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Holy People in Peasant EuropeAuthor(s): William A. Christian Jr.Reviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Jan., 1973), pp. 106-114Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178189 .Accessed: 05/07/2012 05:48

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Holy People in Peasant Europe WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN Jr.

There are parallels to the North Mexican folk saints in Western Europe. What differences there are seem to follow naturally from the different context of Western Europe: the more pervasive influence of scientific medicine; the comparative stability of Western Europe governments; and above all, the more effective presence of the institutional Church.

Folk doctors using a combination of peasant remedies and magic, usually with an admixture of prayers and other elements of Christian rituals, were once common throughout Western Europe, and can still be found locally today. Marcelle Bouteiller, who has studied the French cases at some depth, finds there is a kind of sacred appointment in many of the guerisseurs: an inherited gift ultimately linked to a saint, whether directly or by way of a relic. Yet the guerisseurs themselves, while they are respected, are not venerated, and they certainly develop no popular cult.

The three cases of contemporary cults that we will briefly cite are of a different nature. They are all instances in which the person or persons in question take on a public prominence, are generally considered to be more holy than regular folks, and come to provide the focus for a cult. In Europe since 1940 there have been at least fifty cases of public apparitions (using the term broadly) of divine figures. The examples we will cite are particularly salient examples of the phenomenon.

I

In the village of San Sebastian de Garabandal (Santander), Spain, Conchita Gonzalez and three of her playmates were eleven or twelve

years old when their 'call' occurred on June 18, 1961. It came in the form of Saint Michael the Archangel, just as they were feeling remorse for

stealing apples from a private garden. Subsequently, on over 1,000 occasions in the next four years, the girls would have clear premonitions and feel urgent calls to particular places in the village, where they would have visions of and conversations with the Virgin Mary.

Io6

HOLY PEOPLE IN PEASANT EUROPE I07

During these visions the girls would be in a kind of ecstatic trance: while in the trance they had special powers that they did not otherwise have, like the ability to distinguish priests from laymen although the priests were disguised; the ability to identify without prior knowledge the owners of religious objects they were given to hold up to the Virgin to be blessed; and the ability to provide information to concerned onlookers of a temporal or spiritual nature. As in the case of Fidencio cited in the previous article, the girls could become 'heavy' in their trance state, and many of the apparitions took place around some sacred trees, a grove of pines above the village.

Although the girls do not seem personally to have performed cures, the objects that the Virgin blessed for them and talismans from the pine trees that the pilgrims carried away have been credited with curative powers.

At present the girls are still living in the village. The last apparition was in 1965, in which the Virgin foretold that a great miracle would eventually take place in the village. Tens of thousands of persons around the world are waiting for Conchita's advance announcement of when that great miracle will be.

This case embodies two traditions of European popular religion: one ancient and local-the founding of a local shrine; and the other more recent-the public apocalyptic vision. The first tradition seems to date from the late medieval period and comprises the origin legends of many village shrines throughout the Mediterranean portion of Western Europe. A villager-whether shepherd, child, ploughman, or whatever-meets the Virgin Mary, or finds her statue. And on the site of the meeting, or on some other site that Mary indicates, a shrine is built that becomes the location for the fulfillment of the village's calendrical obligations and critical supplications to the shrine image--the village's divine protector. The seer or finder in these cases becomes a kind of local holy person, attains an informal ordination as it were, often tends the shrine, and is remembered by name in the legend. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of legends of this type for Spain alone.

The mission of this kind of seer or finder is essentially a local one, that of a person 'tapped' by the Virgin to bring a protecting statue to a village or region. The attempt to found the village shrine is an aspect of all four of the Spanish apparitions in the twentieth century that I have information on (Ezquioga, La Codosera, Garabandal, and El Palmar de Troya). They all occurred in villages that had no active shrine to the Virgin, but which were surrounded by villages that did have shrines. In other words, the apparitions seem to fill in the empty slots on the landscape. In this context the shrine image and the site of its location are of prime importance; the seer merely introduces it, and is not himself or herself the focal point of the worship. There seem to be some aspects of shrine-founding in the

I08 WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

Mexican cases, but there it is clearly the seers themselves that become preternaturally salient.

The Garabandal story also falls in the more recent series of Marian apocalyptic visions. Throughout much of the history of the Church mystics have had private revelations of an eschatological nature. But starting at the Rue de Bac, Paris, in 1830, there have been a series of apparitions in which the Virgin has seemingly sought to influence not just one locale or person, but rather the entire world. Her appearances, which could broadly be said to be a reaction to the overall process of secularization, have sought to revitalize Church doctrine, and have established or confirmed certain devotions conducive to redemption.

