Spanish Nativity

León

I'm in Spain at the moment, preparing to spend two weeks as an hospitalera (volunteer host) at the albergue (pilgrim hostel) on the Camino de Santiago in Ponferrada.  I'll be making beds, washing floors and, hopefully, getting some time to chat with pilgrims.

But now I'm in the nearby city of León, letting my jetlag wear off before going to Ponferrada on Monday.  León is one of my favorite cities. It has great food, good solid people, and beautiful sights. The most spectacular, of course, is probably the Cathedral, which is the heart of the town.  It is sometimes called the Bella Azul, the Blue Beauty, because of the brilliant blues in its stained glass windows.

The Romans had thermal baths on the site; in the year 916, the Spanish king Ordoño constructed a church at the location, which had been his palace, in thanksgiving for having driven the Muslims out of this part of Spain.  About a century later, it was attacked and nearly destroyed once again by the Muslims.  However, they were finally driven out permanently and a new building was built in the 11th century.  This in turn was replaced by a 13th century building, a full Gothic structure probably heavily influenced by the French gothic. It has been repaired and restored several times since then, and is presently undergoing work in the altar area.

The building has numerous alabaster high reliefs, with a particularly nice set of scenes from the life of the Virgin around the exterior of the choir.  You can see into the choir and through to the altar in the photo above. On the right side looking towards the altar, there is a Nativity scene, shown in this close-up.  The exquisite, expressive carving reminds one that Spanish religious sculpture reached one of its highest points in this part of Castilla in the 17th century.

Notice the remains of the gilt on the carvings.  These may have been painted; the figures on the exterior of the building were known to have been brightly painted, and the interior of the cathedral is thought to have been decorated with large bands of color (vermillion, particularly) that ran around the walls.

There are also features such as this huge St. Cristopher bearing the Christ Child, which towers over one of the side doors (visible at the right of the photo).

When they shooed us out of the Cathedral, I did the only logical thing and went off and had a caña (a small beer) and a plate of one of Leon's specialties, cecina, combined with the great local bread.  Cecina is an air-dried beef, sometimes lightly smoked as well. It is served drizzled with oil, in very thin slices like prosciutto, and is a true delight.  The local bread is a thick-crusted, "holey" bread baked in wood-fired ovens.  There's really nothing better.

 

Silent Night in Jacksonville

Bill Egan, who runs the website Bill Egan's International Creche School, is probably the world's most devoted fan of Silent Night, and was even presented with a medal by the Austrian government for his research and work on the song. He has hundreds of recordings of it, has travelled to Austria to see its birthplace, and is full of all sorts of interesting and little known facts about the song. One of these is even connected to Jacksonville.

The words to Silent Night were written by Joseph Mohr, the parish priest of the little town of Mariapfarr, Austria, in 1816. A couple of years later, the carol was set to music by his friend, Franz Gruber, who was a local teacher and choirmaster, and was first performed at Midnight Mass in the town of Oberndorf in 1918. Incidentally, it was originally scored for guitar, although a few years later an organ version was written and is generally the one we know.

The song spread and is probably the most widely translated and widely known of all Christmas carols. And here's where Jacksonville comes into it.

 

In 1867, John Freeman Young became the Episcopal bishop of Florida. He was originally from Maine and had served at Trinity Church in New York City before coming to Florida. He was a scholarly and energetic man, and constructed numerous churches and even several schools in various parts of Florida. And he also found time to translate Silent Night from its original German, Stille Nacht, Heilige Nach, to the English version we know today.

It is not known where he heard the song, although it is possible that he first encountered it on a trip to Europe in the 1850s. The song had also been sung at Trinity Church by a traveling group of Austrian singers in the 1830s, and it is equally possible that Bishop Young may have come across a copy of the music years later at the church. In any case, he published his translation in 1859, and it went on to become the standard translation that we all sing today.

John Freeman Young died suddenly of pneumonia in Jacksonville in 1885 at the age of 65. He was buried in the Old City Cemetery, which had been established in the 1850s. His grave had a suitably large marker, but over the years, the marker had sunk to one side and had become grimy and barely legible. Bill Egan, devoted to the memory of this translator of Silent Night, waged a one-man campaign to have this neglect repaired, and finally, early in 2008, the restoration was performed. The cross is now upright and the plaques at the base of the bright white marble cross can be read again. Unfortunately, they don't mention what could arguably be his longest lasting achievement, the translation of Silent Night.

Hidden Nativity Scenes

I hope everybody had a lovely Fourth of July. I'm getting ready to go off to Spain for a month, where I will spend some time as an hospitalera (host) in an albergue (pilgrim hostel) on the Camino de Santiago, and also do some linguistic activities. So I thought I'd do some local North Florida touring this weekend.

