Pope
Honors Spanish “Martyrs”
By Gary Leupp
05 November, 2007
The
Dissident Voice
The
Christian concept of “saint” has a long history. In the
New Testament, in the epistles of Paul (Ephesians 1:1, for example),
it refers to the Christian community in general, and also to Christians
who have died and are assumed to be in Heaven. From a very early period,
the term became more specifically applied to persons martyred for the
faith. By the fourth century, those believed to have performed miracles
were added to the list. Roman Catholic canon law came to specify that
persons so designated must be venerated as having entered Heaven and
possessing the ability to “intercede” between the believer
and God. They are, that is to say, not regarded as having the capacity
to answer prayer themselves but to facilitate the process. The whole
concept is rejected by most Protestants but is central to the history
of Roman Catholicism. Indeed, as the historian Peter Brown writes, the
cult of the saints became the dominant form of religion in Europe after
the fall of Rome (The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin
Christianity, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p3). For centuries
it was closely related to the cult of saints’ relics, collected
by almost every church and the object of pilgrimage.
The Church, acting as its
adherents see it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has a procedure
to select certain dead people for recognition as saints. The first step
is beatification, which pronounces the individual “blessed”
but doesn’t oblige believers to venerate him or her. It merely
allows the believer to pray in the beatified’s name. The skeptic
might suspect that politics have as much to do with beatification as
divine inspiration; the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne (surely no “saint”
in the colloquial sense) was beatified soon after his death in 814.
The Pope, as Christ’s Vicar on earth, has the final say. The late
Pope John Paul II, who will surely himself be beatified eventually,
beatified 1338 — the largest number of any pope in history.
Having done some study on
this topic, I think that the concepts of beatification and sainthood,
and the notion of praying to saints, were no part of the earliest Christianity
but quite likely a meme derived from Buddhism. In Mahayana Buddhism
(to which some Christians in Syria and Egypt were exposed by the second
century if not earlier) we find the concept of the boddhisattva —
the enlightened being who, after death, remains in the cosmos out of
a spirit of compassion and is available to answer prayer. Some boddhisattvas
have specific qualities or functions: for example, Avalokitesvara is
associated with compassion, Manjushiri with wisdom, Vasudhara with wealth
and fertility. St. Christopher (downgraded in 1969 by the Vatican due
to questions about his histroical existence) was long the patron saint
of travelers. His Buddhist counterpart is Ksitigarbha, the bodhisattva
who helps travelers.
In the 190s, in Alexandria,
Egypt, church leader Clement (later made St. Clement) in his Stromatae
made the first known Christian references to Buddhism. He mentioned
Buddha by that title. He also described Buddhist monks (in an era before
there were any Christian monks, although he compared them with the heterodox
Christian ascetics of Syria, the Encratites), and the Buddhist practice
of reverencing the bones of virtuous persons under pyramids (by which
he means stupas). (See John Ferguson, trans., Clement of Alexandria:
Stromateis, Books One to Three [Catholic University of America Press,
1991], p. 293.) There were almost surely Indian Buddhists in Alexandria
and in Antioch, the terminus of the Silk Road. Ideas like the reverence
of saints often pass from one religious tradition into another quite
different one. I think monasticism itself, along with the cult of relics,
the use of prayer-beads, and the cult of saints — none of which
are mentioned in the New Testament or are likely derived from Roman
pagan practice — are Buddhist memes.
In short, I personally think
the cult of saints is a human invention to be logically and historically
explained. It’s very interesting, and perhaps harmless or even
psychologically helpful for the believer; a Buddhist monk is likely
to tell you, “If believing alleviates suffering, what is the harm?”
Nevertheless maybe sometimes the selection process can do harm. If you
chose the wrong person to beatify, you may open old wounds.
In Vatican City on Oct. 28,
in the largest beatification ceremony ever held, Pope Benedict XVI placed
498 persons on the road to sainthood. They all died during the Spanish
Civil War (1936-9), and were presented as martyrs to their faith. This
was just days before the Spanish Parliament was scheduled to debate
the “Law of Historical Memory” requiring local governments
in Spain to fund efforts to unearth mass graves of victims of that war
containing thousands killed at the hands of the fascist dictator and
devout Roman Catholic Francisco Franco. Is the timing not curious?
Half a million people died
in the war. On the one hand there were the partisans of a Republican
government under a leftist Popular Front coalition that won parliamentary
elections. They were leftist and anticlerical, hostile to the great
wealth and power of the Catholic Church. (The Church, consisting of
about 115,000 priests, monks and nuns in a country of 24 million, controlled
over 15% of all arable land, and had large holdings in bank capital
and other financial enterprises.) On the other were the Nationalists
under Gen. Franco, well-known for his exploits in Spain’s colonial
war in Morocco, and for crushing a miners’ uprising. The Republicans
were supported by the Soviets, the Nationalists by Hitler’s Germany
and Mussolini’s Italy—and the Church.
The brutality of Franco’s
fascists and foreign allies is immortalized in Picasso’s painting
“Guernica,” depicting the German Luftwaffe bombing of a
Basque town in 1937. While there was brutality on all sides, the Nationalist
dead were treated with respect following Franco’s victory and
during his long dictatorship to his death in 1975. (He enjoyed massive
U.S. support during the Cold War, and continuing warm, grateful support
from the Catholic Church.) There are tens of thousands of victims of
the fascists whose remains have not yet been located, and some prominent
clerics in Spain seem content with that. AP quotes Francisco Perez,
the archbishop of Pamplona, as opposing the bill before the Spanish
parliament. “You can’t change history,” he says, urging
victims “to look for ways to forget.”
In a Spanish language sermon
in St. Peter’s Square Sunday, Benedict declared that the beatified
ones were “motivated exclusively by their love for Christ.”
“These martyrs,” added the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal
Tarcisio Bertone (the number two man at the Vatican, according to Reuters)
“have not been proposed for veneration by the people of God because
of their political implications nor to fight against anybody”
but because they had been exemplary Christians.
The Pope, meanwhile, has
been an outspoken critic of the growing secularization of Spanish society.
Church attendance has fallen dramatically since 1975, and according
to a 2002 survey only 19 percent of Spaniards consider themselves practicing
Catholics. Spain has under current President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
adopted a liberal divorce law and legalized gay marriage. An indignant
Pope Benedict in 2005 urged Spaniards to firmly resist “secular
tendencies,” and perhaps he associates these with the present
attention given to “historical memory.”
The Spanish state wants to
dig up the victims of fascism. The Church wants to leave them buried,
while launching its own remembered martyrs into the stratosphere for
veneration. Whom do these include? Augustinian Fr. Gabino Olaso Zabala,
executed by Republican forces. In 1896 he participated in the torture
of a priest in the Philippines, a Filipino Fr. Mariano Dacanay, who
was suspected of sympathy for anti-Spanish revolutionaries. He encouraged
prison guards to kick the priest in the head.
But as of Sunday, Catholics
so inclined are authorized to seek his intercession between themselves
and God.
No political implications
here, says the Vatican Secretary of State, although many Spaniards seem
to disagree. I wonder what they’re saying in the Philippines.
Gary Leupp
is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion
at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history.
He can be reached at: [email protected].
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