local priests were against the visions.

Nevertheless people recall that they were fully caught up in the events at the time. One of the women said, "If you did not go to the rosary and to see what happened, it seemed you were lacking something…. It was not something fun, because what they said there was so—I don't know, so serious…. Sometimes it was frightening because of what some of them said they saw."

The seers obviously knew what was going on elsewhere in Spain. One night Ignacio said, "Good evening. The Virgin of Petrás has left for Toledo." And everyone had to wait until she returned, when they said another rosary. We can date this moment with some precision, for in Guadamur, Toledo, children began to have visions at the end of August. The news was in the national press starting 29 August 1931 and in the press of Alava on September 2. Toledo has already shown a marked interest in Ezkioga, and the Catholic newspaper there had published more on the apparitions than any other periodical of the Spanish interior.[4]

Some Catholics in the province of Toledo had reason to welcome heaven's hand. For instance, they read about class rebellion when socialist farmworkers almost succeeded in throwing the mayor from a balcony of a town hall. They read as well about shootings and stabbings in the meeting of a town council; about riots to protest arrests—in one town of a man who made fun of the mayor and in another of a man who struck a private guard; and about invasions of private estates to cut down trees and to poach.[5]

In the wake of the events at Ezkioga people of all persuasions were alert to the idea of supernatural help. On August 18 a republican newspaper reported that a fortune-teller was predicting "great unrest in the future of Spain."[6]And the following day another newspaper, in all likelihood unaware that visions were going on in several other places already, ran a cartoon on the front page suggesting that sleepy villages needed a miracle, "as in Ezquioga," to attract summer visitors.

________________________________________

― 168 ―

On August 19 El Debate presented a short report about a series of visions that had started a week earlier in the Toledo village of Rielves. The article revealed a community divided into Catholics and socialists, believing women and disbelieving men.[7]

[Dateline Toledo, August 18] We are informed from the village of Rielves that during the night of the eleventh the thirteen-year-old girl Teófila, when she was seated at the door of her house, saw a glow issuing from the window bars of the house of Don Lucio Péerez. She called her mother, Celestina, who said that it was the Virgin Mary with a white mantle.

On the fourteenth Marcelino, the father of the girl, saw a resplendence in the same place and called his wife, saying, "This is what you saw." She answered that it was, indeed, the Virgin, although this time more beautiful, with her outline more clear, with a white mantle and a black blouse. Celestina Parra, the mother of the girl, says she is willing to give her testimony under oath.

On the night of the fifteenth, the vision appeared on the facade of the house of Justo Pérez Díaz and was seen by the girl Amparo, who called her uncle, Agapito Centellas, and her aunt. Agapito was so moved that he knelt and took off his cap, crying, "What do you want, Most Holy Virgin?" but he received no reply. Justo Pérez Díaz also saw her. He is a person who is not a believer and says it was without doubt the bust of an image. Two socialists who were on their way home saw the vision on the window bars of the house of Isidoro Morales. "Look there on those bars," said one of them, moved, and the other replied, "It is the Virgin!" Both told their wives when they arrived home.

The placement of this report on an inside page, the absence of a follow-up report, perhaps even the explicitness with which the article addressed the issue of unbelievers, all indicate to me that what happened in Rielves was something Catholic newspapers would not normally have printed. Given the anxieties of the times, the social strife, and awareness of the events at Ezkioga, however, the story made it over the threshold of acceptance—but even then the paper reported it as an anecdote. The vague, ghostlike luminous sightings by villagers on the bars of various windows were not the stuff of Lourdes. The visions at Bachicabo never made it even that far. Both were episodes that under normal circumstances would have gone unreported; the bigger news from Ezkioga "smoked them out," as it were. We saw how similar visions in Torralba de Aragón in April and Mendigorría in May ended quickly. That the visions at Rielves and Bachicabo were believed and reported was a result of the same tense religious and political climate that nurtured the visions of the Ezkioga children.

The subsequent visions at Guadamur were more successful in attracting attention and respect. Toledo's Catholic newspaper, El Castellano , reported them fully. The diocese of Toledo, then running on collegial leadership after the

________________________________________

― 169 ―

expulsion of Cardinal Segura, permitted these reports. Both sets of visions that were permitted major publicity during the Republic were in dioceses where the bishops were in exile.

There was a connection. Two deputies from Toledo, Dimas Madariaga and Ramón Molina, a canon in the Toledo cathedral, went to Ezkioga on 16 August 1931. This was three days after Antonio de la Villa's attack on the visions in the Cortes, and the Toledans went in order to rebut him. Molina described the visions in El Castellano a week later. Another canon of Toledo, Gregorio del Solar, was at Ezkioga for a longer period, until mid-October, dressed in a threadbare cassock and deeply involved in the visions, to the point of learning Basque. Del Solar became convinced at Ezkioga that he was destined for martyrdom. Another canon, the dean of the cathedral, José Polo Benito, who was an unsuccessful candidate in the elections for the Cortes, wrote that the Ezkioga visions and those of Guadamur were "God's offensive."[8]

On August 26, two days after Molina's article describing the visions of Benita Aguirre, two daughters of the Guadamur physician came back from their evening paseo saying that they had seen the Virgen de la Soledad in an olive grove near the town. The next evening at the same time a boy said he had had to stop his bicycle on the road near the grove to avoid hitting the Virgin. That night up to five hundred persons gathered at the site. Thirty of them claimed they had seen the figure, slightly raised above the ground. In addition to children, a doctor, town councillors, and young farmworkers were among the seers. This news was published first in nearby Toledo and then in Madrid.[9]

As a result of the publicity attendance at the visions surged. On the night of August 28, one thousand people went from the adjacent villages and Toledo and on the night of September 2 seven thousand. By then seers included not only adults and children from Guadamur but outsiders from a wide range of surrounding towns, including a "señorita" aged twenty-four from Madrid, where photographs of many of the seers appeared in an illustrated newspaper. On September 1 a speaker mentioned these visions in the Cortes.[10]

The archdiocese of Toledo took the events seriously, and on September 2 after the rosary the boys choir of the cathedral performed in the village. Apparently the left read the visions in political terms, for groups of youths in Toledo's main square harassed the city's pilgrims. While the visions at Ezkioga and Bachicabo occurred in a largely sympathetic environment, those of New Castile faced active hostility and ridicule.[11]

The Guadamur visions or the reports of them in turn sparked others or other reports. Republican newspapers delighted in locating new visions. On about August 28 in Sigüenza the head of the telegraph office and his family saw the Virgin on the tower of the cathedral. And on about September 4 in Guadalajara many people gathered near the church of San Gil because children were seeing the Virgin on an arch at the entrance. Apparently unbeknownst to the outside

________________________________________

― 170 ―

world, there had been some local visions going on in Orgiva (Granada) since April. Following the publicity about Ezkioga, a local leftist newspaper brought these visions to light and the Madrid leftist press followed suit. The press claimed that the visions took place in a cave, that an entrance fee was charged, and that there were sightings of "Saint Joseph, Saint Roch with his dog, Curro Cuchares, Primo de Rivera, Saint John Nepomucene, Juana la Loca, Saint Exuperio, Nebuchadnezzar, and Attila's horse." Madrid newspapers published cartoons making fun of the rash of visions.[12]

By this point the visions must have been an embarrassment for churchmen even in Toledo. As at Ezkioga, so at Guadamur: different seers saw different apparitions and there were too many visionaries to control. Although the parish

________________________________________

― 171 ―

"Summer Theater": "Step right in folks and see the latest, only two pesetas"; "It's about

to start"; "Apparition of the authentic Virgin, guaranteed against imitations and falsifications."

From El Liberal (Madrid), 6 September 1931. Courtesy Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid

priest defended his seers, El Castellano stopped its daily reports on September 11, and the visions slowly decreased. When I went to Guadamur' in 1975, oldsters treated the matter diffidently; the younger generation did not know about it.[13]

Visions Spread by Contact: The Role of Children

By mid-August 1931, about the same time that the news of Ezkoga began to show its effects throughout Spain, a more local kind of spread was occurring. Returning pilgrims and seers took home the Ezkioga liturgy, emotion, and access to the divine. In adjoining Navarra the same kind of replication spread the visions from village to village. These villages were located in a band between one and two hours' travel from Ezkioga, from which the new shrine was accessible but inconvenient. Seers from the Ezkioga area who worked as servants elsewhere and especially children from elsewhere who had visions at Ezkioga were key vectors in this spread because they could not get to the main site frequently.

The only substantive article on the Ezkioga visions in a Basque republican newspaper, El Liberal of Bilbao, revealed that other visions were taking place in Iturmendi, Bakaiku, and other towns of Navarra south of the Goiherri.[14] The Barranca is the broad, high valley of the Arakil river, with high mountains to the north and south. Its inhabitants do not live dispersed in farmhouses, as in most of the Basque Country, but rather clustered in tight villages, as in Alava to the west. But unlike the people of Alava, those of the Barranca speak Basque, and in particular the dialect of their neighbors in Gipuzkoa. As in much of Pyrenean

________________________________________

― 172 ―

Spain and France, the house is the major unit of identity. People belong to a given house and are identified by their house names. The houses are passed on through impartible inheritance, and noninheriting children who marry have to seek their fortunes elsewhere. In 1931 the wealthier households included servants and farm laborers.

From the Barranca two roads wind down into Gipuzkoa: the main highway from Vitoria to San Sebastián, which passes through Altsasu and enters Gipuzkoa at Zegama, and a smaller road from Arbizu through the mountains to Ataun. These roads and countless trails have served traditionally as conduits for frequent contact. Sheep from the mountains of Navarra came down to winter in the milder climes of Gipuzkoa; young women from the Barranca found homes in the convents of the river towns and young men jobs in the factories. The high valley is less than an hour from Ezkioga by car, bus, or truck. But its people—mostly farmers and shepherds, apart from workers in an industrial enclave around Altsasu—were more isolated and poorer, cut off linguistically from the prosperous cities of Estella and Pamplona to the south or Vitoria to the west. They were also devout, and in the first decades of the century the towns received frequent missions, given particularly by the Capuchins in Altsasu.

In the first weeks of the visions the road through Ataun brought constant bus-and truckloads of Navarrese pilgrims to Ezkioga. José Miguel de Barandiarán, the Basque ethnographer from Ataun, remembered them passing in front of his house and once stopping nearby because a girl from Navarra said she was seeing the infant Jesus on a rock in the river.[15] In July Navarrese seers at Ezkioga included a man from Lekunberri (on July 15) and on July 16 a boy from Errotz (near Izurdiaga) and a girl from Arbizu. And when the canon Juan B. Altisent stopped in Arbizu to ask directions, he was told that several children of the village had been lucky enough to see the Virgin.[16]

In June 1984 I drove to the Barranca to search for memories of what had happened fifty years before. In some towns the atmosphere was tense. The district has been a stronghold of Herri Batasuna, the political party supporting the ETA fighters who from 1968 have kept up a campaign of violence to force Basque separation from Spain. The day before I arrived a demonstration in Etxarri-Aranatz had left one man dead. In Arbizu my guide was Francisco Mendiueta Araña, expert in accordion, harmonica, singing, and whistling. He remembered the truck that came at dusk to take people down to Ezkioga. People were packed into it like upright candles in a box; many were carsick.

The visions in Arbizu started at Ansota, about one and a half kilometers north of the town center, in higher pastureland belonging to the township. The first seers were girls, who were tending cows, but boys had visions too. The visions would start in the late afternoon and go into the night, when the townspeople came and everyone would say the rosary. When I asked Francisco Mendiueta, eight years old at the time of the visions, whether before then anyone had ever

________________________________________

― 173 ―

seen witches, he said yes, that with his father at the same place he had seen fireballs on Mount Aitzkorri. The visions at Ansota lasted about a month and then shifted to a new site, still to the north of town, on the road at a place named Baldasoro, where there was a garage and a large ash tree. Finally, they moved to a walnut tree at the cast end of the village. There people prayed with great faith at an altar put up against the Zubaldi house, and one after another the seers would keel back into trance. The visions continued for a couple of months and then petered out. Of the seers Francisco could name four girls and two boys aged seven to twelve, the children of farmers and masons, but he said there were more. A priest native to the village did not believe and said it was witch-stuff and a lie.

