“I don’t know. To heaven, I suppose. Purgatory is not a very bad place to be in, it is pretty fair. The wicked people go to the Tinieblas [tenebræ]. I do not know what that is, but it is very bad. It is always well to say a prayer for those in Tinieblas.”
“But do you suppose that any of your friends are there?”
“No, indeed; but you never know who may be clinging to the robe of the Virgin, and some one belonging to you might just be climbing up. At least, nothing is lost by saying a prayer.”
“If the souls in the Tinieblas are allowed to cling to the Virgin, I suppose she also is there?”
“How do I know? Perhaps these are all lies—things of priests [mentiras, cosas de sacerdotes]. What does it matter? What is needful is to share your puchero[5] with any poor man who is hungrier than you, and God knows I do that.”
The custom of attending a Mass for the dead on All Souls’ Day is very general. There are thousands of men and women who never set foot in a church during the rest of the year, yet rise an hour earlier than usual to go to Mass before beginning their work on November 2nd. But the proportion of communicants even on this occasion is very small. I have counted the congregations present at churches attended by the working and the lower middle classes on All Souls’ Day. At one early Mass, out of forty present, four communicated; at another, two out of thirteen; and so on. Communion involves previous confession, and the poor will not confess. Nevertheless, their faces show that this Mass is not a mere empty form to them. They do not, of course, understand a syllable of the words the priest mutters at the altar, but they are absorbed in earnest intercession for the dead whom they are commemorating. Then they go their way to take up the round of work, and probably do not attend another Mass until All Souls’ Day comes round again, while the rich celebrate the “Day of the Dead” by paying for and attending frequent Masses, and by taking or sending wreaths of flowers to adorn the graves of relatives in the distant cemetery.
Curiously enough, infant baptism bulks far larger in the religion of the poor than any other office of the Church, and the parents, and especially the mother, will make heavy sacrifices to obtain the fee demanded for the performance of this rite. The ceremony itself has some singular features, for the mother must on no account be present, and even the father remains in the background. But the social function which follows the ceremony in the Church is almost as important an event in the family life as a wedding, and the festivities are kept up far into the night. It may seem fanciful to trace these baptismal customs back to the time of Islam, but it is a fact that the accounts of the birth-feasts (buenas fadas) among the Moslems of Spain offer certain resemblances to those of to-day, while the term used to describe an unbaptized child among the peasantry links us directly to the time when to be a follower of the Prophet was to be an object of contumely. The explanation of the efforts made by the family and friends of a child of poor parents to scrape together the 7.50 pesetas demanded by the priest for the performance of the baptismal office is: “I could not leave him a Moor” (No podia dejarle Moro).
Burial often takes place without the offices of the Church, for there are few among the working classes who can afford to pay for a funeral Mass, and very many are unaware that they can insist upon the attendance of a priest even without a fee. And since the charge for a marriage in church amounts in many parishes to as much as 25 pesetas—the average weekly wage of the agricultural labourer certainly not exceeding half that sum—it is only to be expected that the civil ceremony, which costs one peseta, or the stolen “blessing” snatched from an unwilling priest by the pair proclaiming themselves man and wife at the close of any Mass, should be more frequently resorted to than the orthodox function. Many couples, moreover, live all their lives as husband and wife, as faithfully as if married by the Church or the mayor, without any religious or legal tie at all.
“The women don’t like it,” said a working man to the writer, “but what is one to do? How can we pay twenty-five pesetas to get married? And the women are only now beginning to understand that the civil marriage is quite as good as the other, if there is any question of money to be left to the children. I could show you plenty among my neighbours who live as if married, and no one takes notice that they are not. The priests only say such couples are living in sin because they have not got the marriage fee out of them.”
“It is true that my daughter-in-law could leave my son if she liked,” said an old woman when discussing a quarrel between her hot-tempered son and his hotter-tempered “wife.” “There was no money for the marriage, so I consented to their marrying without going to church. They will never separate: it does not occur to them that it would be possible. It is not as if they were not faithful to each other. My son does not look at other women, and as for my daughter-in-law (mi nuera), he would kill her if she set her eyes on another man, and well she knows it. There is no sin in marriages like that, whatever the priests may say about it. Of course I would have preferred that they should be married in church, and so would my daughter-in-law, but what are you to do when there is no money?”