I went to Fernandina Beach, which is on Amelia Island, north of Jacksonville. Once upon a time, the town made its living on shrimping, among other things, as you can see by this shrimp boat monument downtown. It was formerly Northeast Florida's most important city, but now it's a big tourist destination. However, the huge Victorian houses and churches built during its heyday remain.

I also found some hidden Nativity scenes for viewers. Take a look at this beautiful Nativity window at St Peter's Episcopal Church in Fernandina. The parish was founded in the mid-19^th century and the current building was built in the 1890s. The pamphlet that provided this information unfortunately gave no information about the windows, but they were uncommonly vivid and beautiful. Also of interest were these painted organ pipes on the Harrison pipe organ.

On Sunday I went to Immaculate Conception church in Jacksonville for their Latin Mass. Here's their Nativity window. Again, I have no information on the firm that created the windows or their date. This building was built in 1910, after the first building was destroyed in the Great Jacksonville Fire of 1901, and is one of several historic churches in what used to be a prosperous area of downtown. The area has unfortunately become a Skid Row in recent decades, but the city is attempting to rebuild its downtown and the church is in good condition and has a fairly large congregation from surrounding communities. Its interior and windows are undergoing restoration.

And, finally, the reason for it all: to visit the grave of John Freeman Young, an Episcopal bishop who was largely responsible for popularizing the English version of our favorite Christmas carol, Silent Night. He's buried in the Old City Cemetery in Jacksonville, and his headstone was recently restored at the urging of that tireless fan of Silent Night, Bill Egan. But more on that tomorrow…

St Benedict’s Church

 

Today we have a little treat that is only indirectly Nativity related, and barely Spanish at all.

In May, we helped the Sisters of St. Joseph present a history of the order written by one of their members, Sister Thomas Joseph McGoldrick. The book traces the sisters from their foundation in France to the present. They were brought to St. Augustine in 1867 by our first bishop, Bp Augustin Verot, who was originally from France. He was the vicar and then bishop during and after the Civil War. Seeing the plight of the recently emancipated slaves after the war, he decided to bring the sisters from Le Puy, France to teach the children of the town's freed African Americans. You can read the entire story in Sister's book, Beyond the Call, available at Amazon.com.

The presentation of the book was a great success, and the Sisters kindly gave us this beautiful stained glass roundel to thank us for our work. The SSJ run a stained glass workshop where they do restorations and original work.

This particular piece is a copy of a window at St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church, where the SSJ stained glass workshop recently restored all the windows. St Benedict's is in the part of town known as Lincolnville, which was originally primarily an African American neighborhood. During the evil days of segregation, blacks and whites in Florida even went to separate churches, and St Benedict's was the church attended by black Catholics.

It is a charming little late 19^th century church, as you can see. It was originally built and staffed by the Josephite Fathers, a religious order dedicated to missionary work among African Americans, but was then taken over by the Cathedral parish. The Sisters of St Joseph were responsible for running a school for black children at that location. The school closed in 1964 with the ending of segregation, but the church still has a Sunday mass (although it's certainly not segregated anymore!).

The interior is simple and lovely, although changes made after Vatican II destroyed its altar and other features in the sanctuary. However, the windows remained.

You can see the brilliant colors that are used around the roundels – which depict religious motifs ranging from the Sacred Heart to the Lamb that we see here.

Our more pastel lamb is now hanging peacefully in its window.

Teaching the Nativity

A reader passed on this tidbit, which she, in turn, found posted by the musician Jeffrey Tucker on the great blog, New Liturgical Movements. The pages you see here are from a book of songs entitled The Story of the Redemption for Children. It was written by Father F. Abair, who set his own rhyming songs to various Gregorian chant tones or to ancient chanted hymns, such as Creator Alme Siderum. The books were illustrated by Sister M. Joanne, S.N.D. (Sisters of Notre Dame).

 

I know nothing about Father Abair, including his first name. He seems to have worked in the 1950s or before, because this little book was published in 1952 by the Gregorian Institute of America in Toledo, Ohio.

The little rhymes are simple but not silly and fit the chant, which, of course, was originally written for Latin. The words to the Nativity song – sung to Te Lucis Ante Terminum, the Compline hymn – are: They found a stable cold and bare/and made their humble dwelling there/and in this stable cave forlorn/ the Savior of the world was born.

Try singing it to the aforementioned tune and you'll see how sweet and simple it is. Naturally, the fact that these songs were sung to the various Gregorian tones meant that the children would learn the tones, as well as the history and basic doctrines . It reminds us of a time when people believed that children should learn and understand their faith and the history of their Church, its art and its music.

 

I'm ending with another interesting teaching device that I saw in Ohio at the Friends of the Creche conference last fall. It was a rubber Baby Jesus, about 12 inches long and probably meant to be passed around and set up in the class room. The box has the Nativity story on it, and the Infant is very similar in form to one of the classic Spanish Niños from Olot. This set dates to the early 1960s, just before the collapse of Catholic religious education. In my not so humble opinion, it's time to build it up again.