It was hard for Francisco and his friends to remember what the seer children saw, apart from the Virgin and the village dead in heaven and hell. What most surprised them was that their pals could perform little miracles. They remember one boy in vision, who somehow knew that Francisco and a friend, out of sight, were rattling a heavy metal ring and called out, "Paco and Blas will go to hell!" And particularly they remembered the seer children, when the visions were over, holding out invisible candy given them by heavenly beings, then eating it. They heard the crinkle of the candies being unwrapped but saw nothing.[17]

These stories, like those from Bachicabo, are at once delightful, like homemade fairy tales, and moving. They reveal children and young people who found an opening and accepted an unprecedented gift of authority and usefulness in the village arena. In these backwaters the stakes were less titanic than at Ezkioga, where rural children and adults were eventually negotiating with the gods for the future of the nation and humanity before an audience of thousands. Here the miracles and stakes were often on a smaller scale, involving bread-and-butter questions of daily life among neighbors.

Francisco Mendiueta took me to Torrano (now Dorrao), where we ended up in the large dark house of Felipe Rezano and Felisa Lizarraga. They first went to the visions in other villages and then were intimately involved in those of Dorrao, still believed in them, and talked about them directly, simply, and without complexes. But they said these events were something they had largely forgotten.[18]

The main seer in Dorrao was Inés Igoa, who was about seventeen years old in 1931. Inés would fall into trance during the rosary in her house or outdoors with most of the small village present. She narrated what she was seeing in her trance ("ahora ha salido no-sé-qué"), including, they remember, the Virgin and the Heavenly Father, and she would tell them things "as in a sermon." As for the content of the sermons, they recalled only that she foretold a civil war with the death of many sons. On the whole, they preferred the predictions of Inés to those of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

The only other Dorrao seer was Felisa's brother, José, then twenty years old, but he did not have his visions in a trancelike state, and for Felipe, at least, they

________________________________________

― 174 ―

carried less authority. Felipe was one of five youths chosen by the Virgin through Inés as "angels" to help organize the visions. One of their jobs was to cut pine trees, bring them to the village, and set up an altar for the visions. He was a little embarrassed about his being an angel—"How do I know if it was true or not? We said, this cannot be true because we are the worst in the village. What do we know?"

As children Felipe and Felisa both wanted to have visions and went to various sites trying to see. But neither could. At most, they remembered their friends noticing stars that were especially bright. One imagines children, teenagers, and adults peering intently into the heavens at night. Felisa's father and grandfather were great devotees of the Virgin. They took Felisa, who would have been only nine or ten, to Ezkioga three times after the visions in Dorrao had begun.

By a year after her first vision Inés's messages, as reported by Padre Burguera, were quite sophisticated and included references to Freemasonry, Christ the King, the reign of Jesus and Mary in Spain, and a chastisement. Inés also suffered the crucifixion. She was well aware of the government offensive in the fall of 1932.[19]

At Iturmendi the seers were two boys, aged nine and ten, the sons of farmers. They had their visions on the flat threshing ground called Martinikorena, on the edge of the village, where there were some walnut trees. They too would fall into vision during a rosary at which much of the village was present. In Iturmendi the parish priest forbade an outdoor altar. By identifying some of the village dead in hell these boys caused deep rifts in the town. Not everyone believed their visions, and "some wise guy made a jack-o'-lantern out of a sugar beet with a

________________________________________

― 175 ―

candle inside and put it in the cemetery." People remember that the visions lasted two or three months.[20]

At Etxarri-Aranatz a number of seers were having visions by early October. Victoriano Juaristi, president of the Colegio de Médicos of Pamplona, a distinguished psychiatrist and man of letters, was sent there by the bishop of Pamplona when the visions had already built up momentum. On 25 October 1931 he published a critical article in Diario de Navarra . Juaristi's son Carlos, also a doctor, took photographs, and his photos of Etxarri-Aranatz and Unanu, however dark and blurred, are the only, precious, visual evidence I could find of a brief period in the Barranca in the last half of 1931 in which every night children took control.[21] Victoriano Juaristi described five or six girls of Etxarri-Aranatz on a low stage separated from the onlookers by barbed wire. During the rosary, "they fell back on their backs one after another, like dolls in a carnival shooting gallery." When Carlos Juaristi fired a magnesium flash, the villagers screamed, apparently thinking the devil was about to appear, and then roughed him up. One man exclaimed, "Coño! Pues eso se avisa" or, approximately, "Shoot! Give us some warning."

In Etxarri-Aranatz I spoke with José Maiza Auzmendi, an old believer who had gone on foot to Ezkioga and to other towns in the Barranca to witness the visions. In his town the visions took place on the south side of the highway to Altsasu, before an altar of sorts. After two or three months people gradually stopped going, and the child seers ordered a cross to be placed there. When the parish priest refused to permit a cross, Maiza's father, father-in-law, and uncle

________________________________________

― 176 ―

put a cross up in the village cemetery. On the whole, the attitude of the village priests was neutral, he said. The anecdotes townspeople recall confirm the local flavor of the visions. One girl seer relayed news that Serafina, a woman who had died young, was in some difficulty in the afterlife because of an unkept promise. An older woman had been dubbed "Santa Rita" for the saint she was always seeing. And one night the Holy Family appeared with a spirit donkey, and children and adults followed them with lighted candles and lanterns.[22]

The visions in Bakaiku began by the river and the train tracks, where there were poplar trees. According to El Liberalthis was in mid-August.

At Bacaicoa the infant Jesus appeared and spoke to a villager who made doughnuts [churros ]; but the man could not reveal what he heard as it was a secret. Nevertheless he says he has it all written down in a sealed envelope. The doughnut man made a penitential promise not to speak at all and to go for several days to the apparition site barefoot and with his head hanging down.[23]

The writer observed that children were usually playing at the place the infant Jesus appeared, and he commented cynically that the doughnut business was doing very well. He said the Virgin was seen in "another nearby village" walking in a poplar grove along the banks of the river.

The visions were still in full force on 17 November 1931 when Padre Burguera arrived. He was particularly impressed with María Celaya, who kept a notebook entitled "Las Apariciones de Bacaicoa," starting with her first vision on October 16. Burguera accompanied her to Ezkioga and observed her again in her home village. In all he named eleven seers there: a woman aged 58; girls aged 17, 12, 11, 11, 10, 9, 9, 8, and 5; and a boy aged 8. These children included two sets of siblings.[24]

According to Burguera the visions had begun with two eight-year-old children, a boy and a girl, playing by the river. There they met a strange child and gathered mulberries with him. The child told them that he was named Jesus, his mother was named Mary, and they should go to Ezkioga where his mother was waiting for them. They noticed that his hands, unlike theirs, did not become stained by the berries and that he walked on the water of the river. A wealthy female relative duly took the children by car to Ezkioga, about thirty kilometers away, and there they saw the Virgin, who confirmed their vision by the river and gave them secrets. More children went to the river site and had visions of Mary and the child Jesus, whom they referred to as the Infant Jesus of Prague, after the Carmelite devotion popular in the zone.[25]

At Bakaiku the visions received a boost from some of the village elite, including the wife of the civil engineer and politician Wenceslao Goizueta, and the schoolteacher, Francisca Setoáin. When Burguera went to the school, eight children went into trance for him. He referred to the teacher as a "tireless

________________________________________

― 177 ―

apostle." Perhaps in the vision messages there is an echo of her interest, for the first two seers said that the Virgin told them the visions were for the people of Spain, "who honored God so much and now officially dishonor him." Messages like this should alert us to the bias of oral testimony based on memory. No doubt local people are much more likely to retain anecdotes anchored in kinship and place and less likely to remember messages of political or theological importance. By contrast, the written reports of ideologues like Burguera would likely leave out the more local meanings. These seers were speaking simultaneously to both levels.[26]

The seers also ran into opposition, especially from some of the men of the village, which María Celaya described in her notebook. For a while their visions attracted spectators from a wide radius, but as more villages had their own seers, with messages more specific to their neighbors and problems, fewer people went to Bakaiku.[27]

People I talked to remembered the Lizarraga visions beginning after those of Bakaiku, Lizarraga-ergoien was on an excitement route, the road from Lezaun and the Estella region of Navarra, which sent many busloads of pilgrims to Ezkioga in the months of July and August 1931. Such routes became corridors of enthusiasm. Francisco Argandoña, who as a boy went from Lezaun, said that after an outdoor rosary all the children, agreeing with whoever spoke first, saw the saints arrive from over the mountains. The night he was there, the procession began with Saint Joseph, centered on the infant Jesus, and ended with Saint Adrian on a white horse. The next morning he was taken to a girl who said she played with the infant Jesus whenever she wanted to and who handed him an invisible baby Jesus so small it could fit in the palm of her hand.[28]

By late November, as at Ezkioga, the visions had taken a turn for the macabre and apocalyptic. Burguera saw twelve seers from seven households: a woman aged 21; girls aged 12, 12, 11, 11, 10, 9, and 4; and four boys, all of them younger brothers of girl seers, aged 13, 8, 7, and 6. Another observer put the number of seers at more than thirty and wrote:

The seers seemed to be petrified, first supplicating with their eyes upward and their hands joined, then horrified by what they were seeing in their terrible and tragic vision, sometimes giving screams of fear for the catastrophe that they saw coming in the war and other chastisements that would occur in the world.

As in the other villages, the seers had an altar on the threshing ground and an enclosure for their visions, and adults brought chairs and benches to sit on. Some visions were right out in the road. One boy had a vision on top of a delivery van; when it drove off, the boy fell off but was unhurt.[29]

The Lizarraga seers said the devil attacked them. According to the psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi, adult seers saw Saint Michael struggling and tried to help him

________________________________________

― 178 ―

by hitting the devil with a candlestick. Seers said that on the highway the devil tried to get them to throw off the many rosaries, medals, and crucifixes they were wearing for the divine to bless. Burguera himself at least twice gave his rosary to the seers to hold when they were seeing the infant Jesus. A town official eventually forbade the visions. One household with four child seers resisted and the matter ended in a lawsuit. This family was still holding visions at home in the fall of 1933.

From Lizarraga the visions spread to adjacent Dorrao and then down the road to Unanu. While people in Unanu refused to speak of the visions in 1984, they were open with Juaristi in October 1931. He left a striking account and a valuable photograph that shows an altar decked with pine boughs like that of Dorrao.

We are at the foot of the pointed peak of San Donato, which looks like a gigantic altar. And above the green and black floor of the valley, next to the cliff base, there is a circle of weak, reddish light, which has drawn to it about fifty persons who are kneeling. In the middle of the circle there are four children and an equal number of women, kneeling as well, facing the base of the cliff, whence the light comes. An eldery man, thin and erect, recites with a dry, firm, clear voice a litany that the women answer; then he gets up and leads them in a hymn.

The light is hidden in the boughs of some high bushes, formed into a strange kind of multicolored oven shape; it seems to be some kind of altar. Suddenly, one of the girls opens her arms out like a cross, throws her head back, arcs her body, and goes stiff, the moonlight bathing her pale face, her eyes, as if dead, staring unblinking into the infinite. Immediately a boy, younger, and another boy fall into a similar cataleptic state, and two women with white coifs hold them. The prayers continue without interruption.

We are filled with awe, spectators in the dark at a rite like that which must have been the moon cult of the ancient Vascones.