At La Sallette (1846), Lourdes (1858), Pontmain (1871), Fatima (1914), Ezquioga (1931) and Beauraing (1932) seers reported messages from Mary that pertained to Church policy and the salvation of mankind. Recent apparitions at Garabandal, San Damiano (see below), and El Palmar de Troya (Sevilla) fit into this series also, for all have included prescriptions for salvation. They also include more somber warnings of a great chastise- ment should the world not amend. At Garabandal one night Conchita and her friends had a terrifying vision of what the chastisement would be like.

The involvement of the Church in these cases has had a decisive effect on the direction the cult takes and the fate of the potential folk saints. The Church generally witholds judgment for a while as the apparitions progress, and in this free time a cult forms much in the way described for the North Mexican folk saints. In this early period the cult is generally a hybrid. It involves both local citizenry, whether bewildered, sceptical, or credulous, who, if credulous, may see the apparitions as the founding of the shrine, and also outsiders who evaluate the doctrinal content of the

apparition messages for its place in the apocalyptic series. These latter

pilgrims focus attention on the Virgin, not on the seer per se. The seers are treated with affection and respect, but are essentially seen as a kind of go-between for the Virgin.

Eventually the Church may make a judgment that encourages or dis- courages the cult. In the case of encouragement the cult is then swiftly institutionalized: the Church builds a shrine and the seers are encouraged to retire, usually to convents. In short, the Church co-opts the movement. Once an apparition has been endorsed the seer becomes, in a certain sense, a hindrance to the Church. Both in the case of Melanie of La Sallette and Lucia of Fatima the attitudes, opinions, and visions of the seers were fairly effectively suppressed once they entered the convent, especially when they threatened doctrinal or diplomatic positions of the Vatican. The Church has an interest in deemphasizing the 'saint' and

emphasizing instead the shrine and its approved message.

HOLY PEOPLE IN PEASANT EUROPE 109

In the case of Church discouragement the cult eventually dies out: no major shrine building is built; and the seers usually return to normal life. Note that in earlier times the approval of the Church for founding a local shrine would not generally have been necessary. So in a sense the shrine foundings hitherto stimulated by the local devotional system of petitions and promises have been aborted in the last hundred years, precisely because apparitions can no longer be local matters. The canons of judgment for diocese-wide, nationwide, or international apparitions are more rigorous than they were when the cult was the result of a purely local contract between the village and its divine protector.

There are some cases (Kerizinen in Brittany is one, Garabandal another) where cults that the Church has discouraged have continued at a reduced level. This is also the case in some apparitions on which, after many years, the Church has still to pronounce (La Codosera).

Garabandal, in fact, is a very special case; for among the cognoscenti the Garabandal apparitions are considered to be the culmination of the long series of Marian apparitions, with the great miracle yet to come as the critical climax. Many pilgrims consider the Church's lack of approba- tion to be a deviation from the true way. This deviation is reckoned to have begun when Pope John XXIII did not disclose the third secret of Fatima in 1960, and to have involved a deemphasis on the charismatic aspects of the Church for the purpose of a more ecumenical appeal and in favor of more socially oriented concerns. The cult that has formed around Garabandal and other popular sources of revelation challenges this 'liberal' tendency in the Church.

In Garabandal (and at many other apparition sites) the cult begins with people from the village, spreads in the immediate region, and then, if it continues, attracts national and international attention. When the initial novelty of the situation has worn off many of the local people return to their business. But in the case of Garabandal the pilgrims from other parts of Spain (especially cities), France, England, and America have organized around centers where they meet for prayer, and from which they spread the devotion.

One major difference between a seer of the type of Conchita and those of Northern Mexico is that the European seers are not first and foremost healers. Rather they are messengers for the divine, whose extra powers seem to be in effect only when in the ecstatic trance. And the cures that take place in their presence are in no sense done by them. They are done by the Virgin; with their role limited to relaying requests and news of cures. As in Mexico, the European cults, once they are well under way, settle into a kind of unspoken routine that is handed on from more ex- perienced to less experienced pilgrims. The routines vary from site to site, but generally before and after the apparitions the seers 'receive' pilgrims

110 WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

at their houses. The apparitions themselves follow a relatively prescribed liturgy, partaking of some of the orderliness of the mass. They usually begin and end with prayer, 'enveloped in prayer' as one author puts it (Gabriel, p. 34).

II

Padre Pio of Pietrelcina is another kind of folk saint. This Capuchin stigmatic was born of peasant parents near Benevento, Italy, in 1887, and died in the convent of San Giovanni di Rotundo in 1968. An intense, ascetic youth, he received the stigmata (the wounds of Christ) gradually over a period from 1910 until 1918, and suffered from them until the day of his death. Many stigmatics, like Teresa Neumann, have led secluded lives, but Padre Pio, who as a Capuchin was a Franciscan, took on as his vocation the curing of bodies and souls, like St. Francis, another stig- matic, before him.