 

Whitehead Memorial Museum Nativity

Once again, our tireless American belenista Benito Santivañez has found us something of interest. Cruising through the Internet, he came across the Whitehead Memorial Museum in Del Río, Texas.

Del Rio is a small town about 2 ½ hours from San Antonio, Texas. It was originally known as San Felipe Del Río, and was founded by Spanish missionaries in 1635. They arrived at the place on the feast day of St. Phillip, and it was the Spanish custom to name a place for the feast day upon which they arrived. As to what date that was, I don't know: if it was May 3, the town was named after the Apostle Phillip, because that is his feast day; if it was May 26, it was named after St. Philip Neri, who had only recently been canonized and was therefore very popular with the Spanish missionaries.

Little Del Rio has a museum which, as you would expect, has many things about the old Wild West. The famous Judge Roy Bean, for many years the only representative of the law in that part of the country, is buried there. He was known as "The Law West of the Pecos," or as the "Hanging Judge," and held court in the local saloon. He ruled the area for some 20 years with his own peculiar, erratic and sometimes personally profitable form of justice, and died in 1903.

What Del Río also has is a large Nativity Scene. It is a Spanish style scene, built by a local woman named Beatríz Cardena, and is housed in a special building in the museum.

The scene has a very interesting history. I spoke with the friendly, helpful Mrs. Lee Lincoln, director of the museum, and she told me the background story. Beatríz Cardena was born in Mexico and married a Texas boy, and then they settled in Del Río. She started her Nativity Scene in the Spanish Belén style in 1940, setting it up in her front yard with just a few figures. Each year she added more, and as the scene grew bigger, it moved into her living room and then took over other parts of the house until finally her family built a special room just for the Nativity scene. In June of 1969, she stopped working on it and said that it was finished and she did not plan to add anything more to it; six months later, in December of 1969, Beatríz Cardena died.

Her Nativity remained in its special room, locked away and not visited, for more than 10 years, when a family member wanted to repair damage to the roof and found the scene again. While the room was repaired and the scene protected, however, the Nativity would spend another 10 years in seclusion until Mrs. Lincoln arrived at the Museum as its new director in 1992. Her first project was to bring Beatriz Cardena's Nativity to the Museum.

A special room was built for it, and with the help and cooperation of the family, the scene was installed at the museum, where it is open year-round. Mrs. Lincoln reassembled it in the room just as Beatríz Cardena had kept it. The scene is 32' long, 20' deep and 10' high. It has 605 figures and over a thousand lights and trees.

Many of the figures are terra-cotta, although other materials are also used. The figures were purchase dfrom Mexican locations including Guadalajara and Mexico City, and were probably made there. Beatríz Cardena also had about 35 of the figures made specifically for her by an artist in Mexico, although unfortunately nobody knows who he was and the figures are not signed. They are finely made Spanish-style figures with glass eyes.

Mrs. Lincoln, who has four children, calls it her "fifth child," because she feels such a personal connection with it after having worked on it for so long. She tends it carefully, always ready to repair the stray head that has somehow fallen off during the night or simply dust and tidy it and keep it just as Beatríz Cardena would have wanted it. I haven't been to Texas for more than 10 years, but this is almost incentive enough to make me consider a trip to the Southwest…

 

 

 

Mysterious Niño

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a battered plaster Infant that she had received from another friend who had been given it by – well, who knows who. You get the idea!

The figure was about 18 inches long. It was lying on a pedestal made to look like a bed of straw, and clearly had had something behind it at one point, because it was half-finished towards and completely flat on the back. It had already been repainted at least once. When I got the figure, which has a rather adult face, the Niño had dark hair swept down in such a way that the face looked a lot like that of Napoleon Bonaparte. I rebuilt a couple of broken parts and then repainted it, trying with relatively little success to make it less adult looking and distract the eye with bright colors in the robe. I thought my friends wanted to use the figure as part of a scene outside of their house in the country, so I tried to make it look appropriate for being surrounded by straw and lying under a garden light.

I gave it back to my friends, who probably passed it along to someone else, and then I forgot about it.

Imagine my surprise when I saw it again in, of all places, a blog article on a visit to a California mission! The blog Roamin' Catholic has a great story about the author's trip to Southern California and Mission San Buenaventura in Ventura, California to attend a Latin Mass. The mission, which was founded by Bl Junipero Serra in 1782, has a museum (and, of course, a website), and in his trip through the museum, the blogger (Miguel José Ernst-Sandoval) photographed this statue: a recumbent Niño with a background of golden rays which was almost identical to the basic figure that I repainted two years ago! The background and the original pediment, which reads Et Verbum Caro Factum Est, had been lost on my figure, but otherwise the two figures were the same.