The children come back to life, first the older girl, then the others. The girl says she has seen the Virgin with a blue mantle and a silver crown, barefoot and with golden rays in her hands, and the Virgin told her … that we should go and have supper! The spell is broken and we mix with the spectators, who get up. Some friendly words in Basque serve to relieve their fear and distrust, and the children (the youngest is barely four years old) answer our questions as any children would, their mothers filling out their replies.

The girl is lively and communicative, and she is aware of the authority she wields among her kind. Always "by order of the Virgin," she says how much they have to pray, and who has to do it; she orders that the Daughters of Mary spend Sunday making paper flowers and that people come in the evening. She recounts struggles between Saint Michael, dressed in gold with his flashing sword, and a blackened, horned devil. To a request for more details, she says that the devil wears a black jacket, goes without pants,

________________________________________

― 179 ―

and uses a staff. She describes macabre processions, identifying the dead of the town as they go past. Behind the dead walks a young idiot girl who used to work with a hatchet; she carries it in the funeral procession as well and limps because she wounded herself with it trying to open the gates of heaven. She blesses pacharanes , or bilberries, so that the sick can eat them and get well.

Time and again she falls into a new fit, followed by the other children. Then we are able to observe them as doctors and notice all the signs of a neurosis.

The parish priest, whom we visit, is an educated man with common sense who gives us interesting information and is happy that we doctors

________________________________________

― 180 ―

have intervened to set right something he always thought was pathological and harmful to true faith. But his counsel and his sermons along these lines have fallen on deaf ears. The seer girl has "her" church; she wants nothing to do with the "other," or with the priest. And the mothers consider themselves happy for the "celestial" favor that their children have received.[30]

Juaristi presented visions as neurotic and pathological. In Pamplona he was something of a liberal, a black sheep who did not attend church and who the bishop knew in advance would not sympathize with the phenomena. In his article Juaristi pointed out that waves of hysterical behavior were common in all times and that in the past the seers would have been accused of witchcraft. Yet his observations do not appear to have been skewed, for the setting and the social dynamic he described are similar to what we know about in other villages.

Like José Antonio Laburu's lectures, Juaristi's article bore the authority of science. Pedro Balda, the Iraneta town secretary and scribe for another seer, described for a friend its impact on the Barranca:

Finally a doctor declared that it was not ecstacy but instead a sickness called "neurosis," and that it had occurred in a similar form in Germany before the European war. It did not take much for people to lose the fervor of the first days, and many who were believers in the supernatural [aspect of the visions] became enemies of the mysterious phenomena…. If they fed them well, some said, the neurosis would disappear immediately. Others said that with a good beating every day, they would stop having visions at once. Most said that it was a "farce." That is why most of the believers withdrew from attending what had attracted the attention of so many thousands.[31]

There were visions in two other Barranca villages, Lakuntza and Iraneta. In Lakuntza a seventeen-year-old Bakaiku youth who worked in the lock factory told people about the visions in Bakaiku and led them down the railroad line to the regular site there. When he got there, he claimed to see the Virgin in the poplars by the river.

Two boys, sons of farmers, claimed to see the Virgin in Lakuntza in an oak tree near the railroad tracks, on the road to the mountain, and on a door-latch in the village. According to one witness, the people of the town attended for a while, but on one night when the boys announced a vision at two in the morning in the pouring rain, an elderly man announced that he was going to stay home, dry and in bed; that seemed to put things in perspective and no one went.

Lakuntza seems to have turned against the visions rather quickly, perhaps because of its factory workers but in part because of Blas Alegría, a priest born in the village. He was outspoken against the visions, maintaining that "the Virgin is in heaven, and she does not leave it." The man I spoke to most in Lakuntza had another reason for not believing. He was twenty-nine in 1931 and worked

________________________________________

― 181 ―

in the factory with the seer from Bakaiku. He kept pressing the boy, who finally told him, "Well, when a lot of people go, I say that I see because they pay me; but when just a few people go, I don't see and I go home."[32]

Six kilometers east of Lakuntza lies Iraneta. This is the Barranca town in which the visions lasted the longest, primarily because of the special alliance between a seer, Luis Irurzun, and the town secretary, Pedro Balda. I talked to Balda in the old-age home in Alkotz and to Irurzun in San Sebastián. Balda, born in 1894 in Iraneta, where there were about sixty houses, was the eldest of seven siblings in a poor family without land. His father was a pastry and chocolate maker and his mother took in laundry, made bread in people's houses, and did agricultural labor. Before her marriage, Balda's mother cleaned and decorated the church for a parish priest who belonged to Luis Irurzun's "house." The priest took an interest in young Pedro Balda, made him an altar boy, and taught him to sing the mass in Latin. Starting when he was ten years old Pedro worked as a farm laborer, and he barely learned to read and write until his military service, during which he studied and rose to be a sergeant. In 1923 he became the town secretary.

Balda took a keen interest in all matters religious and went to Ezkioga on 18 July 1931, one of the big days. Then, when the visions started in the Barranca, he visited several sites, particularly Lizarraga. His self-education, rare in a town secretary, gave him perhaps a more independent frame of mind and left him closer to the people. Similarly, his informal training in the church, like that of many sextons, demystified for him the opinions of the clergy. He paid little heed to the first seer in Iraneta, a girl about eight years old named Inocencia who saw the Virgin in late September and told people to pray the rosary. Others began to have visions at the outdoor site, including a disbelieving adult relative of the girl, María Arratibel, who saw Saint Michael the Archangel. On September 29 another woman, Juana Huarte, aged thirty, also saw the Virgin and Saint Michael, whose shrine on Mount Aralar dominates the Barranca.[33]

Luis Irurzun, a youth aged eighteen, from a prosperous house, was not one of the persons who went to the visions. He liked to dance and play the accordion, which stricter members of the community considered "the devil's bellows." On October 12, when the Ezkioga visions were attracting large crowds and the Cortes was debating the separation of church and state, Luis was on his way with seven or eight youths to the fiestas of Lekunberri to see traveling puppeteers. They stopped briefly at the vision site in a field by the road, where a rosary was getting started. Luis was smoking, and a woman named Petra pulled the cigarette from his mouth, saying, "When you pray, do it right." Luis started to smoke again and suddenly lost consciousness.

Balda had been at the visions in Lizarraga that afternoon, and he claimed to me that the seer Nicasia Lacunza, aged twenty-one, had told him that Luis would have visions. On his return Balda heard what happened, and he found Luis at

________________________________________

― 182 ―

home in a stupor. The next day Luis had a vision of the Virgin with twelve stars around her and thereafter at three in the afternoon he had daily visions. As a friend and favored client of Luis's house, Balda was affected profoundly.

There were other new seers, including a contemporary of Luis's.[34] Balda remembered the two marching in unison as soldiers of the archangel. I wondered how much Balda himself, as a significant member of the audience and the only one keeping a record, helped to elicit bellicose visions. He had been reprimanded by the governor of Navarra because at the first town council meeting after the Republic was declared he had said, "We are in mourning." When recalling the visions, he emphasized the predictions of war.

Luis had a flair unmatched in the Barranca. He was capable of delivering sermons while in trance for up to two hours in a voice that could be heard across the fields. In spite of other new seers, he was indisputably the central figure. He claimed not only to know future events but also to read people's consciences and thereby provoke conversions. As he put it to me, "I had a grace to be able to look at someone and to know what was wrong with him—sickness and sins and everything."

Balda's family frequently drove Luis to Ezkioga, and his visions there and in Pamplona, Bilbao, and throughout Gipuzkoa spread his fame. Joaquín Sicart sold his photograph. Carmen Medina and Juan Bautista Ayerbe befriended him, and for a time Padre Burguera was his spiritual director. Luis was friendly with several seers, including Patxi, whom Carmen Medina took to Iraneta.

According to Luis, about a month after his visions started, in mid-November 1931, all the seers received orders from the governor of Navarra to submit to a medical examination. Then, at the height of his popularity, Luis went to Juaristi's clinic in Pamplona. In 1983 he told me that after twenty-five days the doctor confessed that medical science could not help and asked for his intercession with the Virgin. Luis also said that in Pamplona his companion from Iraneta, an atheist, tried to take him to a brothel, but when he saw the women inside he fell down the stairs unconscious.

Luis's visions continued on his return. He told me that at that point every day there were eight or ten buses of spectators, some of them from Pamplona, as well as those who came on foot. His fame increased because of a kind of miracle announced by Saint Michael in one of Luis's visions three days in advance. During the Litany on 8 December 1931 in the church packed with spectators, Luis's hands and shirt were suddenly covered with blood. Luis announced solemnly that the blood was "the tears of the Virgin." Marcelo Garciarena, the parish priest, who had no truck with the visions, snapped, "Shut up, fool." Still apparently in vision, Luis announced that the Virgin wanted him carried home, with the Salve to be sung along the way. As they carried him singing, Balda remembers that a woman came out of her house, furious, and said, "Throw him on the fire. That'll

________________________________________

― 183 ―

wake him up!" Balda saved the shirt as a relic and eventually Padre Burguera collected it.[35]

Most town councils in the Barranca had opposed the Republic in April 1931. By the end of 1932, however, many of them had town councillors who defined themselves as republicans.[36] The modus vivendi with the Republic worked against the visions. The church also came down against the visions, and most people in Iraneta sided with the parish priest. Some people found incongruities in the content of the visions. At first most spectators were from Iraneta and Ihabar, and one Iraneta woman stopped believing when in vision Luis said, "The Virgin has said that the girls from Ihabar should sing a hymn." The Iraneta woman saw no reason why the Virgin should single out the girls from Ihabar.[37]

________________________________________

― 184 ―

Nevertheless, Luis's visions survived the longest in public of all those in Navarra. In March 1932 Governor Bandrés called him to Pamplona and told him he would have no more visions, which earned the seer a headline and, doubtless, more followers. Irurzun told me he assured the governor that he was having visions at 3 P.M. every day and offered to return at that time, but the governor declined (in panic, Luis thought). He said the governor threatened him with jail but in fact did nothing, and Luis went home. At this point the Navarrese were still going to Ezkioga itself, some in buses from Pamplona and others on foot from the Barranca, praying out loud as they went. When the governor ordered the last outdoor vision stages and altars in the province dismantled, Iraneta was one of the holdouts. In October 1932 Luis was still having visions, and seers and their families from other places went to see and have visions with him. An occasional bus brought spectators from the city.[38]

In March 1933 Bishop Muniz y Pablos of Pamplona sent a circular to the priests of the valleys of Arakil and Burunda that forbade attendance at the visions and denied that they had any supernatural character.[39] José Maiza remembered being mocked in Lakuntza and Arbizu when he would walk to Iraneta from Etxarri-Aranatz. And the two families who were the last to go from Arbizu had to do so secretly, so much had public opinion there changed.

