Carlos Chiclana: "Priests must take care of themselves in order to take care of others".Which Church, which priests?As it appears in many literary works, the priest is derogatorily described as "clerical", and his person and mission are clearly negatively judged. In the history of literature the figure of the priest has always been very present, but in the current novel it has acquired a generalized critical tone: the behavior and attitudes of clerics are usually ridiculed, and a certain desire, somewhat implicit, to spread a great "social discredit" on the figure of the priest is perceived. The Christian and clerical heritage, especially if we refer to contemporary literature, is seen as a heavy burden from which society must free itself as soon as possible, in order to acquire its autonomy, maturity and emancipation.
The classics
In the Spanish Golden Age, Cervantes introduces us to the clergyman of the town where his knight of the sad figure was born. He is a clergyman who is a reader, although poorly enlightened. A cleric who was afraid of literature. He decides that the books of chivalry that had driven his good neighbor Don Quijano mad should be thrown on the stake. Cervantes does not judge, because he did not want to "make blood" with the clerical establishment. Cervantes tells things that happened to him, because he knows well that to those clerics nothing happens but what St. Teresa said: that "they knew no more and were not good enough for more".
Quevedo, in his immortal "Historia del Buscón llamado Pablos", presents a dirty clergyman "like a rat in a masonry, with a shabby cassock, almost green with discoloration and full of filth" (Quevedo, in his immortal "Historia del Buscón llamado Pablos").. Quevedo, who knew the clerical establishment well, because he was an assiduous visitor of convents and chapels, did not like the greed of many of the priests with whom he dealt. And to this aspect, we must add the personal disagreements with They were "priest-poets" of his contemporaries: Góngora and Lope de Vega. Those were times when many writers were priests and/or religious: Fray Luis de León, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, San Juan de la Cruz... They used to be very well educated, very cultured, and because of the way they were treated and studied, they were very close to those who served as clergymen.
The first novels
We had to wait a few centuries for a priest to appear in the novel as a protagonist. He arrived in 1758 with the "Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio de Campazas" (History of the famous preacher Fray Gerundio de Campazas)., by Jesuit Francisco José de Isla: an amusing satire against the high-flown and hollow preachers, "frightening priests of the pulpits of the region".. A book full of irony and mockery, because it was the way to point out one of the most common clerical defects.
In the first novels of the 19th century, when the writer imagined that the priest was a sufficiently rich vein not to be wasted, what was used were several "clichés" of the rural world and of the more or less public customs, by which the priest did not give an example in accordance with his status. The priest, for example, maintained an affair life or lived a "double life". We can recall what St. Teresa wrote in the "Book of Life" (chap. V) when, on her way through Becedas, she learned that the priest was living an "amancebado" with a woman.
It is usually a cliché that the priest who had a maid at home, his treatment usually drifts towards something too familiar, that "literary" goes beyond the possible service to the house. Normally, it is also a "literary cliché", to speak ill of the priest, it was resorted, to speak ill of his fondness for good food or his evening habit of drinking chocolate jícaras with croutons. In fact, there is a chocolate that was called "del canónigo" and that was advertised on the walls of the bars of the villages with a fat mosén that was leaning over the cup and on the way to his mouth the picatostes, already smeared with the thick and almost olfactory chocolate. Clarín composed "La Regenta" with similar "narrative elements". o Juan Valera "Pepita Jiménez" o Juan Valera "Pepita Jiménez" o Juan Valera "Pepita Jiménez". or Torrente Ballester's "Los gozos y las sombras". o Pérez Galdós "Fortunata y Jacinta"...
Bad habits, doubtful vocations
These bad habits, according to some, came about because in the seminaries the future priests were given a formation/deformation that only dealt with the defects to be avoided and the moral pitfalls against which they had to be forewarned, rather than the virtues with which the priest had to be adorned. Juan Valera, for example, takes it to almost dramatic consequences, within the general sentimentalism of the novel "Pepita Jiménez". (1874), the experience of the seminarian Luis de Vargas, from the moment he encounters Pepita Jiménez, a widowed woman of exquisite sensitivity, against whom the seminarian does not find many arguments. The seminarian realizes that the path God is calling him on is not the one that, perhaps a little "unconsciously", he had taken.
In the novels of Pérez Galdós there are also numerous clergymen "without vocation", a vocation, the priestly one, that the Canarian writer repeatedly questioned. The priests who parade through Galdós' novels are not too exemplary: neither those who appear as ordinary characters in the life of the people, nor those others whom Galdós paints with a critical and acerbic gaze. "Tormento" (1883) is, possibly, the first Spanish novel to deal with the "problem of the priestly celibacy"and its bad experience, especially when the priest's life is crossed by the love of a woman. Although, certainly, Galdós does not make "a thesis" with this theme.