I have no idea how old it is: the figure was cast of plaster, which of course doesn't give much of an indication of anything, and there were no maker's marks on it anywhere. Looking at the coloring in this one, I'd say it could be 19^th century and possibly French or Spanish. Of course, the 18^th century was also very fond of this set of colors and that sort of adult-looking child could have appeared in French or Spanish popular works. On the other hand, it could be a 20^th century mass-produced piece copied from one of these sources or based on them.

Any ideas?

Herod’s Palace

The good news is that yesterday's attempt at posting directly from Word 2007 was a great success! I recommend it highly to bloggers. It actually posts faster than posting from my blogging company's own site. Photos are very easy to add and resize, too. But enough of the commercial…Bill Gates isn't paying me to say this, I swear!

I visited my storage unit, where my belén and other Nativity related things wait it out until Christmas, and saw what will be Herod's Palace. I know, right now it just looks like – well, Styrofoam from a packing box (I think it held electronics of some sort). And that's what it is.

I hope someday it can be as beautiful as this great palace from the 2007 Belén at the Casa de Correos in Madrid. I've got a lot of work ahead.

This will be the first year that I am attempting a palace. I have always been very impressed by Spanish belenes, where the palace looms menacingly over the tranquil scene of Bethlehem – and we all know what evil is going to come out of that palace. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to use any lighting effects this year – as every year, because of the rather limited space where I generally set up my Belén – so I'll have to be very creative to achieve that dramatic effect.

Angel Trumpets

You may be asking what this has to do with Nativities, Spanish or otherwise: basically, nothing. I'm trying out a new software for blog posts, hoping to make it faster and easier to get my posts up.

For those among you who blog, I'm trying out Word 2007's blog document, one of the built-in templates that you can select when you create a document. You can publish it directly from Word once you have entered the identifying information about your blog. Or so it says…

To entertain the eye, however, I have put up a couple of photos of one of our beautiful Florida flowers, the Angel Trumpet (brugmansia x). It's a native of South America and is related to the datura and a member of the Solanaceae family. The latter includes things ranging from nightshade to potatoes to eggplants, tobacco and chili peppers! However, the Angel Trumpet produces nothing but beautiful flowers, and even those are toxic.

But it has long been a favorite of Florida gardeners and now virtually constitutes an heirloom plant. The varieties grown around here are usually pink or yellow, although it evidently occurs in other colors in its native areas. The plant can get to be about 8 feet high and is spectacular for most of the summer. This one is growing over the fence from my neighbor's backyard. Enjoy!

St Joseph and the Sisters

I’m seriously behind in the blog postings because for the last month or two, I have been completely occupied assisting our local order of nuns, the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine, with an event they held to celebrate the publication of new book written by one of the Sisters, Sr. Thomas Joseph McGoldrick, about the history of the order.   The book, Beyond the Call, is available from Amazon. The event was a splendid success and everyone involved in it has recuperated, so it’s time to get moving on the blog again!

St. Joseph is, of course, one of the favorite saints of anybody involved in the Nativity world.  Where would we be without St. Joseph?  He was the “foster father” of Jesus. In Spain, his feast day, March 19, was followed in the sanctoral calendar, which is the listing of saints and their feast days, with the explanation that San José was the “Padre Putativo” (putative or supposed father) of Our Lord.  The initials are P.P.  In Spanish, this is pronounced Pepe (in English, it sounds like “pay pay”), and thus the nickname for a man named José is Pepe.  For a woman named Josefa, it’s “Pepa,” although obviously by this time the nickname has wandered far from its origins!

In any case, the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine came to St. Augustine from France in the 19th century to teach the children of the recently emancipated African Americans.  They have run schools ever since that time.  Their schools are scattered all over Florida, although their first school was in St. Augustine and their motherhouse is still located there.

 
The statue of St. Joseph you see here has accompanied them since the 19th century. It is a French statue and is in a large niche over the door of the motherhouse.  Here you can see some photos of the Sisters, the motherhouse and the statue of St. Joseph, which is a little hard to see because it’s behind glass.   Under his feet is a plaque that reads J.M.J, for "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," and bears the date 1874, which was the year in which construction began on the Motherhouse and first home of St. Joseph's Academy, the sisters' largest school.

For your delight, I'm going to add an album of historical photos that I found in the course of putting together a display for the event. Included are things such as a sister making her profession, sisters sewing their habits (the sisters no longer wear habits), and some of the sisters in their chapel in the 19th century.

And finally,  since we really missed St. Joseph’s feast day this year because it was bumped from its usual day of celebration because of our very, very early Easter, here’s a small salute to him and a request for his help and kind attention to all belenistas!