A man of profound love and kindness, Padre Pio's fame as a stigmatic and as a counselor spread quickly through Southern Italy. Throngs gathered around his convent, set up a shanty-town, formed the kind of informal fellowship that is to be found both in the early stages of the Marian apparitions and in the cases of the Mexican folk saints. At first the incipient cult encountered obstacles from the priests in the town and diocese whose positions and way of life were threatened by this un-

expected phenomenon. Their opposition was eventually overcome after a

ten-year struggle by the Capuchins and a group of devoted laymen through intercession with the Vatican. The local governments supported Padre Pio throughout his lifetime against those in the Church who sought to restrict his freedom.

The clearing of Padre Pio's name (of imposture) by Pope Pius XI in 1933 opened the way for the cult to flourish. Pilgrims and money came in from all over the Western World, and after the Second World War Padre Pio used the money to build a large hospital for pilgrims. Certain

days of the year-like the anniversary of the reception of the stigmata- were especially marked by the cult. Again, a routine of pilgrimage was established. Odors connected with the padre's presence were catalogued and their meanings identified. An impressive dossier of miraculous cures was assembled. He was attributed the power of bilocation, of telepathy, the gift of tongues, and above all a personal, intimate knowledge of the

designs of God. He corresponded with many 'spiritual children' and prayer groups encompassing tens of thousands of persons were set up throughout Italy and in many other countries. Again, as in the case of the visionaries, Padre Pio did not himself cure the faithful. Rather he imparted the decisions of the divine, acting for his part as an advocate of the sick to God. He was equally interested in saving and healing souls, and his con-

HOLY PEOPLE IN PEASANT EUROPE III

fessional, during the years he was permitted to confess the pilgrims, was always busy. It is a remarkable testimony to the blindness of the Western intellectual community that the mere magnitude of this movement, not to mention the inexplicable phenomena associated with it, was not widely noticed, and that Padre Pio is virtually unknown in America outside of certain Catholic circles.

The second and final period of suppression began after the Second World War, instigated apparently by leaders among the Italian Capuchins who sought to obtain some of Padre Pio's contributions to rescue the order from bad investments. Because of his intransigence on this matter Padre Pio was confined to his cell and virtually all contact between him and the pilgrims was cut off. The Capuchins seem to have obtained the aquiescence of the Curia because of Vatican misgivings about the

ideological flavor that the cult had taken on. Again, as in the case of the

apocalyptic apparitions, there was a sense that the devout were getting out of hand, with the aid of a source of revelation alternative to that of the institutional Church.

Tens of thousands of persons came to Padre Pio's funeral, and the cult continues, centering on his grave. In this sense Padre Pio is rather a classic

European saint, whose grave becomes a shrine.

III

Padre Pio reportedly participated in the 'call' of Rosa Quattrini of San Damiano (Piacenza) Italy. Known as Mama Rosa, she was visited in 1961 by the Virgin Mary, who instructed her to go to see Padre Pio. Padre Pio in turn informed her that her vocation was to heal the sick, and this she did for two years in her own village. Then he told her that she was to serve in a more important capacity, and in her garden she began to experience, at noon every Friday, the visions of the Virgin, Jesus, and Angels that have made it a place of pilgrimage.

According to Mary (according to Mama Rosa), Mama Rosa has been

given powers by God to help out the Virgin on earth. She combines charac- teristics of Padre Pio and the Spanish girls. Like Padre Pio her mission is one for life. She informs people of divine intentions and counsels them, relaying words of comfort or exhortation from the Virgin. Like Conchita she distinguishes priests when they are disguised, and she delivers messages from the Virgin destined for the entire human community. As in Gara- bandal, the cult that has grown up around her partakes of the founding of a local shrine. Several legends common to Western European shrine tradition have been re-enacted at San Damiano. The tree on which the Virgin appears bloomed out of season. Strange clouds and crosses form in the sky during the apparitions, and a holy well has been established whose water will protect the faithful when the great chastisement comes.

112 WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

For San Damiano too, like Garabandal, foresees an approaching chastise- ment, that might come before or with the end of time and the reign of Jesus.

The apparitions at San Damiano have been discouraged by the Bishop of Piacenza, and the following there has much of the same anti-establish- ment character as that of Garabandal and Padre Pio. The three cults share many devotees. Mama Rosa has referred favorably to Garabandal several times in the course of visions and has mentioned also the great miracle that is to come. And Conchita traveled to see Padre Pio after her visions.

