My daughter Fiorella’s baptism was celebrated here in Mallorca, Spain, last week at the Church of Sant Jaume, which contains a miraculous image of Christ reported to have sweated blood and water in 1507, in answer to the locals’ pleas in the midst of a terrible drought. They mark the return of the rains by revering this image in extravagant processions triennially, including this year, on July 26, which happens to be my wife’s birthday. Perhaps they can help mitigate the heat wave currently engulfing Europe, though we as a global community need to do more than pray on that front. But this legend of what they call “Sant Crist” led me to explore another local hero on a visit to the island’s largest city, Palma.
While there with our Argentinian friend Yanina, staring up at the gargoyles of dragons, basilisks, and harpies adorning the elaborate church in the midst of the convoluted snarl of alleys and passageways that constitute the historic center of Palma, I pondered the life and death of a Catalan martyr revered in Barcelona and the Balearics, but largely unknown in the English-speaking Christian world – Santa Eulalia. Incidentally, there is a tiny Eulalia Township in Potter County, Pa., named after the founder’s foreign wife. But I’ve seen little references to the name elsewhere in the United States.
The storied church in Palma was dedicated to her after the re-Christianization of the island by Jaume de Aragón, the first king of Mallorca, in 1229 AD (the Romans and Byzantines had been there before the Muslims). But the saint’s story dates back remarkably further, to roughly 303 AD.
Eulalia’s name is quite obviously of Greek origin, usually translated as “sweet-spoken.” Apparently not infrequently used in the ancient world, there are actually legends of two distinct Eulalias in early Christian Spain: one in Barcelona and one in Mérida. But over the centuries, their lives and the stories of their martyrdoms have been largely conflated.
Eulalia of Barcelona was allegedly a young girl from an early Christian family under the co-emperors Diocletian and Maximian in the pre-Constantinian Roman Empire. The local prefect or governor, Dacianus, was particularly ruthless in his enforcement of the dictates to eradicate Christianity from Roman Spain, the territory the Empire called Hispania. Eulalia was accused of professing the faith, and subsequently stripped in the public square, beaten, branded with cast iron and rolled down a hill inside a barrel studded with broken glass and metal shards. Eventually, she was either crucified or at least displayed naked on an X-shaped cross, similar to the one most associated with Saint Andrew. Supposedly a miraculous snow fell over her body, preventing onlookers from gawking at her exposed and battered corpse before her family was able to retrieve the body. A white dove is said to have flown out of her mouth (or her wounds) after death.
Today her relics are kept in the crypt of the Barcelona Cathedral, which is dedicated to her and the Most Holy Cross, along with precisely 13 geese in its cloisters, representing one bird for each year of her life when she was killed. She is recognized as the patron saint of birds and birdwatchers, and co-patroness of Barcelona. The Arc de Santa Eulalia is a vault in a tiny alley there, where legends say she was imprisoned before her ordeal and which accordingly is draped in constant shadows other than one day a year – February 12, her feast.
The festival celebrating Our Lady of Mercy – “La Mare de Déu de la Mercé” in the local dialect – is the infinitely more famous patronal feast of Barcelona, with papier-mâché giants, elaborate monsters and fire-breathing dragons, enormous fireworks displays, late night processions and alcohol-induced revelry drawing onlookers from around the world. But Eulalia’s tortures and much-older celebration (as the area didn’t start invoking Mercé until an attack of locusts in 1687) deserve prayerful attention as well. Her festival, affectionately called La Laia, has a less-chaotic and more family-oriented tone, as children’s parades, regional dancing and laser light shows are held in her honor.
Ongoing devotion to both Sant Crist and Eulalia demonstrate the Christian roots of an increasingly secular modern Spain. It is left to our generation to make sure that future ones recognize their roots in the past, albeit with a sufficiently critical lens, and that these horrors are not simply remembered as vestiges of a superstitious era or dark fairy tales, but warnings about what can happen when humanity forgets the transcendent and the inherent dignity of all people, particularly the poor, the outcast and those vilified or demonized by the state.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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