Visionaries

In June 1931, on a hillside in the Spanish Basque country, two children reported seeing the Virgin Mary. Within weeks, hundreds of seers were attracting tens of thousands of onlookers, and the nightly spectacle gave rise to others in dozens of towns across Spain. Visionaries explores the experience and the larger meaning of this wave of sightings of Mary and the saints which began shortly after Spain became a republic and anticlerical mobs burned religious houses in several cities. Before repression from the government and condemnation from the Vatican finally drove the visionaries into secrecy, more than a million people had visited the original apparition site at Ezkioga. William Christian writes about two kinds of visionaries and their relation to each other: the seers who had visions of Mary and the saints, and the believers who had a vision for the future which they hoped Mary and the saints would confirm. Together, these visionaries attempted to convince a skeptical world that heavenly beings were appearing on the Iberian peninsula. Christian immersed himself in the lives of these visionaries, retracing their steps and recreating their world. He spoke with hundreds of witnesses, who led him to caches of vision messages, diaries, clandestine publications, and eloquent photographs in, for example, a clinic in Dijon, a garage in southern France, a cloistered convent in Valladolid, a farm attic in the Basque country, a house in a Catalan mill town, and a chapel in an orange grove in Valencia. By turns intense, poignant, fierce, and funny, this long-hidden history demonstrates the vital role of the extraordinary in giving voice to a society's hope and anguish. What do people want to learn from heaven that they cannot learn on earth? How are their churches failing them in these needs? How are we affected by seers and the kinds of believers who nudge seers along? How do vision messages converge on certain themes?