This Galdosian vision of the clergyman who in the middle of the world does not live his celibacy joyfully, is picked up by Leopoldo Alas Clarín, in what is possibly one of the three best novels of Spanish literature, "La Regenta" (The Regent). (1885). Clarín plays with the feelings and temptation of the cathedral's Magistral canon, who has too much vanity and not enough sense. He is overcome by social and domestic circumstances, which endanger his fidelity to a vocation that he does not know how to orient it, so that it is not devoured by a city (Vetusta Oviedo) in which he lives daily.
In the 20th century, in 1943, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester published his first novel: "Javier Mariño"., where there is much that is autobiographical in this account of the Galician teacher: there are evident memories of his time in a seminary where, despite all his efforts, a supposed priestly vocation "did not take root". The author does not spend too much time clarifying some of his character's behavior; however, there is no doubt that, despite the accusations that have been made against this novel, the book has the honesty not to deceive anyone. In the end, if there is any vocation that should be examined with sincerity, it is that of one who believes himself called to the priestly life.
Realities and prejudices
But it is not all drama and conflict. The vision that some more recent novels have had on the priests, have manifested moments of "glorious exaltation". Santos Beguiristain, "Por esos pueblos de Dios". (1953) and José Luis Martín Descalzo, "Un cura se confiesa" (1953) and José Luis Martín Descalzo, "Un cura se confiesa" (1953). (1961), left some of those "laudatory" elements in the personal vision of themselves and their priesthood that they "came to novelize", because their personal history was what gave plot to their novels. The priests who appear in these books are real priests, without great virtues, with the defects that we all have, and, above all, with a great illusion to carry to the goal the priesthood that they received when they were still village boys, full of dreams and hopes.
In the second half of the twentieth century, two main accusations were leveled against the clergy: the introduction of the notion of sin and the greedy quest for power. It is recurrent to recall the "clerical horror" (Lourdes Ortiz), because "with so much sin, with so much demon" (Ray Loriga in "The worst of it all"), "with so much sin, with so much demon" (Ray Loriga in "The worst of it all")., 1992) aim to introduce men into the "labyrinth of guilt" (such as the character of Juan Mirón, by Luis Landero in "Caballeros de fortuna")., 1994).
In this way, writers create "psychological spaces" in which it is not possible to enjoy, "in a repressive, mediocre and hypocritical society" (Lourdes Ortiz), inhabited by a "herd of sweet and bovine creatures who still went to mass on Sundays" (Lucía Etxebarría, "Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes"...)., 1998). The priests seek to impose a "cemetery order" (Francisco Umbral, "Los helechos arborescentes")., 1979) and a "religion of slaves" (F. Umbral, "Las ninfas") and a "religion of slaves" (F. Umbral, "Las ninfas")., 1975).
This tension is the common thread of our most recent novel: the clerical figure of the priest is the antithesis of that which asks for and allows the enjoyment of the body and of life. "The Outskirts of God". by Antonio Gala clearly reflects the struggle and victory of Sister Nazareth, who becomes Clara Ribalta when she leaves the convent and is reunited with love and life in the "outskirts of God".. It is "irrefutable proof" of this hedonistic "thesis", because within the Church, even if there are some people (including priests) who try to open other perspectives, the denial of life ends up being imposed. So they say. That is why it is understandable that there are no vocations, because "young people try to make the most of their youth and their life without calculations or plans"., as the retired Luciano points out to his religious sister in "A Tent by the Water". (1991) by Gustavo Martín Garzo.
Through the imposition of their ideas and the control of consciences, the priests are presented as exponents of a subtle domination of society. Thus they configure these "petty" cities, "cemeteries of dry leaves", "cemeteries of dry leaves"., closed by a "classical and closed morality", in the manner of the "Levitical City"., Raúl del Pozo's native Cuenca, 2001, or the Valladolid of Umbral's adolescence, described in "El hijo de Greta Garbo" (Greta Garbo's son)., marked by "the clerical paisanaje"., superb and fatuous, far from the sensibility of the people, or the Oilea of "Where it is always October"., by Espido Freire (2001).
In a similar way, León Luis Mateo Díez describes in "La fuente de la edad" (The Fountain of the Ages) as a "cursed city", a "lost corpse", closed in its "petty memory", whose inhabitants are "children of ignominy" because they are governed by the most hypocritical and useless and by "the cassocks". Even a later generation of writers, such as Valdeón Blanco, defines the city of Valladolid as "theological, Augustinian and conventual"., opposed to the development of the modern, industrial and university city ("The Red Fires")., 1998).
The priestly figures appear, therefore, in a dark light, focused mainly on their behavior and intra-ecclesial relations. In "Mazurka for Two Dead Men", by Camilo José Cela, the ambivalence of the Galician priests is manifested, in line with the general production of the author.
