opinion

The vision that lived on
by Silvio Sirias

Back in 1980, only a few months after the Sandinista rebels overthrew the 50-year-old Somoza dynasty and assumed power, Cuapa, then a village unknown to the vast majority of Nicaraguans, witnessed a series of events that altered the lives and the identities of everyone that lived there: the Virgin Mary appeared on four occasions to a 49-year-old tailor named Bernardo Martínez.

The apparitions became the axis, the central point of contention, in the grave conflict of the 1980s between the Catholic Church and the Sandinista government. The traditional wing of the Church used Bernardo’s visions to help rally the faithful against the growing power of liberation theologians and the “Popular Church,” both strongly aligned with the Revolution. In turn, the Sandinista government did everything within its power to discredit the seer.

In writing Bernardo and the Virgin, I was not interested in proselytizing; that is, it was never my intention to convince readers the Mary had descended from the heavens to deliver messages for the faithful through Bernardo. I left that decision up to each reader. Instead, I wanted to explore two things: one, the history of Nicaragua in the latter half of the twentieth century and, two, how Bernardo Martínez unwittingly placed himself at the heart of a bitter confrontation. The tailor became the rope, if you will, in a ferocious tug of war between the traditional wing of the Church and the adherents of the Revolution.

At present, however, in Cuapa, the only vestige of that tense era is the glass case --- kept in the old church, where the initial signs of the apparitions took place --- containing the broken fragments of the first image of the Virgin of Cuapa: the statue was the victim of a hail of bullets fired by Sandinista sympathizers in the late 1980s.

The peace that reigns in this rural town today reflects the current truce between the Sandinista party and the Church. But as I traveled through the country, keeping an attentive eye open, I saw that devotion to the Virgin of Cuapa has spread considerably among Nicaraguans since the last I lived here, six years ago. Images based on the description Bernardo gave of the Virgin now adorn the entrances of many small towns, and not only in the department of Chontales. What’s more, a statue of the Virgin of Cuapa is in every cathedral of the nation --- a clear sign that the Nicaraguan Catholic Church has fully embraced Bernardo Martínez’s story.

In the town of Cuapa, wherever I went, I saw evidence that Bernardo’s mystical visions of twenty-eight years ago are now an integral part of the townsfolk’s identity. What’s more, Mary’s visit to Cuapa --- in which she urged Nicaraguans to work for peace rather than wage war --- is rapidly becoming an integral part of the identity of Nicaraguan Catholics.

And this, I believe, indicates that spiritual visions, those revelations that makes us look deep into our souls, endure far longer than the political ideals and dreams of any revolution, regardless of how well intentioned these may at one time have been.

Silvio Sirias is the author of Bernardo and the Virgin (Northwestern University Press). The manuscript of his second novel, Meet Me Under the Ceiba, won first place in last year’s Chicano/Latino Literary Prize sponsored by the University of California, Irvine. Meet Me Under the Ceiba will be published within the next year by Arte Público Press, University of Houston. He has just completed his third novel, The Saint of Santa Fe, about the life and times of Father Héctor Gallego. For more information, visit his website at http://www.silviosirias.com