In North Mexico more general ideologies came to influence the folk saint cults. This may have happened in the European cases as well. At Garabandal the messages received by the seers over the three years of visions took on a more and more universal note. On the one hand this may be the Virgin's way of waiting for the right moment to make important statements; on the other it may be the seers' unconscious response to the kind of people who came to see the apparitions, people acquainted with the previous Marian visions seeking information from the divine about the course of human salvation. In the case of both Padre Pio and Mama Rosa certain aspects of their positions have been emphasized by their partisans, the universal over the local. The seers have been led sometimes unwillingly into the arena of internal politics of the Church, partly because only the more traditionally minded members of the Curia have been

disposed to take apparitions or revelations seriously in recent years. Their followers have been persecuted at times, as in the diocese of Padua, by prelates who saw in them a threat to Church discipline. At Garabandal the girls reported that the Virgin said that many members of the clergy, even cardinals, were on the wrong road, and this has been taken as the

opposition of the Virgin to some of the Church reforms during and after the Second Vatican Council.

The typical follower of these cults on the international level is a quiet, anguished person, often with a personal life marked by tragedy, who is

struggling to know God. The apparitions for them provide information on divine will, confirmation of divine justice, and reassurance of divine love.

Finally the role of the apparitions and seers in reaffirming the entire structure of Catholic belief in an age of doubt cannot be underestimated. While this applies particularly to the middle-class pilgrims from the cities, it

applies also to the villagers, for nowhere is the old system of belief complete- ly secure. Recently young, radical priests have been shaking the old faith as much as anti-clerical liberals used to, and this form of subversion from within has been particularly confusing to rural parishes. Contemporary Marian apparitions would seem to be directed at this source of confusion, reaffirming traditional values in a time of change.

HOLY PEOPLE IN PEASANT EUROPE 113

In all three cults there is an emphasis placed on the reality of evil, the activity of the devil. The Virgin acts as a loving mother both protecting and encouraging the struggle of the faithful for good. The combative nature of the cults is symbolized by the presence of Saint Michael the Archangel in all three. Mama Rosa's first encounter with the Virgin came on Saint Michael's Day, and Saint Michael often shows up in the Friday colloquies; the first apparition at Garabandal was of Saint Michael, and the shrine that has been built there is dedicated to him; and Padre Pio's monastery is on the slopes of Monte Gargano, where the most famous medieval Mediterranean shrine to Saint Michael was located.

Whereas in Mexico it was the government, because of its tenuous control over the Maya, that felt threatened by the cults, in Spain and Italy it has been the Church, worried over the possibility of popular traditional reaction to its reforms, that has felt threatened and has sought to suppress or control their influence. The only major governmental reaction to a set of apparitions in Europe in this century was in Portugal, where the government razed houses belonging to supposed seers in the town of Torres Novas, near Fatima, after the Church discouraged the apparitions. But on the whole these cults have not had either the magnitude or the radical character that might have occasioned reaction from the govern- ments.

None of the seers in Europe has commonly been referred to as a saint in his lifetime. This is partly because the term has been effectively defined to mean a person canonically sainted by the Church after death. Yet only Padre Pio has been treated as if he were a saint in his lifetime. Although their fame has extended farther than that of the Mexican folk saints, these holy figures in European folk religion have been less venerated. They have seen themselves as messengers of the divine, not therapists or divine themselves. They have been more concerned with salvation and the progress of world affairs, much more involved, as Europeans are, in the net of world relations than Mexican Indians.

Yet their cults have followed, in certain respects, much the same tra- jectory as the Mexican cases. They progressed from local to more universal cults. It remains to be seen whether after their rejection by the Church they will return to more local mission. It seems more likely that the opposite will continue to occur. The Church has power on the local level, so that villagers nearby do not favor seers who are rejected by the Church. Rather it is those pilgrims from afar, less obedient and more educated, who feel free to reject the Church's prohibitions.

When confronted with phenomena we cannot explain we tend to treat the aspects we can explain and let the rest ride. In the cases considered in these pages we have discussed some of the organizational aspects of

114 WILLIAM A. CHRISTIAN JR.

folk cults. It has been all too easy to avoid asking whether the 'saints' mentioned really possessed exceptional powers, or whether their followers merely believed they did. I feel that the evidence of anthropologists and historians shows that there occasionally occur as genetic or social mutants people with capabilities, temporary or lifelong, that Western science has been unable to explain. Nor is it to be expected that these seers can themselves furnish complete explanations for their special capacities, since their explanations and the uses they make of their powers, are culturally limited by the repertoire of roles available to them. It is not even clear whether or not such powers are due to the influence of some force outside the seer. We are only at the threshold of a phenomenology of religious experience.

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