In May 1933 Raymond de Rigné brought J. A. Ducrot, a journalist from the French photo magazine VU , to Iraneta. By then Luis gave vision sermons in his house. Ducrot saw Luis fall backward "as if hit on the chin," for a while maintain a praying posture, eyes closed, but then begin to preach like a seasoned orator. "His voice, resonant, swells, takes on a poignant tone. Little by little he gets more deeply involved, and he lives what he describes." Luis then acted out a battle between Saint Michael and the devil, "like a tempest that shook the house." It ended as suddenly as it began. Luis answered Ducrot's questions, and from Luis's instructions the reporter made a sketch of the devil and Saint Michael. Luis told him that in the great chastisement "the sword of Saint Michael would kill people at the rate of two million every five minutes, and the earth would be almost depopulated in several hours." Luis's story constituted most of the third and concluding installment of Ducrot's report on Ezkioga. The cover showed Luis just as he had fallen to the floor, held by Pedro Balda and two other young men.[40]

Five months later there were only twenty-two spectators, and in May 1934 people attended from only four households.[41] Attendance was even sparser when Maritxu Erlanz arrived as the new schoolmistress, probably in 1935, and Pedro Balda took her to a secret session. By that time it was considered sinful to attend and Maritxu had to be careful not to be seen. The visions were no longer held daily. Only five men were present: three from Iraneta, one from Lakuntza, and the vision promoter Tomás Imaz. They said the rosary and the Litany and then Luis gave a cry in Basque and fell down. He was propped up with a pillow, his face began to sweat, and he delivered a long, disjointed, sermonlike speech in

________________________________________

― 186 ―

Spanish. He told of the call-up of conscripts, of a coming war, and of bodies in roadside ditches, with an admixture of biblical material. The highlight for Maritxu was that he seemed briefly to levitate, but her overall impression was a certain lack of spontaneity, a feeling that the vision was prepared, and she did not return. She told me that comparing Pedro Balda's version of Luis's sermon with what Luis actually said, it seemed that Balda was dressing up the language and adding things. Balda confirmed to me that in his enthusiasm he had interpolated material in the texts and that for that reason they should not be published.[42]

Balda's interpolations raise the difficult question of how to reconstruct what any of these visionaries said or what they wanted to say. Almost inevitably we are restricted to describing the multiple mirrors—the hopes and anxieties of the listeners—that distorted the messages. For instance, Balda included in his wide correspondence poems of his own, such as the one he vigorously recited to me at age ninety, composed in 1933 or 1934. I translate the last quatrains:

The right and the left laugh

at the Holy Apparition.

If they keep it up

they will be sent to hell .

What sorrow! What bitterness

will some day be felt

when God casts his sword

and shakes the world .

"That day is not far off"

the seers are saying,

and at the divine warnings

the people are laughing .

The laughter will cease

when the great fright comes,

and all the happiness

will change into tears .

For our enemies

that day will be horrible;

it will be a day of fulfillment

for the sons of Mary .

Hear the voice of Christ

who will come to reign soon,

for if Christ did not come

the world would be ruined .[43]

Derechas e izquierdas se ríen

de la Santa Aparición,

si persisten en su empeño

tendrán la condenación.

Qué tristezas! ¡Qué amarguras!

algún día se han de ver

cuando Dios lance la espada

que al mundo haga mover.

"El día no está lejano"

van diciendo los videntes

y de los avisos divinos

se van riendo las gentes.

Las risas se acabarán

cuando llegue el gran espanto

y todas las alegrías

se convirtirán en llanto.

Para nuestros enemigos

será espantoso ese día;

será día de ventura

para los hijos de María.

Escuchad la voz de Cristo

que pronto vendrá a reinar

que si Cristo no viniera,

el mundo se iba a arruinar.

Although Pedro Balda refined the written messages, it is clear that Luis not only took people aside to tell them (whether correctly or not) their private sins

________________________________________

― 187 ―

but also announced that certain people, like the male schoolteacher, would die. Pedro Balda wrote the vicar general Justo de Echeguren in Vitoria and over a back fence informed a priest in Iraneta that seers had foreseen their untimely end. These announcements were not well received, and many villagers came to look at Luis askance.

For what Luis and others were doing was risky. People knew they had visions of and struggles with the devil. If their predictions turned out to be accurate, the question could be posed: Did they act or speak with the devil's help? The fear of malevolence that led to accusations of witchcraft three hundred years earlier was still alive in the twentieth century. Rural folk were alert to the power of curses and of quasi-religious rituals to maim and kill. Once the church denounced the visions, not a few people, like the parish priest of Arbizu, judged them to be sorcery and shunned the seers. If the seers were wrong in their predictions, they could be labeled charlatans. The psychiatrist Juaristi opened yet another line of explanation: mental illness. In the long run his diagnosis may have helped to relieve seers of opprobrium, but in the short run it tended to isolate them, for Juaristi described the illness as contagious.[44]

There were other mini-Ezkiogas in the near vicinity. One sequence of visions took place in a pair of villages to the east of the Barranca, Izurdiaga and Irurtzun. According to one source, the Izurdiaga visions began on 11 October 1931, that is, at the height of those in the Barranca. At the beginning of December a priest, Marcelo Celigueta, reported to the vicar general of Pamplona on behalf of the pastor of Izurdiaga, his brother Patricio. For more than a month there had been three seers in Izurdiaga, two girls aged seven and ten and a boy aged eleven. Watched by about thirty children and ten adults, they were having visions every day during prayers to the Blessed Sacrament. The schoolmistress led these prayers in the church prior to the evening rosary. Perhaps because one of the girls was his niece, the parish priest was sympathetic.[45]

The youngest girl had been to Ezkioga. There the Virgin had said that she would make herself visible whenever the girl prayed a Hail Mary. Then the three children had visions on a hillside in Irurtzun for several days, attracting a thousand spectators. The littlest girl said the Virgin had given her a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which she gave to her schoolmistress to keep. The Virgin said there that those who kissed the little girl's hand or received the blessing of the other girl could receive Communion the following day. Like seers of the Barranca and at Ezkioga, the children saw an apocalyptic battle between devils and Saint Michael. There had been Irurtzun children who had had visions as well, but their parents had treated them harshly. The Izurdiaga seers learned from the Virgin that those parents would be punished. By December the Irurtzun outdoor visions had ended.

The sessions in the Izurdiaga church were similar to those in the rest of the Barranca. When the children first began their prayers, they would fall into

________________________________________

― 188 ―

"ecstasies" (Marcelo Celigueta's word) lasting up to an hour. They would offer flowers to the Virgin and at the end of the session distribute the flowers by name to the persons that the Virgin indicated, even if they did not know them. They did so on their knees and without removing their gaze from the Virgin.

Marcelo described other aspects of the visions as well.

Other times, after having put on behalf of the Virgin much fear into some child who was not praying or who was distracted, they would mark out with the petals of the flowers a kind of cloud that when they returned to their normal senses they explain is the perimeter of the aura, like that of the sun, around the Virgin; and within this they mark out another circle, like that which a person occupies when standing, and they do not let anyone go there or step there during the apparition.

They are given rosaries and medals so that at the end, when the children say the word "Bendición," the Virgin blesses them several times, or perhaps blesses several people in particular. And as the Virgin does it, the children once or several times make a perfect cross in blessing. Normally the rosaries in question are already blessed by a priest. One day they gave a rosary like the others to the girl when she was in ecstasy, and she rejected only this one. A priest, who had the authority to do so, made the sign of the cross and blessed it; and they gave it to the girl and she was not sure whether to accept it. She finally took it, and without waking up from her ecstatic sleep or whatever, she gave it by name to the girl it belonged to. After the session they asked her, "Why did you not accept the rosary the first time and then accept it later?" "Because the Virgin did not want it because it was not blessed." "And why later?" "Because it had been blessed." "Then who blessed it?" "I don't know, but the Virgin said it was now blessed."

During the ecstasy, their eyes are always fixed on something; their retinas are motionless in spite of the sharp glare of a light put before them, and when their bodies are pricked they feel nothing. The first days they appeared to be frightened and wept because the Sorrowing Virgin wept, and later they are seen smiling because she does not weep. You can see them speaking to the Virgin and answering. A person close to them can follow the conversation. Then they say something like, "Virgen Santísima, Save Spain," and after finishing, they say that the Virgin will save Spain.

Asked on someone's request if certain persons have been saved, of almost all they say yes—of one they said that he needed two Rosaries for his soul. A woman asked that the Virgin give the name of one of the souls that was saved . "That question should not be asked; [the woman] knows the name." Another time they asked where three (deceased) persons were, and the children understood, as with the previous woman. The response, that "the ones who are dead are in heaven, but do not ask about the other one because you know he is alive and in what village he lives," was true.

Celigueta also wrote that the children in vision used flower petals to make on the altar a perfect design of a monstrance and a decorative host with a cross

________________________________________

― 189 ―

in the center. And he said that "most persons present noted an intense fragrance of lily [azucena ]." When asked, the children said it was the scent of the Virgin. Other days they played on their knees with the infant Jesus and their flowers. Sometimes the devil wanted to take the flowers away. "Not for you, ugly; these are for the Virgin," and they would chase him away with the sign of the cross, making fun of him.

Marcelo Celigueta was dubious about much of what he described, which he called "the dark side of the picture." He singled out the time the children claimed to have gone to heaven.

One day they wanted to go to heaven with the Virgin, and helped by those present, they got up on the altar, respecting the sepulcher, and there they stood forming a tight group, kissing each other. They were asked how they had done this, even though they were in ecstasy. "Because the Virgin had taken them to heaven"—where they said they had been, and the little one added, "I was so happy in heaven that I did not want to come down!"

Many aspects impressed Celigueta: the way the children in trance seemed to know names and persons and who was dead and who still alive, the physiological aspects of their states, the artistic beauty and exactness of their floral decorations (these especially impressed Balda when he visited), and their consistency—in spite of frequent and separate questioning they did not seem to contradict themselves or one another.

Again evident in this report is the immediate political relevance of the visions. At Izurdiaga the Virgin told the children that all persons who entered the church should dip their hands in the holy water and repeat:

Sacred Heart of Jesus, Save Spain

Virgin of El Pilar, Save Spain.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, in you I trust.

Virgin of El Pilar, in you I trust.

Both Juaristi and Bishop Muniz y Pablos of Pamplona spoke of the political moment as a major factor contributing both to the visions and belief in them. In his 1933 circular the bishop wrote,

Historically, in times of serious social strife like the one we are experiencing, it is common that these seers appear and multiply, and there are usually two causes attributed to this: the first is the anguish and disorientation normal in simple souls who, not finding an easy solution either in the human order or in the ordinary paths of divine providence, aspire and believe to find it in the supernatural, in God acting directly on society and not through intermediate causes; the second cause is that the spirit of evil himself suggests these aspirations, whether so that people will relax in the hope of extraordinary solutions and not work diligently to solve things on

________________________________________

― 190 ―

their own; or to stifle the faith, as they stifle it in those persons who believe in these visions and prophecies and then see that they do not come true.[46]

In Izurdiaga, as in Bakaiku, the schoolteacher encouraged the visions. Pedro Balda remembered that she tried to get reports into newspapers and even spoke to the bishop. She seems to have relayed to her charges adult issues. Six months before the visions began, she got the boys and girls to write the director of a mission magazine. Their letters convey the mix of adult and child-like elements which made all the children's visions possible and attractive.

Izurdiaga, 31 March 1931

As soon as our new schoolmistress told us how to rescue the soul of an unbeliever, we gladly deprived ourselves of treats in order to contribute to save souls. We drew lots, and it fell to me to send you this letter, and I want [the pagan child] to be called Francisco Javier. Later we will send you used stamps. I ask for your blessing for all the boys of this school, without forgetting our schoolmistress, and kiss your holy scapular in the name of all of us.

Francisco Satrústegui

Izurdiaga, 6 May 1931

We, the girls of this school, who will not let the boys outdo us, have saved by not buying sweets the 10 pesetas needed to baptize a little Chinese girl, and we send them very gladly. Since we collected the money in the month of May, we wish to offer a rose to the Virgin to make very holy, and we want her to bear the name Rosa María, and Soledad for that is the name of the girl to whom it fell to write the present letter. On Ascension Day we will receive into our hearts for the first time the Baby Jesus, and we will beseech him to make us missionaries so we can save many souls. Pray, Father, so we will be conceded this grace. Bless us all, without forgetting our dear schoolmistress, and kiss your scapular in the name of all of us.

