But after the regulation rockets had been fired, those that exploded, in shimmering white or red, the good men of La Coruña let go. On a series of wagon wheels stuck on poles about the plaza they set loose some contraptions that were dazzling, each consisting of at least eight radically different sequences timed to explode one after the other over a period of at least two minutes, so that one wondered how the first charges could ignite without detonating the others. While the crowd was marveling at this, the La Coruña men produced their specialty: a large rocket which climbed in a zigzag pattern to about a hundred yards in the air, then stopped, dashed off parallel to the earth for a hundred yards, where it died in a soft hissing sound, but when it had almost reached the earth it gave forth a huge burst of flame, another rocket fired, and the whole thing went back into a giant orbit that took it higher than before, ending in a loud explosion and a blaze of multicolored lights. It was quite a rocket, much more complex than anything Valencia had shown, and the crowd cheered.
But there was still more! On a distant building far across the plaza a brilliant ball of light began to blaze, and on a thin wire that none of us had noticed before, it sped in wild flight some two hundred yards and crashed directly into the false façade of the cathedral, after which it sped back up the wire to the point at which it had begun; but few saw its journey end, because when it struck the cathedral the entire false front burst into flame and for at least four minutes we saw such a popping of lights, such a rain of rockets and such a confusion of colors that no eye could possibly have followed all that was happening. The whole cathedral seemed to be ablaze, and at the end some sixty standing rockets were automatically ignited and these went off in all directions, filling the sky with flaming color.
Apparently the residents of Compostela are more accustomed to fireworks than I, because next day the local newspapers reported that ‘the traditional illumination of the façade went off as usual with nothing special to report.’
At dawn on the twenty-fifth, large black limousines begin to arrive at the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos. In the early 1500s this had been the foremost hospital in the world, a center of medical learning reputed to be without equal, for it had been established by Queen Isabel and King Fernando as a refuge for those many pilgrims who reached Compostela in a state of exhaustion after negotiating the pass at Cebrero and the bitter mountains of Galicia. Now the majestic building, constructed around four different courts, each an architectural masterpiece, serves as a luxury hotel, and in its spacious lounges the early-morning visitors munch cakes and fruit with their coffee.
They are politicians from Madrid and officers from the naval base at El Ferrol del Caudillo, the Galician birth-place of Generalísimo Franco at the northwest tip of Spain. Spaniards say that if Franco had been born one step farther west, he’d have been a norteamericano.
By midmorning the plaza is filled with army units in brown uniforms, accompanied by a competent brass band which plays marches. A small cannon booms out a nineteen-gun salute to Santiago, a military greeting to a military saint, which is not surprising in a land where in 1962 the mummified left arm of Santa Teresa, during a grand tour of the nation, was officially received in Madrid with the military honors due to a ‘captain-general in active command of troops.’ Additional dignitaries appear in full morning dress, and soon one portion of the plaza is filled with handsome-looking men in various costumes, all prepared to pay homage to the great saint who had led the nation to victory over the Moors, over the Incas and Aztecs and over most of the armies of Europe.
At ten a large parade forms, composed of military units, the civil officials, red-caped priests and green-clad members of the Guardia Civil. These march about the plaza in a show of national solidarity before heading for the cathedral, where at the Pórtico de la Gloria a mitered bishop in red waits to grant permission to enter, and all bow to kiss his hand.
I have not previously mentioned the extraordinary size of the cathedral, but this parade of several hundred led by a brass band will be absorbed in the vast expanse of pillar and chapel without causing much stir. On this day the interior is redolent of past glories: enormous throngs of worshipers crowd the aisles while the massive organ thunders out Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Prior to the entrance of the parade a tall priest leads four men clothed in red in a procession that moves along all aisles and transepts of the church. They bear on their shoulders an ornate reliquary containing a statue and memorials of St. James the Less, and on his statue one sees a highly decorated silver collar which has a most curious history: it was given to the cathedral in 1435 by that same Suero de Quiñones who held the bridge over the Orbigo for thirty days. And as this strange gift makes its slow way through the cathedral, it passes the chapel in which hangs the bejeweled pendant delivered later by an equally famous Spaniard of the heroic age, Don Juan de Austria, who came here on pilgrimage after his crucial victory at Lepanto. In the left transept the relics pass the little chapel of St. Andrew, where a niche was recently let into the wall to house a sickly-sweet modern statue of the Virgin dressed in robes of pale blue and white and framed by a bouquet of asters and white lilies. A halo of small electric lights illuminates the head of this very popular statue, for even now with the procession in full swing a group of women prays before the shrine. Before each woman kneels she takes from beside the Virgin a printed slip of paper, and with a pencil hanging from a cord ticks off the subjects in which she is most interested, depositing the marked slip in the prayer box:
9. Peace in the family.
10. A termination to a bad love affair.
16. Success in studies.
23. Peace in the world.
25. For the unity of all Christians.
29. Reconciliation of a married couple.
The niche in the wall has a special appeal to women because the statue of the extremely, beautiful Virgin was given by Evita Perón.
Now the procession from outside the cathedral has completed its entrance, and as it moves down the right aisle the organ produces a new song, and eight men in red robes move into action, ready for an exhibition seen in no other cathedral in the world.