Coordinates of a negative vision
Also authors who move more directly in a Christian environment do not hide their "anticlerical" attitude, including José Jiménez Lozano and Miguel Delibes. The former, already in his first work "Un cristiano en rebeldía" denounces the "hard mind" of the men of the Church, an attitude that has marked the inquisitorial attitude of the Church in Spain, as he wants to prove in his research on "Los cementerios civiles y la heterodoxia española" (Civil cemeteries and Spanish heterodoxy).. It is a theme that appears in novels such as "El sambenito." o "History of an Autumn"., but which continues today in works such as "A Man in the Line", "A Man in the Line", "A Man in the Line", "A Man in the Line" and "A Man in the Line". (2000).
Miguel Delibes, for his part, portrays the dark and sour character of a narrow and somber religiosity, which can border on hypocrisy ("La sombra del ciprés es alargada", "Mi idolatrado hijo Sissi", "Cinco horas con Mario")., In the face of which he wants to open up closer and more human religious perspectives in "Lady in Red on a Gray Background". or "Letters from a voluptuous sexagenarian".. His latest novel "The Heretic". The dedication itself contrasts an inquisitorial religiosity with the authentic free religion, proper to the spirit.
Completely autobiographical is Javier Villán's story "Sin pecado concebido" (Without conceived sin). (2000). The author's time in the Seminary of Palencia was not, precisely, a joyful and peaceful time, nor was it a time of harmony with himself. The author begins by saying that "the first night I spent in the Seminary was a sad night" (2000).. Many more would follow. And the fact is that "the days of those nights were not hymns of glory and tranquility". Javier Villán recounts, with evident detachment, some of the experiences he had to endure during the years he lived in the diocesan formation house. In the end, he ended up abandoning it because, possibly, says the author bitterly, "the future does not exist"..
The subtitle of the book already gave us a glimpse of the end to which he wanted to lead us: "Joys and tribulations of a seminarian". This rejection of clerical training is driven, above all, by the imposition of dogmas or irrational truths, and especially by the "dams it presents to the enjoyment of life", to the unfolding of instincts, to the play of desire... Therefore, he concludes: "God is not found in the worship presided over by priests, but outside the temples, in contact with the earth and nature".
We are seeing how two coordinates converge in the consideration of the figure of the priest, but which mutually feed each other, causing a negative view of the priest. On the one hand, we detect the historical weight that has passed into the collective imagination of Spanish society, and on the other, the emancipation of man, exalting his rational autonomy and his free will to be able to get what he wants, his cravings, desires and instincts, all under the banner of the claim of the "new freedoms". Thus, the priestly function seems to "embody" a repression that must be overcome. The figure of the priest focuses the role and meaning of the Church, as the institutionalization of a particular religion, and that of Christianity, in terms of its historical magnitude.
Conclusions
Faced with the postponement of the figure of the priest (and of what he represents), what is the panorama that is drawn in the light of Spanish literature? What is intended to be eliminated is the mediating role of individuals and of the institution.
On the one hand, the novel has opened up the perspective of a "religion of nothingness" (J. Bonilla, Javier Marías, J. A. Mañas, G. Martín Garzo and F. Umbral, who uses the expression), dominated by the experience of loneliness, anguish and meaninglessness. Umbral, who is the one who uses the expression), dominated by the experience of loneliness, of anguish, of meaninglessness... This option leaves man alone and abandoned, subjected to destiny or to the absurd, and therefore refers to the force of desire as the only path to life, the only way to escape from nothingness. Without access to a founding reality, or to a loving origin or a hoped-for goal, life is reduced to a game of masks that exhausts itself in its mere appearance.
On the other hand, the perspective of a "religion of the Whole" that aspires to the fusion with Life with all the range of possibilities of enjoyment and cruelty (A. Gala, T. Moix, L. A. de Villena, F. Sánchez Dragó, J. L. Sampedro) opens up. Neither in this form of religiosity (which can be considered paganism or syncretism) mediators are required. Each one has to look for the adequate means to enter into the "ecstasy" that certain experiences can bring, and can indistinctly assume the violence and/or disinterest that this life manifests, with respect to concrete individuals.
The protagonist of most Spanish novels is left alone before the Nothingness or the immoderation of the All. Against this background, the figure of the priest, acting "in persona Christi et in nomine Ecclesiae", can be outlined in a clearer way.. It must make perceptible the mission of a Church that lives from the permanent call of the Lord who, as sent by the Father in the power of the Spirit, communicates and testifies to a gift capable of rescuing man from his solitude, from the fatality of destiny or from a totality that ends up annulling the eternal value of the person.