Soledad Antolín[47]

These letters are little different from those of children in other schools in the magazine. But they share aspects with the subsequent visions: the children joining in a common sacrifice for the conversion of others; the role of the schoolteacher as a facilitator; the motif of the Eucharist; and the awareness of issues far beyond school and village. On 9 and 12 December 1931, at the height of their visions, these schoolchildren sent more money. One of the letters was signed by a twelve-year-old girl who was a visionary both at Izurdiaga and Ezkioga. The money was "to rescue a little pagan girl from the power of the devil" and have her named María Pilar. In a similar letter on behalf of the schoolchildren of Piedramillera dated 26 April 1931, twelve days after the Second Republic was

________________________________________

― 191 ―

proclaimed, Lidia Gastón sent money for a "paganito" to be named Nicasio, "who is the patron saint of our village and to whom we fervently pray to intercede very extraordinarily in favor of our Spain, now in bitter and difficult straits." Magazines such as these and schoolteachers brought the children into the bigger picture.[48]

The Izurdiaga seers were still having visions a year later on 11 September 1932 when Padre Burguera saw them in a chapel in a private home in Pamplona. There he marveled that the girl claimed to know that a certain flower came from a convent of nuns who were disbelievers. He describes the seers, much like those who followed Bernadette at Lourdes, running around on their knees unusually fast with their eyes fixed on a flower that they considered the Virgin as Burguera carried it from room to room and hid it from them. They subsequently underwent vision crucifixions, their vision lasting four hours in all. Sessions like these were held in these years in Pamplona convents, the asilo of the cathedral, and private houses, including the home of the parents of the Carlist leader Jaime del Burgo. There is no evidence that politicians in any way provoked the visions, but there can be little doubt that in Navarra the climate was propitious.[49]

Finally, there were also little Ezkiogas in Gipuzkoa. One set of visions occurred simultaneously with the visions in Navarra in the fall of 1931 and indeed may have been a kind of replication of the Navarrese visions. At a house named Kaminpe, close to a road into Urretxu, child seers from the house itself and from Urretxu and Zumarraga gathered with parents and neighbors. The seers included siblings from three different families for a total of at least nine children, four boys and five girls, aged four to thirteen. Almost all of them had had visions at Ezkioga.

A woman who went as a spectator recalled that the seers distributed roses blessed by the Virgin. People lit large numbers of candles and the children fell down into a vision state and later chased the Virgin, who once hid from them under the sink. Once many people went up a nearby mountain when the children announced visions there; those attending included an invalid wrapped in blankets and riding in an ox cart and parents carrying sick or handicapped children.

One argument against the visions here was that the children who were seers later led lives just like the others—seer girls even rode bicycles, for instance. As a child aged seven or eight, my informant did not treat the visions of her playmates with the same importance that the grown-ups did. As in the Barranca, where the children sometimes played with holy dolls, it seems adults were taking seriously what for children had a component of fancy or play. But in any case the Kaminpe visions were a neighborhood affair; they did not attain in Urretxu the status of those in Navarra, which drew entire villages—and sometimes polarized them—for weeks or months. Presumably for the seer families it was simpler to go to Kaminpe than walk to Ezkioga, but later several children resumed visions at the main Ezkioga site.[50]

________________________________________

― 192 ―

Twenty-five kilometers from Ezkioga by road in the hills above Tolosa, Albiztur was a more durable satellite. In 1931, as today, it was a rural township with just a few houses near its church at the bottom of the valley and with farms on the mountainsides. The pious pastor, Gregorio Aracama, had prepared Albiztur's children and adults well to believe the Ezkioga visions. Deeply devoted to Mary, he dedicated his first sermon to her when he arrived in 1921 and put something about her in each sermon until he left in the late 1950s. Aracama asked parents to add the name María to the names of girls and boys he baptized, promoted Mary's month in May, and organized the sodality of San Luis Gonzaga for boys and the Daughters of Mary for girls. Before the visions, Aracama had led his parish in pilgrimage to Lourdes and had told and retold the Lourdes story in sermons. His sense of duty was so strict that when he heard a report of minor misconduct on the part of a girl, he was capable of going to her home to tell her parents. This alienated him from some families.

It was Aracama who arranged for a bus to take his parishioners to Ezkioga, and he went every Sunday. People from Albiztur went as early as 8 July 1931. An Albiztur girl, eight years old, had visions there on July 15; a second, thirteen years old, two days later; a third, fifteen years old and a sister of the first, on July 25; and a fourth, nine years old, on August 15. What they saw was retold in loving, enthusiastic detail in the Albiztur column of Argia by the local correspondent, "Luistar" (Juan Múgica Iturrioz), poet, barber, maker of espadrilles, and sexton. Like the priest of Izurdiaga, he too was the uncle of a seer. In his 2 August 1931 column he compared one of the girls to Bernadette. In subsequent visions, they saw the Virgin of Lourdes, Bernadette, and Bernadette's sheep.[51]

Three of the girls were from farms; the father of another worked in a pharmacy in Tolosa. There were, however, child seers of poorer people in the village. One of these, a girl whose father had only two cows and who worked in the quarry, first began to have visions in Albiztur proper. At the time, I think early 1932, she was caring for the baby of another family. She began to fall into vision by the road near the center of the village, and the woman who cared for the church went and prayed with her, attracting other followers. One day the schoolmaster chased them away, and they moved to the covered area of the church porch. Gradually more girls—only girls—began to have visions there, including three of those who had had visions at Ezkioga. Villagers can name ten, aged six to thirteen, who were seers. In this group were two leaders, an older one whose visions started late and especially the young one, the eight-year-old who had been the first to see at Ezkioga.

As elsewhere, the believers brought flowers that the seers redistributed in vision. The girls also saw the souls of the village dead and found out what prayers or masses they needed. Believers thought the girls could read unspoken thoughts and answer unspoken prayers, and I have talked to persons who were led to repent their sins in the sessions. People from neighboring towns went to

________________________________________

― 193 ―

see the children, but the sessions never reached the newspapers. The parish priest prayed discreetly at a distance, but afterward the girls went to his office and dictated what they had seen. These sessions coincided with outrage in the town over the removal of the image of the Sacred Heart from the exterior of the town hall.[52]

Luistar, the sexton, was a Basque Nationalist. He was devoted to the Virgin of Lourdes, but not to the "Castillan" Virgen del Pilar. He went to Ezkioga fifty-three times starting on 8 July 1931. His last trip was on 30 June 1932, before the arguments of Laburu converted him from the visions' chief supporter to their chief opponent in Argia . The town as a whole split for and against the visions (the split eventually coincided roughly with the split between Carlists and Basque Nationalists), and little by little the girl seers and their families became isolated. "They thought we were fools," one steadfast believer told me.[53]

In May 1933 the vision sessions on the church porch were still going on, with about thirty persons gathering at dusk to say the rosary and accompany the seers. By then the girls also held afternoon sessions at a little makeshift chapel their families had set up on the hillside above the village, at a site called Partileku. They posed there for J. A. Ducrot, the French photojournalist from the magazine VU . The bishop inevitably found out about the visions and threatened to deprive Aracama of his parish. So sometime in 1933 the girls stopped holding

________________________________________

― 194 ―

the sessions in public. At least one girl continued in the intimacy of her family until 1940.[54]

Each public mini-Ezkioga, like the "pre-Ezkiogas" of Torralba de Aragón and Mendigorría, had original aspects. In Albiztur all the seers were girls, in Bachicabo all were boys or young men, but in most places there were both boys and girls. In some places it appears that one seer led the others but that the leader might be older or younger. In some places local elites were sympathetic, and where there was a favorable priest or schoolteacher, the visions lasted longer. In some places, like Dorrao, Unanu, and Bachicabo, the Virgin insisted on worship outside the church. Certain divine beings, like Saint Rita, showed up more in one place than another. The Sorrowing Mary was common to many places, but Mary's avatars varied. Saint Michael and the Infant Jesus of Prague appeared more in the Barranca, where such devotions were strong.

There were also innovations in places. Invisible candy wrappers, the naming of five angels, a vision boulder, a Virgin who played hide-and-seek, visions as sermons, apparitions on house facades, and visionary flower designs were special twists that made each sequence of visions unique. And of course what made each unique was that the seers were members of the local population seeing divinities who had chosen that particular place and landscape.

Except for some sites of "unsuccessful" visions—the ones that drew no following—all these locations are rural. But the "successful" vision sites are well placed. Just as the visions of Ezkioga were just off a main highway, within a long walk of Zumarraga's three train stations, so the village vision sites were on or near main roads, many of them in or near village centers. Those in inconvenient places, like the Fuente Petrás of Bachicabo or the mountainside above Arbizu and Lakuntza, soon shifted.

As we will see for Ezkioga, however, the sites tended to incorporate emblematic elements of the landscape: a pine tree and a spring at Bachicabo; olive trees at Guadamura; a cave and spring at Orgiva; first a sacred mountain at Arbizu, then a walnut tree; pine trees at Dorrao and Unanu; a river a poplar trees at Bakaiku and Lakuntza; walnut trees at Iturmendi; a mountainside at Irurtzun, Albiztur, and above Kaminpe. When the visions were forced indoors the flowers remained as a link to the land.

The visions that were exclusively "urban," or architectural, as at Torralba, Mendigorría, Rielves, Guadalajara, and Sigüenza, were the most fleeting, perhaps in part because there was too much church and social control. The governor and the bishop of Palencia quickly checked a girl who in November 1931 tried to move her visions from the outskirts of the capital to a city church. In the provincial capital where public visions would have had the best chance, Pamplona, the bishop was too close for comfort. Conversely, in the cities of the north coast—Irun, San Sebastián, Bilbao, in all of which there were habitual seers—the hostile secular Republic was too close. In Tolosa sometime around 1933 two

________________________________________

― 195 ―

middle-aged women of humble extraction were able to attract people to visions outside the town in a big meadow, where they placed a picture of the Virgin on a tree. But those visions lasted only briefly.[55]

Almost all visions produced a reversal of power, with initiative and control in the hands of children or unmarried youths. And although this reversal coincided with an ancient southern European pattern, it may have had a particular significance for the period: the fear that the youth would lose their faith. By the same token, this fear may have provoked the marked increase in religious imagery directed at the young by missioners, parish priests, lay catechists, and schoolteachers. In the process, young and old alike became aware of the enhanced status of children in the distribution of religious power. Only in such an unusual ambience could a priest or schoolteacher have tolerated the kissing of child seers' hands, a youth seer's appointment of "angels," the use of a child seer's blessing to forgive sins, or the child's provision of sacred berries for healing. By obeying the minors, people were obeying and humbling themselves before the divinities for whom the minors spoke.

At Ezkioga, at center stage, as far as we know no one gave orders to harvest another's potatoes. The mini-Ezkiogas, however, were more domestic versions, like local-access cable studios rather than national networks. But within vision cuadrillas at Ezkioga, the same precise allotment of grace and favor took place, with flowers going to X and not Y and private messages delivered to certain persons in the knots of believers. The local seers of Navarra and Gipuzkoa were largely in synchrony with changes in vision motifs at the Ezkioga center. As at Ezkioga, struggles of Saint Michael and the devil occurred in the summer and early fall of 1931, seer crucifixions started in the winter of 1932, and seers' crucifixes "bled" in 1932 or 1933. There was clearly enough contact between the different groups to keep everyone up to date.

Visions Spread by Persecution

As the dioceses of Vitoria and Pamplona moved step by step toward denunciation of the visions, it became increasingly difficult to hold sessions in public. And in any case as the audience shrank large outdoor venues were unnecessary. Those surviving became restricted, private séances, many with seers who had retreated to their hometowns or to safe havens protected by sympathetic priests.

