cover image Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ

Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ

William A. Christian, Jr.. University of California Press, $50 (588pp) ISBN 978-0-520-20040-1

In his extraordinary book, Christian (Person and God in a Spanish Valley, Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain) documents the encounter between ecstatic religious experience and the Spanish Catholic clergy of the 1930s when, for common people of Spain, visions of the Virgin Mary at Ezkioga became an overarching phenomenon. The inevitable result was a challenge to the authority of the institutional Spanish church at a time when Spain itself was coming undone by fractured governments and, eventually, civil war. Were this merely a history of these visions and their consequences, the book would be remarkable enough; but Christian also skillfully explores the psychological states of the visionaries and shows how their unsanctioned spirituality attracted the often repressive wrath of Church authorities. (Mar.)