Two bear on their shoulders a massive pole from which hangs an iron censer about three feet high. Silver-plated and of a handsome design, it was made in 1850 by the silversmith Losada and is the most recent of a long line of Botafumeiros (Smoke-Throwers) to have been used in this cathedral.
The other red-clad men are busy with another detail. From one of the nearby pillars they have released a very stout hempen rope possibly three inches in diameter and a couple of hundred feet long. This rope reaches up to the highest part of the cathedral, where it passes over a complicated system of pulleys, dropping down so that the Botafumeiro can be attached to its loose end, which is passed through a huge iron ring at the top of the censer and securely lashed. The eight men then grab the other end of the rope and slowly pull the huge object a few feet in the air.
A priest now opens the top of the contraption and pours inside a large bucketful of charcoal and incense and gives the censer an initial swing to start it moving. What happens next I do not understand, but by a series of skillfully timed pulls on their end of the rope, the eight men succeed in getting the great silver chalice to swing in evergrowing arcs until at last, in an unbelievable surge of power, the enormous thing is flying right up to the ceiling of the cathedral some ninety feet away, hesitating there a moment, then roaring down with sickening speed, skimming oyer the heads of watchers, only to be held in restraint by the rope and swung up to the ceiling on the other side. And as the huge thing flies through the air, perforations admit a flow of air and set the charcoal ablaze, so that sparks fly out in the swift descent and incense fills the cathedral. It is a most extraordinary sight, a thrilling display of motion, power, fire and mystery.
I ask Father Precedo what all this signifies, and he says, ‘The people like to believe that the custom started in the Middle Ages when thousands of pilgrims slept in the cathedra
l and smelled up the place. The incense was supposed to be a germ killer. Actually, the custom may have started in the time of our great Archbishop Gelmírez, Who did everything possible to maintain the credentials of Santiago de Compostela on a par with those of Rome. He probably invented the huge censer as a gesture of Compostela’s uniqueness within the Church.’
The men who pull the ropes are employed as caretakers by the cathedral, and their origin, according to legend, antecedes that of the present building. When Alfonso III was king of the north, Bishop Adaulfo of Compostela was accused by three men of the village, tsadón, Cadón and Ensión, of ‘nefarious vices too ugly to be announced.’ The king’s, judgment ordered Adaulfo to be thrown before a wild bull, but when this was done the animal, knowing that the bishop was blameless, came and placed his head in the good man’s hands, whereupon the king thundered, ‘Isadón, Cadón and Ensión and, all their offspring are sentenced to perpetual servitude at the cathedral which they have shamed.’ It is their descendants who pull the ropes.
Now they stop, for if they continued they’d send the censer banging into the ceiling and then down into the crowd, as happened in 1499 when ill-fated Catalina, youngest daughter of Fernando and Isabel, stopped here on her way to London to marry Arthur, Prince of Wales. Again in 1622 the Botafumeiro fell, landing in the middle of a large crowd without injuring anyone.
It is now time for the solemn high Mass celebrating Santiago as patron protector of Spain, and what happens next is so strange to Americans reared on a theory of separation between Church and state that I had better translate a portion of the speech which Admiral Francisco Núñez Rodríguez makes to the massive stone statue of Santiago, addressing him personally as if he were present in his role of Matamoros:
Glorious Apostle of Spain, Señor Santiago, in obedience to the most honorable responsibility given me by the Chief of State, I come here to present you with the traditional offering whereby our people wish to testify to their gratefulness for the protection and aid which they continue to receive from you.
Spain will never forget that she received the Light of Faith and the Doctrine of Christ from your lips nor that you selected these marvelous lands of Galicia for the repose of your glorious remains. Every year on this day we come to hear your message of apostolic impatience, which is like a sunrise testimony which reaches into our blood and fills it with fidelity and missionary zeal.
It was in continuance of your example, O Glorious Apostle, that in the past we sanctified our power and sublimated our ambition, orienting them toward difficult enterprises like the recovery inch by inch of your national heritage and the evangelization of half the globe. A new world we brought you, and later an eighth part of the earth.
We will never permit either error or false doctrine to snatch away our great treasure of Religious Unity, the foundation of our political and social unity, which thanks to you, O Glorious Apostle, we have enjoyed during these past thirty years.
Mighty and tall in his red robes and biretta. Cardinal Fernando Quiroga Palacios, primate of Santiago, and because of the advanced age of the Cardinal of Toledo, president of the council of cardinals governing the Church in Spain, replies on behalf of Santiago, accepting the homage of Spain and promising that as long as the nation is faithful it shall prosper. At this moment the pealing of the organ, signifying the majesty of government, is joined by the sound of bagpipes marching to the cathedral on the shoulders of the common people. All Spain appears united under a single banner, that of Santiago, and dedicated to a single ideal, that of the Catholic Church.