In May 1933 the only public, outdoor vision site left was at Albiztur, and its days were numbered:

While it is true that only small, isolated, furtive groups now go to Ezkioga, and although the protagonists of this affair try to be forgotten by the authorities, one should not conclude that everything is back in order. Far from it, for now it is at home, in a little group, that the seers have their ecstasies. With their holy place ruined, they have dispersed, gone to ground,

________________________________________

― 196 ―

but they have hived off. In every valley, there have thus formed little clusters of believers who keep the faith, in spite of persecution and defections. One by one the church denies them the sacraments and excommunicates pitilessly even little children.[56]

Sometimes only the seer and the family held sessions, but in the years 1932 to 1936 in the cities of Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Pamplona and in the towns and villages of Astigarraga, Legazpi, Legorreta, Ordizia, Ormaiztegi, Pasaia, Urnieta, Zaldibia, and Zegama there were regular secret meetings for persons outside the immediate family.

The visions of Ezkioga aroused exceptional interest in the large rural townships to the southeast, in the mountains on the Navarrese border. Zaldibia and Zegama were devout Carlist breeding grounds for priests. Both showed early interest in the visions, and photographs of seers at Ezkioga show people from these townships as close, attentive spectators. Farm families from Zaldibia told me of rushing through the day to finish their chores early in order to be able to get to Ezkioga for the evening rosary. There was equal interest in the village center, where believers held all-night rosary sessions.

The earliest seers from Zaldibia were two teenage girls. María Luisa was a foster child on a small farm. She was not believed in her house and eventually had to take refuge elsewhere. Inés worked as a servant in Ordizia and eventually became a nun. Neither achieved the fame of the seers from Ataun. By July 1933 a married farm woman, age thirty-four, Cándida Zunzunegui, had begun to have visions, first at Ezkioga, then elsewhere, including the Echezarreta house in Legorreta, a shop in Ordizia, and her farm. I think it was to her that the schoolteacher of Zaldibia referred in La Voz de Guipúzcoa on 11 November 1933:

A NEW LOURDES OR A NEW EZQUIOGA?

The apparitions of the Virgin increase daily. Recently she seems to have begun appearing in Belgium, according to a Madrid weekly.

The Virgin is also being seen here. Here too there is a female seer who sees her. She was left unemployed at Ezquioga by church decree, but it seems she has found in her home village a place where she can continue to exercise the same "profession."

There is no lack of people. Some day we are going to wake up and find ourselves not in Zaldivia, but in a new Lourdes, among the noisy sirens of buses arriving full of people.

The teacher, apparently not a Basque, was answered a month later by the Zaldibia correspondent of El Pueblo Vasco , who wrote, "The Basques have been losing their culture ever since teachers like him have come to colonize us." In Zaldibia the visions were associated with Basqueness.[57]

Zaldibia believers faced the stiffest opposition in the diocese. The parish

________________________________________

― 197 ―

priest Martín Elorza was the cousin of Bishop Mateo Múgica of Vitoria and he took the matter personally. In 1984 I spoke to an elderly priest in Zaldibia who knew Elorza well. On the wall was a panoramic photograph of a huge diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes led by Múgica and including Elorza. Elorza was a stern man. His sympathies were with Hitler, whose picture he had on the wall of his study and whose ideas on racism he defended with vigor. But the day he read Pius XI's declaration on Danzig, he tore the picture in two, saying, "I have been wrong." Because he was so strict with himself, he demanded the same obedience from his parishioners and tirelessly preached against Ezkioga. The priest said Elorza lost ten years of his life because of the Ezkioguistas.

The Zaldibia believers were the most combative and stubborn of all. When the governor in 1932 and Bishop Múgica in 1933 prohibited seers from going

________________________________________

― 198 ―

to the vision site, the Zaldibia followers accompanied the few seers who went, specially Cándida, Juliana Ulacia of Tolosa, and a girl from nearby Gainza. Even Burguera could not dissuade them. They told me how they would go on foot from Zaldibia in small groups of four or five and sneak in among the apple trees after the guards had passed. People whistled or laughed at them on the way. Sometime after July 1934 Elorza began to deny Communion to those who went. The believers told me that he sent a nephew and four or five Zaldibia seminarians to Ezkioga to take the names of those who turned up there.[58]

When the Zaldibia believers went to take Communion in the church Elorza would refuse to give them the host in a ritual of authority and disobedience acted out at every Sunday mass for a decade. When they stepped up to receive communion, Elorza or his assistants would say, in front of everyone,

"Do you go to Ezkioga? I say this to you before Christ."

"Yes. I go to Ezkioga to pray."

"Well, I will not give you Communion."

"Well, somebody else will."

At least a dozen persons were denied Communion in Zaldibia for up to twelve years, although not all had the courage or stubbornness to present themselves and be refused regularly.[59]

At least one Zaldibia cuadrilla was arrested. In late January 1935 Gipuzkoa was under martial law in the wake of the October Socialist uprising and all unauthorized gatherings were illegal. The military commandant announced that he would jail all those participating in "the reappearance of new activities in Ezquioga," since the diocese had explicitly forbidden them. The next month La Voz de Guipúzcoa reported, "The Civil Guard informed the governor that a clandestine religious meeting, possibly 'Ezquiogan' in nature, had been discovered in the house of the mayor of Zaldivia. The matter has passed to the jurisdiction of the military." Apparently the civil guards merely took down the names of those present. The matter cannot have troubled the military commander seriously; he set modest fines of fifty pesetas. When the Zaldibia believers asked through a seer whether they should pay the fines, the Virgin said no. The government insisted and the Zaldibia town council finally paid for them.[60]

The believers told me that during the Civil War Martín Elorza had the group arrested again. Civil guards went to the regular Sunday session at Cándida's farm and took the whole group to Zumarraga, Bergara, and finally the Ondarreta prison in San Sebastián. Legend has it that Cándida in vision was so heavy the guards could not budge her until she came to her senses. There was also a political angle. From at least 1933 the town was bitterly divided between Carlists and Basque Nationalists. The two groups competed in public piety and the result was

________________________________________

― 199 ―

a kind of devotional spiral. When Franco's troops occupied Gipuzkoa, the Carlists turned in the vision group as separatists. The Carlists had been irked by seers who would stand up in town council meetings and announce what the Virgin wanted done.[61]

The cuadrilla arrested had five women and six men, ranging in age from about thirty to about sixty. Four were relatives belonging to three farmsteads. They included a young man, unmarried, in his late twenties, his aunt and her son, and a third male cousin. In addition, there was an older male neighbor of the youth, Cándida and her husband, a man and a woman from an Ordizia store, and a man and a woman from the Zaldibia village proper. In jail, where they were held for not paying still larger fines, they felt quite out of place with the political prisoners. A farmer whose brother was jailed told me,

There they said, "But how can this be? How did you people come to be here?"

"As Catholics."

"What do you mean, Catholics? These other people are Communists, or Modern, or Anarchists. How can they denounce people for praying? Don't you have anyone on your side, anyone who will speak up for you and clear this up?"

"We have no pull anywhere."

Nine were freed when the government confiscated property to cover the fines; three others, who had no property in their own names, remained incarcerated for sixteen months until their case came up. The wife of one prisoner died while he was in prison and he was not allowed to go to the funeral. They say that when the judge released them, he said those who denounced them should have been the ones in jail.

In Zaldibia the lines between believers and nonbelievers remained drawn until the late 1940s at least, and the conflict worsened when a new seer moved in. For Martín Elorza, the seers' defiance of his authority—including back talk in front of the congregation and visions in the waiting room of the rectory—was intolerable. With the word straight from heaven seers felt no qualms about confronting the priest. And according to them, he, in his anger and rigidity, slandered them publicly and even fell into heresy, as when he said, they claimed, that in the celestial hierarchy the Virgin Mary was lower than the worst priest.

Fifty years later the older Zaldibia clergy and the old-time believers were still traumatized although generally at peace. They all agreed that Elorza's rigor had been counterproductive. A believer put it this way,

Faith, yes, it is good. But a faith that is persecuted has more strength, because love takes on more firmness. And when the enemy attacks, there is a

________________________________________

― 200 ―

reaction, "Well, no; it is this way, and it has to be this way." Little by little they began to let us do what we wanted, and little by little we left off going to Ezkioga. We still go, but less.

Said the priest, "We made abundant mistakes. It has been demonstrated that in the towns and villages where there was the most repression, the believers stayed the strongest. The more we hit them, the more they resisted. By violence it could not be done, for these are delicate matters."[62]

Denied Communion in Zaldibia and Legorreta, many seers and believers went to Ordizia, where the parish priest was more lenient. Ordizia was a market center for the Urola valley farmers and was less industrial than neighboring Beasain. Rural seers and believers had two kinds of ties to Ordizia: they were clients of its merchants and they were servants. In March 1934 there were restricted vision sessions in the house of the branch bank director, whose servant was a seer from Zaldibia, and in the flat of relatives of another seer. But most frequently the believers met in a small room behind a grocery store run by a fervent believer, Juana Usabiaga; they called the room "El Rinconcito" (the nook). The secret sessions there on market day, Wednesday, were already taking place in early 1933 and went on for at least twenty years. Believers and seers attended from as far away as San Sebastián, Oñati, and the Barranca.[63]

On the wall of El Rinconcito there was a picture of the Christ of Limpias taken from a box of candles. When the journalist Ducrot visited in May 1933, he was assured by the proprietress that it had bled in prayer sessions six times since the beginning of the year. Ducrot saw dried blood on the image. When he asked why it was not kept behind glass, she said that through a female seer the Virgin had forbidden it. A picture of the image was on sale at Ezkioga, and in 1982 I talked to a believer in Zaldibia who still kept fragments of the blood.[64]

People in Zaldibia described a typical vision session.

[Male believer:] In a vision you have to pray a rosary of fifteen mysteries, the stations of the cross and all those things. Then we get messages or errands, the person who has the visions explains them—you have to do this or that, and then [the divine figure] blesses the crucifixes that people bring and flowers, too. And the seer then hands out the flowers, giving explanations, to each person by name, although the seer had never seen the person before. And they passed on the messages—for the wife, for the children, for the good or the bad they had done.

[Female believer:] And those flowers would generally be good for healing. My father had bad eyes. And the seer said, "Here are some roses; sprinkle them with water from Ezkioga, and go with them to your father." It healed his eyes. We would be happy to get those flowers.

Always when the seer was in vision we lit candles or wax. When [the divine figure] began to appear, they would say that it said, "Make light for me, even if it is just matches." And so we always had candles or wax handy.[65]

________________________________________

― 201 ―

An Ormaiztegi woman whose mother went regularly to Ordizia attended once herself. She remembered especially the pain of kneeling. The believers would enter at nine in the evening and leave at six in the morning. Some stayed on their knees all night.[66] In these sessions the divine figure, or, if you will, the seer, became a spiritual director. No longer confessing with the parish priest, these believers felt themselves to be under direct divine scrutiny, judgment, and penance. Through the seer the believer was a member of an intensely scrupulous community where every doubt about the past and the future could be answered.

In 1946 Dionisio Oñatibia, doctor in Urretxu, and Juan María Galarraga, assistant priest there, went to one of these sessions out of curiosity. Oñatibia told me that about twenty-five persons were present, men and women. After a large number of rosaries and stations of the cross, two seers, a man and a woman, went into a lengthy and "photogenic" (the doctor's word) trance state and announced that Ignacio de Loyola was celebrating mass. The seers would narrate the mass, step by step, "Now he is going to read the Gospel, everybody stand up." And the seers and believers received Communion; that is, they extended their tongues as if receiving the sacrament, though he and the priest saw no host. When the seers were in trance, Oñatibia took their pulse and observed their pupils; both were normal. At a given moment their hands appeared bloody (like those of Luis Irurzun at Iraneta). Unimpressed by the blood, Oñatibia was impressed by the prayers: "They prayed tirelessly. It was remarkable. Prayer, patience, and penance, that was the watchword." When the session was ending a woman stood up and called out in Basque the motto of Saint Michael the Archangel, "Nor Kristo bezelakoa, Nor Kristo bezelakorik" (There is no one like Christ, no one else like Christ). Sometimes at the end a stuffed pigeon, as the Holy Spirit, was passed around and kissed.[67]

The Ordizia store became a clearinghouse for messages, prophecies, and dates of the chastisement. The town also was the point of departure for the peripatetic vision sessions of Tomás Imaz which kept different cuadrillas in touch.

