Deliver Us from Evil

This week we celebrated the Immaculate Conception, one of the two most important church feasts honoring Mary (and a rare instance of dogma defined under the aura of Papal infallibility). Yet today, Mary matters less in the spiritual life of most American Catholics than she did for their parents or grandparents.

I’m old enough to remember the day when many Catholics came to Mass to say their Rosary in devotion to Mary, oblivious to the Eucharistic celebration before them as they fingered their beads. I also remember my own grandparents, kneeling on the front hall floor, with a statue of the Blessed Virgin in one corner and the radio in another, as Cardinal Cushing droned the evening rosary and the good sisters of the studio responded. If I arrived to visit during the program, I could wait on the porch, or let myself into the kitchen by the back door, or join them on the hall floor, but they would not rise to greet me until the Rosary was done.

Those days are gone, but my recent “personal pilgrimage” to France and Spain reminded me of Mary’s power in our tradition. All it took was a short train ride from Barcelona to Montserrat, the “Mecca” of Spanish Catalonia.

The jagged peaks looming 4000 feet above the landscape at the very center of Catalonia resemble the toothed blade of a saw (Montserrat means “sawed mountain”). To reach the monastery you choose between a cable car straight up the steep stone walls or a “zipper train” that pulls you up winding rails to the abbey’s perch high above the town. .

Nearly three million tourists, visitors, climbers and pilgrims make this journey each year to see the spot that has become a literary, patriotic, and spiritual symbol of faith and freedom. The mountain itself is part of the attraction, of course, as is the monastery church, its famous boy choir, and the retreat center (where Loyola himself discovered his vocation to found the Jesuits). But the main draw is “La Moreneta,” (“The little Dark One”), the small dark-skinned 12^th-century statue of the Blessed Virgin.

For centuries, people—from simple devout peasants to John Paul II himself—have come, climbing one by one up the narrow stairs behind the main altar to reach the small balcony from which the Black Virgin oversees the sanctuary. One by one, they kneel before her, kiss the globe she holds out next to the child on her lap, and pray the prayer of Montserrat:

O God

Giver of every good,

You have chosen this mountain

As a center of special devotion

To the Mother of your only begotten Son;

Grant us the aid of the Virgin Mary,

So that we may safely reach

The Mountain which is Christ.

Through the same Christ our Lord,

Amen.

This devotion to La Moreneta has made her the world’s first global Madonna. There are more than 150 chapels dedicated to the Madonna of Montserrat in Italy alone. A Montserrat hermit accompanied Columbus to the New World, where the first churches in Mexico, Peru, Chile were dedicated to her, as was an island, several towns, mountains, and two "Montserrat” monasteries in Brazil. Today there are Montserrat-inspired chapels in Paris, New York, Bombay, Jerusalem, Vienna, Havana, Manila, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and Rome.

But Montserrat’s most powerful impact is in Catalonia itself. Americans might picture Catalonia as the “New England” of Spain: the country’s northeast corner, with the sea to its east, a French-speaking country beyond the mountains in its north, a major seaport for its capital (Barcelona and Boston), and a people noted for sturdy character and stubborn independence.

Montserrat had already been a center of Catalan piety and pride for more than 800 years when, between 1936 and 1939, Civil War broke out in Spain. The Catalan nationalists sided with the losing Republican cause, as the Hitler-backed blitzkrieg of Generalissimo Francisco Franco imposed a fascist dictatorship on Spain for nearly 40 years (until Franco’s death in 1975).

Franco punished Catalonia’s rebellion by trying to stamp out its identity: banishing all Catalan institutions, customs, and cultural heritage, including Catalan itself, the language the region had shared with French Catalonia since the expulsion of the last Moors in the 9^th century.

Franco might have succeeded, but for the Virgin’s inspirational power. The war killed 30 monks and emptied Montserrat, but the Benedictines returned shortly after and, in direct defiance of Franco, continued celebrating marriages, baptisms, and funerals in Catalan. Before long it was the only place in Catalonia where the language, culture and customs of the people survived. In addition, the monks sheltered hundreds of Catalan nationalists, refugees of Franco’s repression.

For all his political power, Franco could not stop them. The monastery’s remote location, the long tradition of religious sanctuary, and above all the people’s near-fanatical devotion to La Moreneta (whom Pope Leo XIII had already declared the patron saint of Catalonia) made Montserrat immune to fascist control. So Montserrat became a rallying center for the entire identity of a people—and the Virgin’s power proved greater than the tyrant’s

When Franco finally died in 1975, King Juan Carlos restored Catalonia’s autonomy. It regained its own government, its institutions, its culture, and its language. The whole of Catalonia enjoyed a “Renaixenca” (“Rebirth”) culminating in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Today Catalan is the language of instruction at the University of Barcelona; it is compulsory in all schools; all signs marking roads, streets and public places of the region are in Catalan. There is even a movement promoting Catalonia as an independent country. And to this day, Catalans make an annual pilgrimage a family priority, their homes display the image of La Moreneta, and people still insist, “until a man brings his wife to Montserrat, they are not properly married.”

But if the Catalan people credit Mary for protecting their identity, they never forget the lesson preached over and over by the Monks at Montserrat: “Now as before and by ways proper to each age, ways that lead to and from Montserrat through the natural beauties and the Sanctuary, Mary brings people home to Jesus.”

In other words, Mary’s power is not as an object of worship, but as Mother—as an ambassador for her son, whose birth we prepare to celebrate by honoring her.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com