At this point it is appropriate to consider the role of the Church in modern Spain, and I shall be drawing only upon conversations conducted outside of Compostela. The central fact of Spanish history in the past five hundred years has been the country’s willingness to sacrifice for the welfare of Catholicism, and if one doubts the sincerity under which Isabel, Cisneros, Carlos V and Felipe II did so, there is no chance for him to understand Spain. The cost in gold, in armies, in commerce and in freedom has been stupendous; the rewards have been a sense of mission and the building of a nation committed to one Church. Most Spaniards deem the bargain to have been a good one and the cost not excessive. In various parts of Spain I was told what I believe to be true: ‘Eighty percent of the men of Spain, as contrasted to the women, inwardly ridicule the involved ritual of the Church, but of those who scoff, eighty percent would take arms to fight anyone who tried to change our religion to something else.’ One fatal miscalculation of the Republic in 1936 was its underestimation of the number of Spaniards who would defend Catholicism if it were threatened.
A short distance from the cathedral an ingratiating barker shouts to the pilgrims, ‘Step this way, ladies and gentlemen. Try your skill. You too can win a bottle of wine or a kewpie doll.’
The next point is difficult to explain, for although Spain has been the chief defender of the faith, it has often given popes a bad time. Fernando and Isabel were not loath to rebuke the Pope when he issued edicts they didn’t like. Stout Gelmírez, Archbishop of Compostela, openly opposed the popes of his day. Many a law promulgated by Rome was denied proclamation in Spain, for Spaniards have usually done pretty much as they like in governing their Church. Even today the Pope has a more difficult time appointing a bishop in Spain than in any other country where the Church is recognized, for the government, in consultation with the Papal Nuncio, draws up a panel of six acceptable names. These are submitted to the Pope, who designates the three who are most acceptable to him, and from this list the Spanish government selects its new bishop. In many parts of Spain, as we have seen, the memory of Pope John XXIII is poorly regarded and his more revolutionary ideas of ecumenism are opposed by at least half the clergy. It is common to hear a Spanish priest say, ‘It is now the role of the Spanish Church to save Rome from itself.’ What percentage of the ecumenical reform of the past decade will operate in Spain remains to be seen.
The extent to which the Church dominates civil life is often surprising to visitors. Marriage, family life, education, publishing, health and motion pictures are only a few of the areas in which religious control is supreme. The Church is vigorously supported by the other members of the ruling triumvirate, the army and the landed families, and by the Guardia Civil and the police as well. A citizen is ill advised to tangle with any agency of this group, for the others will jump on him. A man I know was visiting Valencia when a religious procession passed and he alone of the bystanders refused to rise and doff his cap as the Virgin went by. He was arrested and asked by the police, ‘What are you, some kind of a radical or something, not paying homage to the Virgin?’ He escaped serious trouble only by claiming that his knee had been damaged in an automobile accident. He was warned that in the future he must be more worshipful.
This kind of interlocking directorate between the rightwing politicians and the Church has existed for two centuries and explains why, at recurring intervals, the people of Spain, judging the Church to be indifferent to their needs, have risen blindly to slay their priests and burn their churches. This has happened so often and in such identical patterns that one must consider the killings and burnings following the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 as merely the latest in a doleful sequence. It is misleading for the Franco government to place marble tablets in churches proclaiming that it was Marxists who killed the priests. Most of these atrocities occurred months before Marxists were in control and should more accurately be considered a typical explosion of Spanish resentment. One incident not related to the war typifies those that were. In July, 1834, a cholera epidemic threatened Madrid, and when a rumor spread that Jesuits and friars had been poisoning wells, a mob swarmed into the Puerta del Sol and fanned out to burn churches and slaughter more than eighty friars and monks. In 1835 similar burnings and killings broke out, almost as if by prearrangement, in all the major Spanish towns.
During the Civil War it was natural and necessary for the Church to ally itself with the army and the landholder
s, but the continued alliance for more than thirty years has encouraged the lower classes to believe that the nineteenth century is being repeated and that the Church continues to be their enemy. This is why many younger priests and possibly half the seminarians want to create a Church which is divorced from the army and landholders. In Barcelona, as we have seen, priests agitating for social liberalism were clubbed publicly by the police and won much sympathy from the public. In Sevilla sixty seminarians struck for a more liberal interpretation of Church law. In Madrid priests wanted to know what was being done to implement the decisions of the Ecumenical Council, and petitions were circulated within the Church. I never knew, when I began talking with Spanish priests, what unpredictable thing they might say, and among them I found a wider spectrum of opinion than I do among my neighbors at home. Older men seemed determined to keep Spain as it has always been and to defend the country against what they regard as the recent errors of Rome; some of the younger men were surprisingly outspoken liberals.
The recent ruling which permits a degree of freedom for non-Catholics is more significant than would at first appear, and frankly I did not expect such liberalization so soon. Only a few years ago a Protestant chaplain at an American military base was arrested when he held a Sunday School picnic in an open park, for this was held to be in violation of the law forbidding any religion other than Catholicism to conduct ceremonies or meetings for worship in public, yet I have explained that when I arrived at Santiago de Compostela, the very heart of the Church in Spain, the Church itself offered to facilitate my attendance at a Protestant chapel. And when I was last in Madrid the newspapers carried long illustrated accounts of the ordination of a native-born Protestant bishop, but with the caption ‘Married and with two children.’
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