Tomás Imaz and the Vision Trips

Tomás Imaz Lete, a thin bald man in his early fifties, first came to the public eye when he was arrested and fined for making a scene with Marcelina Eraso on the train. By then, October 1932, he had been a leader in the vision community for at least seven months. The believers nicknamed him "Tximue" because of a certain chimpanzee-like quality to his face and ears; they heard rumors that he was connected to high church officials. Imaz was a real-estate broker based in San Sebastián. While he was not a publicist, he was very much an organizer, and he was one of the few believers to follow his convictions to their logical consequence. If indeed the world as everyone knew it was going to come to an end, and soon, with a great chastisement and a great miracle, there was no point in

________________________________________

― 202 ―

selling real estate. So he liquidated his assets and slowly spent his funds on the seers and the believers.

Starting in June 1932 Imaz rented buses and invited seers on pilgrimages. He took several trips to Zaragoza to speak to Hermana Naya, venerate the Rafols crucifixes, and pray for Spain to the Virgen del Pilar. The French author G. L. Boué met the seers, including José Garmendia and Benita Aguirre, on their return from a trip on 25 June 1932 in which Benita had visions of the Virgin and Gemma Galgani. José Garmendia's declarations on these expeditions would have confirmed Burguera's worst fears about uncontrolled seers and uncensored messages:

BLOOD OF THE DEVIL

Declaration and vision on this day taking place on the fifth pilgrimage organized by D. Tomás Imaz with seers of Ezquioga to the Santo Cristo Desamparado of the Venerable Madre Rafols in Zaragoza.

Zaragoza, 22 September 1932

On the way, after passing Tudela in the bus, the Most Holy Virgin made me aware that although she had forbidden the devil from bothering us pilgrims on this trip, he had come close to the bus, and Saint Michael had wounded the brazen devil with his sword on the right side of the neck, and from that wound fell two great drops of blood that stained the outside of the windshield of the bus; and when the infernal dragon returned

________________________________________

― 203 ―

again later, Saint Michael hit him again, and blood spattered the hood of the bus. All these bloodstains remained very visible for two days, as all the pilgrims present have been able to confirm.

The seer José Garmendia Tomás Imaz; Jesús Imaz, priest; Rosario Gurruchaga; María Luisa; José Antonio Múgica; Juana Múgica; Martí Berrondo; José Azaldegui; Marcelina Eraso; Vicente Gurruchaga; Francisco Otaño, priest .[68]

Here we have another rare glimpse of a clandestine group. Besides Garmendia there are at least five second-rank seers, the two (unrelated) Gurruchagas, María Luisa of Zaldibia, and Marcelina Eraso, Juana Múgica was a believer from Zaldibia, and José Antonio Múgica was the baker from San Sebastián detained two weeks later with Tomás Imaz and Marcelina on the train. The baker and his brother frequently accompanied Garmendia, and Marcelina stayed at their house in San Sebastián. Jesús Imaz Ayerbe had been a missionary overseas; he had moved to San Sebastián in 1928, where he was the chaplain to a community of nuns. On 18 July 1931 he had been cured of a chronic stomach ailment at Ezkioga. Otaño we know as Ramona Olazábal's spiritual director. Martín Berrondo and José Azaldegui were believers. So we have a gathering of seers and believers, priests and laypersons, urbanites and rural folk, men and women. There was a mix of class as well. The real-estate man and the retired missionary were listening intently to farm girls and barely literate factory workers. As for the blood of the devil, it is no coincidence that it was seen on a trip to see the crucifix of Madre Rafols; that crucifix was supposed to have been found with blood on it. Believers proudly showed the stains on the bus to townspeople in Ordizia.[69]

Since Tomás Imaz spoke Basque, he could connect better with the rural seers than Burguera or the Catalans could. At the vision sessions he frequently led the rosary. His special protégées in 1932 were Esperanza Aranda and Conchita Mateos, in addition to José Garmendia. He introduced Juan Bautista Ayerbe to them and accompanied him to their séances. Tomás's belief in the apocalypse made him fearless in defying the government, the church, Burguera, and social convention. Burguera concluded that Imaz was doing the work of the devil. José Garmendia eventually had a revelation that "the seers who go with I[maz] are betraying her and us."[70]

Imaz's trips were a way to avoid parish, diocesan, or governmental control. He took seers to places like a sympathetic convent in Alava where, with discretion, they could have visions in peace. Later he was reduced to leading pilgrimages on foot to Aralar or Urkiola. And when his last money was gone and the world had not yet come to an end, he lived on the charity of the believers.[71]

________________________________________

― 204 ―

The shrine of San Miguel de Aralar is near the peak of Mount Aralar between the Barranca and Gipuzkoa. For the seers and followers this isolated site was always a safe haven, and with or without Imaz they made numerous trips there, even when it was snowbound. At that time San Miguel de Aralar was the great shrine of Basque Navarra. In an annual ritual of great emotional impact its thaumaturgic image of Saint Michael was carried from town to town in the province; this veneration stitched together the fabric of Navarrese identity. In each town the image would be met with a procession and would be carried to the parish church and to the houses of invalids. In Iraneta devotion to Saint Michael was "terrible ," according to the town secretary, Pedro Balda, who described annual fiestas during which the town council went to the shrine on foot. As a youth, Balda himself carried the image down from the shrine and from Iraneta to Irurtzun. In Betelu too there was "a blind faith in the Saint Michael of the Basques." On the Gipuzkoan side of Aralar there was also devotion, if not so thoroughly programmed. The parish church of Ezkioga, dedicated to Saint Michael, has a sixteenth-century plateresque reredos with reliefs of the apparition of Saint Michael at Monte Gargano. In Ataun people made promises to the saint and used ribbon measurements from Aralar for healing. In Oñati a youth dressed as Saint Michael, complete with sword, walked in the Corpus Christi procession, as did boys in Good Friday processions in Andoain and in Azkoitia.[72]

People thought of Saint Michael as a precursor of the end of time, a warrior captain against the enemies of the church. At Ezkioga the photographer Joaquín Sicart distributed a picture of the saint with these words: "This image, approved by His Holiness Pius IX in 1877, represents the Archangel Saint Michael, sent by the holy spirit to remove the obstacles to the reign of the Sacred Heart."

Saint Michael's shrine at Aralar was a symbol for all Catholics of the region. When he was bishop of Pamplona Mateo Múgica wrote a stirring pastoral letter in praise of the saint. It opened with Apocalypse 12, verses 7 and 8: "And there was a great battle in the sky: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the great dragon was slain, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil." In the letter the bishop discussed the cult of angels and the apparitions of Saint Michael in Italy, in Normandy, and in Navarra. (In the year 707 the saint was said to have appeared to a noble warrior living on Mount Aralar as a hermit in penance for having slain his wife.) Bishop Múgica's predecessor had revived the shrine's brotherhood and Múgica himself had built a road, brought electricity, and planned an illuminated cross for the remote site. He had seen the thousands of Navarrese and Gipuzkoans who gathered at the shrine on May 8, September 29, the last Sunday in August, and the first Sunday in September. He concluded the pastoral letter with an intemperate attack on blasphemers, adulterers, those who work on Sundays, young libertines who attend theaters, movie houses, and dance halls, overtolerant parents, indecently dressed girls (those with bare arms and short skirts), makers of short skirts, drunkards, skinflints, thieves, exploiters

________________________________________

― 206 ―

of workers and the poor, gossips, proud and worldly people, spiritists who worship the devil, as well as apostates, heretics, schismatics, and sectarians. On all of these he called down Saint Michael's sword.

Writing in El Pensamiento Navarro on 17 July 1931 a cathedral canon equated Michael of Aralar's struggle with the dragon and that of Catholics with the Second Republic. In doing so he anticipated by one week the visions of Patxi and others. For the canon Saint Michael of Aralar was

the shrine of our beliefs and the bastion of our traditions, whence resounds the old triumphant cry, "There is no one like God!" whose echo, rolling from peak to peak and spreading from valley to valley, has gotten the sacred militia of your brave men on their feet, ready to struggle fearlessly with the dragon until they slay it or cast it, defeated, in its cave.[73]

For conservative Basque Nationalists too Aralar was a rallying point. Luis Arana Goiri, the brother of the founder of the Nationalist party, had Saint Michael named the patron saint of the party. In August 1931 party ideologue Engracio de Aranzadi wrote that the shrine was "the point of vital union of all Basques" and he warned people not to abandon "their invincible Chieftain, the Angel of Aralar, at a time when the race needs the help of all its members in order not to succumb before the number, power, and hatred of its eternal enemies." The great advantage of Michael of Aralar as party patron saint was his attraction for the Navarrese, doubtful members of a greater Euskadi.[74]

The visions of Saint Michael battling dragons and devils in the sky at Ezkioga pointed to Aralar as a place of contact between the celestial and regional landscapes. Michael figured prominently in the visions of the seers from both slopes of Aralar, those from Ataun and those from the Barranca. In the visions Michael was the Virgin's great auxiliary, and when the great miracle was to occur, it was he who would explain it and later carry out the chastisement. So when vision meetings were forbidden at Ezkioga, Aralar became a logical alternative for Tomás Imaz and the seers.

There were other private vision places. In February 1933 police arrested the inhabitants of a flat in Bilbao because people were going there to see a miraculous Christ. By 1934 there were also regular meetings of believers in San Sebastián. And two male seers held sessions in the house of José María López de Lerena in Portugalete the first Fridays of every month. In Oñati women from town and farms said the rosary in a chapel of the parish church of San Miguel and embroidered a banner with the Virgin of Aranzazu and Saint Michael. Thus they prepared for the day of the great miracle, when they would come into the open and show their colors.[75]

________________________________________

― 207 ―

In Ormaiztegi a wealthy lady held prayer sessions almost continually in her large house; she had a chapel-like prayer room with an altar and stations of the cross. Seers, two of them young women servants, would go into trance. On special holy days the dozen or so believers might hold a procession in the walled garden and sing hymns. Those attending included shopkeepers from Urretxu and Zumarraga. Persons involved in this circle describe a closed, intense world where every illness was treated with holy water from Ezkioga and every death lit by candles that had previously been lighted and blessed during visions. Some families were divided, and believers had to pray extra hard and have extra masses said so nonbelieving relatives would not go to hell. The sick offered their illness to God as sacrifices, and some who died were considered saints and intercessors in heaven. The believers contributed money and jewels for liturgical ornaments and a chalice for the shrine planned for Ezkioga. The host died in 1966.

Zegama was another center of support for the Ezkioga visions. This large township had a big new Carlist community center, complete with movie theater and bar. Relics and a statue of the Carlist general Zumalcarregui were in the parish church, where the boys in catechism class could put on the general's beret and the best one got to touch the relics. The religious activity of children was highly organized, both informally in fiestas and by the church in sodalities.[76]

In 1924 a priest reported that only ten persons did not go to church at all, but he was alert to the railroad, the paper mill, and the alcohol factory as threats to community morality. The women were devout, but most men were indifferent. The clergy worked hard to counter the inroads of modernity: from 1918 to 1924 almost every house enthroned the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In this effort the clergy could bank on Zegama's strong Marian traditions, which included an overnight pilgrimage on Pentecost Sunday over the mountains to Our Lady of Aranzazu.[77]

In 1931 several of the many diocesan priests born in Zegama supported the visions. One of them, the parish priest, took down the messages of Zegama seers Marcelina Mendívil and the eight-year-old boy Martín Ayerbe. Burguera was much impressed by the boy's visions of dead children: "He gives minute details about them to their families, which is why these families and others who know about the prodigies believe him."

