Visionaries
Christian, William A. Jr.
Who sees what, & possibly why Dn late June, 1931, two young children in the Basque region of northern Spain claimed to see the Virgin Mary. Hundreds of seers soon echoed their claim, and by the end...
...But most of Christian's energy centers on religious experience, on Ezkioga as a "window on how new religious worlds came to be...
...An older Catholic historiography, when it ashamedly glanced at such phenomena at all, centered inquiry around the question "Is it true...
...ation now possible...
...Christian asks "What was it like...
...The figures Christian treats least sympathetically are those bishops and Jesuits who eventually deem the visionaries frauds, and certainly little sympathy should be shown to the clerics who frightened the devout into silence about some of the most powerful events in their lives...
...This reluctance to end with a series of pronouncements perhaps stems from a healthy skepticism about historical certitude, as well as a realization that the friendships gained and confidences shared in many years of research are not easily evaluated...
...More assessment, more examination of motive, might have given Visionaries a sharper analytical bite...
...The concluding chapter is titled "Questions without Answers...
...Christian acknowledges this context, noting the controversy over the removal of crucifixes from classrooms in Spain concurrent with the Ezkioga visions, violent clashes between Catholic rightists and an anticlerical Left, and tension between a Basque-speaking, rural population and Spanish-speaking, urban authorities...
...Recent discussion of Lourdes (just over the Pyrenees from Ezkioga) has followed these lines, emphasizing how the shrine's promoters, and French Catholics more generally, saw themselves in opposition to the secular, even anticlerical culture becoming dominant among the intelligentsia and in the cities...
...But of course only Christian's remarkable achievement makes such an investigation now possible...
...The insight demonstrated in these compressed pieces of analysis, however, is often diminished by Christian's reluctance to focus on representative figures and his penchant for interrupting chronological descriptions of the visions with thematic excursions...
...The footnotes suggest that Christian has lived in Spain for much of the past three decades, and a short review cannot do justice to the persistence with which he has tracked not only the seers but those who promoted their cause, along with the family members and friends who continued (in the face of clerical and state repression) to honor the visions in subVisionaries The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ William A. Christian, Jr...
...And, too, Christian effectively makes the point that the process of selection and rejection is constantly occurring well in advance of ecclesiastical umpires, as crowds find particular seers and messages more or less persuasive and useful...
...Christian's relationship to Spanish religious history is beginning to approximate that of Herman Melville to whaling novels...
...University of California Press, $39.95, 566 pp...
...Hundreds of seers soon echoed their claim, and by the end of the year over a million of the curious, the devout, and the skeptical had made their way to the small township of Ezkioga, making it the most prominent Marian apparition site after Lourdes and Fatima, and until Medjugorje, in our own time...
...This judgmental cast runs against the grain of Christian's temperament, and certainly Visionaries is eloquent testimony to the conviction that a "failed" apparition can illuminate a particular time and place...
...David Blackbourn's brilliant Marpingen (1994) stresses the hostility of Bismarck and Prussian liberals to the backwardness of a Catholic culture that could accept claims of a Marian apparition made by children in a small German town...
...Christian's perspective on this wealth of material is anthropological...
...Reading Visionaries, despite Christian's clear prose, is hard work...
...Or why young women, often criticized by clerics for immodest dress, became the most trusted of the seers...
...In a series of vignettes, Christian deciphers why some visionaries chose to lie down on a wooden deck on Good Friday, 1932, acting as if they, like Christ, had suffered crucifixion...
...Trudging from convent to farm attic to apartment, Christian has unearthed a series of first-person accounts and spectacular photographs...
...Even so, historians do occasionally act like bishops and Jesuits...
...But the task of separating the authentic from the fake, if carried out in a more humane manner, is presumably part of a leader's responsibility in an institution convinced that boundaries between our world and the supernatural are not impermeable...
...John T. McGreevy sequent decades...
...Roughly seven hundred individuals, according to the index, make at least cameo appearances, meaning the reader becomes acquainted with the equivalent of a Basque village...
...In part, though, this ambiguity results from a veneration of "experience...
...Perhaps no historian has ever recreated a specific Catholic milieu in such depth, with such meticulous attention to detail...
...More significantly, Christian's own evaluation of what the visions meant- for Spanish history, for the visionaries, for Catholicism-is circumspect...
...Or how word of the apparitions spurred not only pilgrimages, but parallel, almost wholly unpublicized, visions in distant parts of Spain...
...together with the hundreds of interviews he has conducted, they allow a stunning recreation of a now distant world...
...This point really must be reempha-sized in the context of Visionaries...
...A more historical narrative might have emphasized the occurrence of the visions in the tense years before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War...
...The consequences of this strategy are frequently exhilarating...
...Criticisms made by the visionaries of the democratic, "godless" Spanish Republic, for example, can be understood as one of the religious divides that historians now see as central to European history between the French Revolution and the Second World War...
...William Christian's investigation of this phenomenon is the culmination of an effort that has already resulted in important books on shrines in a rural Spanish valley, apparitions in the late medieval period, and moving crucifixes in the early twentieth century...
Vol. 123 • November 1996 • No. 20
