Feeling Our Lady’s touch on a Spanish journey

Edinburgh in autumn is charming but decidedly damp. I never fail but to get a nasty cold right about Michaelmas and then spend a week sniffing and snorting and littering tissues around the flat. For this reason, when my sister-in-law decided to do a tour of her European relations, she suggested to my brother that, instead of risking the lives of their babies in insalubrious Scotland, he invite his sister and brother-in-law to join them in sunny Barcelona for a week. As we are fond of family, and as going to Spain is for the Scots a favourite hobby, Mark and I accepted the invitation with alacrity.

Barcelona is one of the great art towns of the world, having had the good fortune to possess such children as Antoni Gaudí, who conceived the famous Sagrada Família Cathedral and designed the remarkable Park Gϋell. The principal Picasso museum is in Barcelona, as is the principal collection of Mirò. The city rejoices in many Gothic churches and networks of narrow medieval streets overlooked by iron balconies. It also backs onto the Mediterranean Sea. Thus, there was quite a lot for the Cummings and McLean families to do and see.

My brother and sister-in-law took their children to the beach, my husband hurried from shrine to shrine, and I thought about Hemingway and made notes. Hemingway would not have liked modern Barcelona; the Spanish region of Catalonia has banned bullfighting and the principal bullring stood empty in the sun-drenched city centre, covered with scaffolding.  

The children, aged two years and four months respectively, kept their parents’ sightseeing within modest limits but exercised little control over their uncle and aunt, who managed to get as far as the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat before returning to the rented house.  

Montserrat is in the mountains about an hour and a half north of Barcelona. To get there we took a train and a frightening funicular (cable car) a thousand metres up. Our train’s ultimate destination was a town called Manresa, and when I saw it on the map, my Jesuit-trained mind began to whirr. St. Ignatius of Loyola famously made his great retreat in Manresa, and I wondered if this Manresa was his Manresa. My question was answered when we arrived in Montserrat, for a pamphlet in the basilica informed us that it was there, on the night of March 24, 1522, before the altar of La Moreneta, that St. Ignatius promised to amend his life.

La Moreneta, or “little black one”, is the pet name given to Our Lady of Montserrat, whose black and gold statue looks out over the basilica. Legend says that this enthroned black Madonna and Child was carved by St. Luke and brought to Spain; art historians place its origins in the late 12th century. Pilgrims have been coming to visit La Moreneta for many hundreds of years, as my husband reminded me when I showed too much excitement about St. Ignatius. We joined a long and talkative queue as it slowly moved up a passageway of chapels towards La Moreneta’s shrine.

“Let us worship Our Lady,” said a helpful red pamphlet at the basilica doors.

“Venerate, not worship,” I wailed sotto voce. “Who translated this thing?”

In a flutter of orthodoxy, I took the French pamphlet which more correctly encouraged, “Vénérons saint Marie” and read along as we followed chattering Catalans under signs reading “Silencio.” Thus we passed through a chapel devoted to St. Peter and then a chapel devoted to St. Ignatius. This was followed by a chapel to St. Martin, a chapel to St. Joseph de Calasanz, a chapel to St. Benedict, and then a wonderfully carved triumphal arch surrounded by patriarchs and prophets and surmounted by “Mary in the thought of God the Creator.” This led to a staircase flanked by mosaics of female saints—mothers to the left and virgins to the right, an antechamber, great bronze doors featuring St. Gabriel and St. Joseph and, finally, the balcony on which La Moreneta sat with the infant Christ on her lap. She was encased in glass, all but her outstretched hand that held the orb of the world. Once gold, the orb was as black as La Moreneta’s hands, probably from being touched by so many pilgrims over so many centuries.

Perhaps because my mother was brought up a Protestant, she taught her children to treat the veneration of inanimate objects with some reserve. Personally, I am swayed by the old you-kiss-loved-ones’-photographs-don’t-you argument myself. So I gently touched the small black hand and had the strangest feeling that, through it, I could feel Our Lady’s hand touch me back.  I genuflected and made way for my husband.