Probing the political context of religious faith is a challenge full of pitfalls, the principal one being reductionism. William Christian avoids this trap as he deftly documents and analyzes an outbreak of miracles wrought by images of the crucified Christ in three towns in northern Spain in the first decades of this century. He shows that these devotions were inspired by Fatima and Lourdes, and indeed became the Spanish equivalent of those great manifestations. At the same time, the miracles of “moving Christs” and other phenomena in the towns of Limpias, Gandía, and Piedramillera very much reflected the tense religious and antireligious atmosphere of pre-civil war Spain.
Christian surveys a wide range of newspapers, pamphlets, and apologetic literature, as well as statements from the anticlerical press, to trace the rise and spread of these devotions. He examines the origins of the promoters and followers according to sex, region, and religious order. In so doing he creates a combined history, sociology, and anthropology of rural Spanish Catholicism. His dispassionate but highly fascinating account brings to light the volatile interplay of religious and political emotions that formed an important part of daily life. His work greatly broadens and deepens the social portrait of a country in which those emotions were on the brink of exploding into a civil war. It is also a valuable complement to studies on similar phenomena in Latin America, especially the Guadalupe devotion in Mexico.
