Roman Catholicism in Spain

by Anonymous

Those persons who are prevented by acute, although not dangerous, diseases, from attending the churches in compliance with the paschal precept, are also privileged to have the viatico in a splendid procession once a-year. This ceremony is attended by all the brotherhoods and principal people of the parish. The grandees of Spain, and the richest inhabitants of the neighbourhood, send the best of all their carriages on those occasions. The balconies are covered with ornaments, and the fair occupants scatter abroad a profusion of flowers, and copies of rude engravings of devout subjects, which are called aleluyas, towards the coach in which the priest is conveyed. Numerous bands of music accompany the cavalcade, which is escorted by a strong detachment of troops. Every time that the priest descends from the carriage to enter the house of some infirm person, the soldiers perform those military honours which already have been described, and during the performance the band plays the royal march. In some parishes, the proprietor of the carriage, or one of his principal people, assumes, pro hâc vice, the office of coachman.

Under the title of processions may conveniently be placed those of the funerals of such persons as have left sufficient funds to defray the expenses exacted by

the church on such occasions. Until within a very few years ago, it was the custom to convey the body to the dead-house of the church, with the face uncovered, in some religious habit, which was called the shroud (la mortaja), and the body was borne on the shoulders of the brotherhood of some society. Now-a-days, however, it is usual to convey it in a closed coffin, and on a funeral car. In Madrid, some of these cars are on such a scale of luxury and sculpture as but ill accords with the character and nature of the ceremony. The body is preceded by the poor of the charitable institutions, with lighted candles or tapers in their hands; and the clergy follow it, chanting the office for the dead. The undertaker is a personage entirely unknown in Spain. The church takes possession of the body, and keeps it until the time of interment, and the bill of expenses for the offices which the church performs frequently amounts to a sum absolutely ruinous. There is a Spanish city of which it is recorded that no sooner has a person breathed his last sigh, than the surviving family are importuned by deputations from the different religious communities, offering their respective services to conduct the interment on the cheapest scale of prices.

We have several times had occasion to allude to the strange contrast formed in Spain between the superstitious character of Roman Catholicism there professed, and the mockery which, at the same time, is made of the most sacred objects and venerated practices. The most notable example which we have of this moral phenomenon is The funeral of the sprat, or, as called

in Spain, El entierro de la sardina, which is performed yearly in Madrid. On Ash-Wednesday, the day on which the follies of the carnival cease, and on which the people proceed, at once, from dancing and revelling, to the church, to receive the ashes which the priest rubs in form of a cross on the forehead of every believer, and in the evening of the same day, the population of Madrid meet on the shores of the Manzanares, where they witness the caricature of a solemn funeral, the body interred being that of a dead sprat. This absurd feast is truly one of bacchanalian character; in it are committed a thousand excesses of many kinds, among which that of drunkenness, especially among the lower classes, greatly prevails. There is not in any modern society a more faithful copy of Pagan festivities than that we are now describing, as witnessed every year in Madrid. The clergy have often protested against this stupid ceremony; but all their efforts to procure its abolition have been fruitless, and the authorities have retroceded before a practice so deeply rooted in the public habits, and so analogous to the gay temperament of the people of the Spanish capital. In the year 1851, it having been reported that the government was going to prohibit this horrible profanation and mockery of one of the most solemn ceremonies of the church, all the periodicals of Madrid, except those under the influence of the clergy, put forth the most energetic remonstrances. In the Cortes the most violent debates took place on the same subject, and appeals were made to the cabinet; nay, there were symptoms of an approaching vote of censure

on the ministers, in case they should have the temerity to think of abolishing the obnoxious practice. Senor Madoz, who afterwards became minister of Hacienda, put himself at the head of this opposition, and displayed great ardour; and in spite of the religious periodicals accusing him of inconsistency, and quoting a passage from his own writings, in which he advocated the suppression of the feast as a blot on Spanish civilization, the question was too popular to be easily given up. Warm debates followed, and the subject took an aspect so serious, that the government, seeing itself exposed to a crisis, was obliged, to save its own existence, to come to the Cortes and declare solemnly that it would not offer the least opposition to the Entierro de la sardina, the funeral of the sprat. After this triumph, the interment of the sprat was performed with a splendour never witnessed before. The whole city attended the procession; there were thousands of coaches and vehicles of every description, besides an incredible variety of masked characters; guitars and castanets resounded for more than twelve hours on the pradera adjoining the Manzanares. The burlesque of the religious ceremonies was greater than ever; and the history of Madrid never recorded a day on which was consumed so great a quantity of wine and escabeche (a kind of pickle of different sorts of fish), being the classical refreshments with which the people of Madrid honour that ceremony in taking leave of the carnival, and furnish themselves with strength to bear up against the fastings of Lent.

CHAPTER VII.

Purgatory—Deliverance from by devotions of survivors—Those devotions described—Difference between dogma of purgatory and other dogmas—Modes of drawing out souls—Masses for the dead—Legacies to pay for them—External representations of images and pictures—Day of All Souls and its practices—The Andalusian Confraternity of Souls—Mandas piadosas—Debtor and creditor account between the church and purgatory—How balanced—Bull of Composition—Soul-days—Responsos—Cepillo, or alms-box—Financial operation—Origin of bills of exchange and clearing house—Wax Candles—Their efficacy—Cenotaphs—Summary of funds, and reflections on their misapplication.

In the year 1802, the Inquisition of Granada celebrated an auto-de-fé against a teacher of languages, who lived at Malaga, for having said and written that the true purgatory was the purse of the friars and clergy. All persons who have considered the immense gains which the Spanish clergy have drawn, and continue to draw, from the belief in purgatory, will agree that the unhappy professor did not wander far from the truth. According to the doctrine, generally admitted among the Roman Catholic clergy, upon this dogma, which the Roman Catholic Church alone receives, the liberation of souls suffering the torments

of fire in purgatory, or, what is much the same, their admission to the joys of the celestial state, does not depend so much on the culpability of the defunct individual as on the devotion of those who survive. It is taught in the catechism, it is preached in the pulpit, and enforced in the comments of theological works, that the souls of those condemned to purgatory can be ransomed and drawn out by means of prayer, penance, alms, and religious rites; and that one of the works of charity, most meritorious in the eyes of the Almighty, is the use of those means to abbreviate the duration of punishment of the sufferers. Hence it is that what is called in Spain devotion, with reference to souls in purgatory, is one of the most striking characteristics of religious life in that country. Nobody there has hitherto ventured to examine whether this belief is or is not conformable to the sacred Scripture, and to the doctrines of the first centuries of Christianity.