Martí Ayerbe had visions both in Zegama and at Ezkioga, where his picture was sold on postcards. Like the other seers, he saw not only the Virgin, but also Christ, Saint Michael, other angels, and Saint Paul (walking among the people with sword in hand, a crown on his head, in white clothes and white shoes). The parish priest was intrigued by Martín's visions of a book the Virgin was reading that the devil wanted to destroy; he assumed it was the one Burguera was writing. The boy's vision on 17 October 1931 shows one way the visions could spread among children. He told a farm girl, aged twelve, from

________________________________________

― 208 ―

Zumarraga that the Virgin had appeared over her head and instructed him to tell her to pray six Hail Marys on her return and to go every day to Ezkioga, where she too would see the Virgin.

In January 1933 when Martín was in vision in catechism class in a chapel, he saw a crucifix in a corner bleeding. According to Burguera, the other children and persons who came in, including two priests, saw the blood too. On Martín's advice, the parish priest notified Bishop Múgica, not yet in the diocese, instead of Echeguren, the vicar general. When the French photojournalist Ducrot went there in May 1933, other children as well were having regular visions before an altar in the chapel.[78]

Finally there was a vision substation in the mountains of Urnieta coordinated by the town secretary, Juan Bautista Ayerbe. In 1933 and 1934 Conchita Mateos, Esperanza Aranda, the servant Asunción Balboa, and others sporadically held sessions in houses there. Gradually Ayerbe became more daring. The first news

________________________________________

― 209 ―

came from the local stringer of El Pueblo Vasco on 1 December 1934, under the leader "Another Ezquioga?"

It seems that part of the stream of tourists has been diverted to this town. We are assured that several persons frequently go to a certain place between the hermitage of Azcorte and Mount Buruntza, among them several from this town, and even that some go up barefoot. The visions take place not only at this site but also in two or three houses in town.

The correspondent added details the next day, reporting that the seers were adults, that some were from San Sebastián, that people went daily from Urnieta, and that after the visions the believers gathered to talk about them at a nearby farm, where the farmer was one of the seers. Few households in Urnieta were involved actively, but the correspondent named Juan Bautista Ayerbe and "Señor Imaz" of San Sebastián. Ayerbe denied the charge, and an angry lady visited the newspaper office in San Sebastián and said in broken Spanish, "Do not mess with the apparitions. Leave us in peace. We will follow the Virgin anywhere."[79] Clearly there was more than visions at stake, for three days later an explicitly political diatribe against the correspondent appeared in La Constancia . The author, I think Ayerbe himself, admitted only that the farmer and his friends were praying the rosary and doing the stations of the cross at the chapel. With the kind of vehemence that can best be aroused in small towns, he pointed out that the Pueblo Vascocorrespondent was a Basque Nationalist and attributed his derision of the devotional practices to politics. By then Basque Nationalists had become allies of the Republic, and he tried to attribute their opposition to the visions to anticlericalism.[80]

The correspondent replied that in Nationalist homes throughout Urnieta, rural and urban, people still prayed the rosary and that monarchists like Ayerbe did not have a corner on Catholicism. He alluded to two years of visions in Ayerbe's home and cited a brief exchange that gives a sense of how difficult it was for persons going about their daily lives to contend with others who believed that the end of time was at hand.

Not long ago an assiduous male devotee of Ezquioga went up [toward Mount Buruntza] with a lady, and when they came to a farm and saw that its inhabitants were quietly eating their afternoon meal, they snapped, "What are you doing eating? The Virgin is appearing up there."[81]

With martial law in force, all meetings required government permission. Ayerbe recklessly continued the sessions, and civil guards surprised a group praying at the chapel of the Santa Cruz de Azkorte. Three persons were fined. When the military commandant consulted with the diocese, the archpriest of the zone asked him to ban all meetings in the chapel. At Urnieta the Republic thus

________________________________________

― 210 ―

came to an understanding with the church to suppress visions, and this understanding was applied in Zaldibia.[82]

Only a week later Ayerbe reconvened his group in Tolosa, where on 23 December 1934 the poor seer Asunción Balboa talked over the crackdown with the Sorrowing Mother. The Virgin told her the Basque Nationalists were to blame and would be punished and warned that bad men would throw bombs into convents. The unusually explicit politics of this cuadrilla comes out in Balboa's conversation with Jesus, who told her that King Alfonso would soon come back to reign in Spain. She also saw Thérèse de Lisieux, Gemma Galgani, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, who said that because of the group's prayers twenty-five souls would leave purgatory the next Saturday. There was still time for many private messages for individuals.[83]

Starting then in 1932 Gipuzkoa had a number of groups that maintained their own parallel Catholic rituals, firm in the knowledge that a civil war would occur and that sooner or later there would be a great chastisement. Each cuadrilla met in secret, but everyone in the zone knew that such groups existed. As far as I can tell, apart from some intransigent priests, few people felt moved to do anything about them. One exception was a potter from Zegama who stood up on the vision stage at Ezkioga and shouted, "I believe in Christ but not in this nonsense!" After all, the majority of Catholics in the Basque uplands were hopeful at first that the visions were true, and huge numbers had been devout and enthusiastic spectators. Later, instead of denouncing the seers and the believers, people either tolerated or laughed at their delusions, often with grudging admiration for their piety.[84]

I was told stories about the believers which, true or not, demonstrate how some of their contemporaries dismissed them. Women in Zumarraga told me about a couple from Zaldibia who were convinced by visions, their own or others', to reenact the flight of Mary and Joseph to Egypt. They borrowed a child and set off walking with a donkey. When they reached Valencia and found they would have to cross an ocean, they turned back. In Legorreta, I was told, a great fear swept the town one election day when a man came down the steep mountainside above the town with a blazing pine torch, and people were convinced Saint Michael the Archangel had finally descended to separate the just from the unbelievers.[85]

But what nonbelivers, whether indignant, mocking, or tolerant, all seemed to ignore was the zest of the believers. Paradoxically, while having visions of dire events in their closed secret cells, the believers were having a wonderful time, creating pockets of social space full of goodwill and good humor. For them their rosaries, their hymns, and their vision messages were a taste of heaven on earth. In these groups the mixing of unrelated men and women, of wealthy and poor, of merchants and farmers, of San Sebastián sophisticates and rural Basque speakers, of adults and children, led to a kind of exhilaration that comes with

________________________________________

― 211 ―

the breaking of taboo and convention. Rural women were suddenly on an equal footing with educated urban men, who served as their secretaries.

These people now recall their arrests as heroic. One day in October of 1937 or 1938 Juliana Ulacia and her group were caught at Ezkioga, put in a truck, and detained in a vacant house in Zumarraga.

[Woman:] How we prayed and sang! [laughs] From morning to night!

[Brother:] From that empty house they wanted to make it to heaven! [laughs]

[Woman:] Then they brought us to testify. Even the guards had to laugh. They didn't know what to do. We did nothing but pray and sing. But they had their job to do. We spent eight days like that; then when they got tired of our praying and singing, they gave us food and said, "All right, you can go home now."[86]

The old-time believers, their faces alight with pleasure, remembered these groups with great fondness.

Visions and Accusations of Witchcraft

In the 1930s many people drew comparisons between the Ezkioga apparitions and the great Basque witchcraft epidemic of 1608–1617. Cultural ecology may have facilitated the spread of the two phenomena.

The witchcraft accusations started near the border as a direct result of prosecutions nearby in France. The more the Spanish Inquisition got involved, the more witches were accused, mainly by children, until the entire zone of mountain Navarra, Gipuzkoa, and eastern Alava was sensitized to the pattern and the fear.

The accusations featured fear and suspicion; the visions, at least at first, featured hope and enthusiasm. The beings seen in the visions were generally good and beneficent, not maleficent, as in the accusations. Whereas the witchcraft scare was a chain reaction of ill will, the visions at first were a chain reaction of benevolence and grace, toward individuals, families, towns, regions, and nations. In both situations the proximate paradigms were French, from the Labourd region for witchcraft and from Lourdes for the apparitions, but both built on older local traditions as well. And both ended with an ecclesiastically imposed silence.

Children and teenagers played important roles in both sequences of events, testifying to the persistence both of their lack of power and their reputation for innocence. In 1611 people accused witches of corrupting children. When the enlightened inquisitor Salazar traveled around undoing the damage, he found that 1,384 of 1,802 persons whom he allowed to retract witchcraft accusations or confessions were children, girls under twelve or boys under fourteen. In 1931

________________________________________

― 212 ―

children were considered more likely to have visions because of their moral innocence. In both sequences adults granted children an unusual credibility. In 1611 the adults projected onto children their fears and in 1931 their hopes. The children themselves quickly took advantage of the new opportunities that high-culture witchcraft (in 1611) and Lourdes-type vision prophecy (in 1931) accorded them. By providing the reports that adults wanted to hear, they temporarily reversed the order and hierarchy of their little societies. In 1611 the children verified that they were victims of the devil, who defiled them, or of witches, who sucked their blood. In 1931 children proclaimed themselves God's messengers and God's willing victims. The spread of the phenomena in both cases was helped by the flexible nature of children and their more fluid notions of reality.

The children's accounts of strange experiences were especially convincing because they made contact with the spirits in an altered state: in the case of witchcraft, as far as we know, a fictional or dreamed one; in the case of most seers, a real one (although one that was uncommon). In both sequences the new powers were double-edged. Witches might be agents of the devil, but there were teenagers like Pedro de los Reyes of Oiartzun who had a divine gift for unmasking witches. Some of my less educated informants accused various Ezkioga seers of having powers from the devil, not from God, and considered those seers witches.[87]

Promoters helped the spread of both epidemics; in the case of witchcraft local elites and learned inquisitors pressed people to confess and with their edicts and questions standardized the patterns of belief; in the case of the visions, informed enthusiasts convoked the seers and parents, and parish priests and schoolteachers communicated to seers their own hopes and anxieties. In both cases, servants, children, and the less privileged elements of society gained a temporary advantage.

Witchcraft accusations and visions spread with equal ease through dispersed farms and grouped settlements, but both developments seem to have done better in the countryside than in the cities, in the uplands than in the lowlands. And the events had their greatest effect in the areas of Basque language. The visions in Spanish-speaking Bachicabo and Mendigorría did not spread. Those in the Barranca reached their southern and eastern limits at the first Spanish-speaking villages. The cultural isolation of rural Basque speakers may have left them with fewer defenses against and fewer inhibitions about the spirit world and sheltered them from critical alternatives.

Finally, both proliferations may have had common roots in a landscape people already considered sacred. Witches were supposed to meet in caves. Ancient spirits called sorguiñak were supposed to live in caves as well, whence the Basque word sorguin for witch. In Bakaiku and Lakuntza children had visions along or in rivers, and rivers were one of the dwelling places of attractive but dangerous spirits known as lamiak . And many seers saw beings coming from mountains, both at Ezkioga and in the Barranca, mountains associated with

________________________________________

― 213 ―

powerful spirits, whether local gods like Mari, who could send hail and lightning as punishment, or Christian spirits like Saint Michael. But these deep cultural roots are much easier to postulate than to demonstrate; and not once did they appear explicitly in my oral, manuscript, or printed sources. I suspect them because of the intense pressure in contemporary Basque society to provide a primordial local origin for cultural phenomena.[88]

Especial Chupinazo San Fermín 2014

1

Primer encierro de sanfermines 2014

2

Segundo encierro San Fermín 2014

3

Tercer encierro de sanfermines 2014

4

Cuarto encierro de sanfermines 2014

5

Quinto encierro sanfermines

6

Sexto encierro de San Fermín 2014

7

Séptimo encierro de San Fermín 2014

Octavo encierro

Tema Sencillo. Con la tecnología de Blogger.