Pedro Marieluz Garcés

Depiction of the shooting of the Camillian father Pedro Marieluz.

Pedro Marieluz Garcés (also Petrus Marielux ; * 1780 in Tarma , Peru ; † September 23, 1825 in Callao , Peru) was a Peruvian Roman Catholic religious priest and is considered a martyr of the confessional secret .

Life

Origin and career

Pedro Marieluz was born in Tarma in the first third of 1780 to wealthy parents. He entered the order of the Camillians at the age of 16 and, after a two-year novitiate and initial rejection by the superiors after consulting a lawyer, was admitted to the religious vows , which he took on August 10, 1798 in the Convento de la Buenamuerte , the main monastery of the Camillians in Lima , cast off. On June 28, 1806 he was ordained a priest and transferred to the Camillian convent at the Church of Santa Liberata in Rímac , a suburb of Lima.

War participation

During the War of Independence , Father Pedro Marieluz stood on the side of the royalists and after the arrival of the Chilean-Argentine expeditionary troops under José de San Martín to Lima in July 1821, he joined the army of the Spanish viceroy José de la Serna , who had set up his headquarters in Cuzco . An uncle of Pedro was also a first lieutenant in a guard unit of the viceroy. Like some of his confreres, Pedro Marieluz was appointed military chaplain . With the Spanish troops he took part in various military operations and was present at the victory of Ica on April 7, 1822 with the royalist army under General José de Canterac . With his army, Marieluz returned briefly to Lima in June 1823, where he witnessed the looting before the city was surrendered again by the Spaniards.

At that time Peru was divided into two parts: the coastal area with Lima and Callao was in the hands of the republican government, while the south and the mountains remained under Spanish control. It was not until the arrival of the Greater Colombian forces under Simón Bolívar and Antonio Sucre in Callao in September 1823 that the military decision was taken and led to the final success of the Peruvian patriots.

In February 1824, loyalist forces brought the capital back into Spanish possession after a royalist revolt among the fort's garrisons. The Spanish brigadier José Ramón Rodil Campillo , to whose division the Camillian priest belonged, occupied the fortresses of Callao and established a tough military regime in the area. After the decisive defeat of the royalists in the Battle of Ayacucho on December 9, 1824 and the subsequent capitulation of the Spanish viceroy, the last Spanish associations that did not want to surrender joined under Rodil's leadership in the Fortaleza del Real Felipe in Callao Bay and were besieged by an independentist army under General Bartolomé Salom . With the surrender of this fortress after almost fourteen months of siege on January 23, 1826, the Spanish presence in South America ended .

Death in Callao

As the fortress priest, Father Marieluz was among those trapped. During the siege , a climate of deprivation, tension and mutual mistrust developed among the worn-out soldiers who hoped for relief from Spain in a hopeless situation , as defectors and traitors had to be reckoned with constantly . In the final phase of the siege, some officers apparently decided to revolt against the fortress commander José Ramón Rodil in order to desert or to hand over the place to the besiegers against his will. According to reports, there was a denunciation , which then led to the shooting of several accused as well as the Camillian father Pedro Marieluz on the orders of Commandant Rodil. Marieluz's date of death is usually given in September 1825.

Ramón Rodil was honored with the title of Field Marshal by King Ferdinand VII and knighted after his return to Spain in 1831. He was a Christian military leader in the First Carlist War , became Spanish Minister of War in the 1830s and briefly head of government of Spain under the reign of Baldomero Espartero .

Lore

Testimonies

In the decades after 1826, anecdotal (often exaggerated) accounts and rumors were circulating in the international press about the cruelty and determination of Rodil, who was portrayed as intolerant and tyrannical, and about his seemingly irrational perseverance as commander of the trapped brigade in Callao. They particularly attached themselves to the brutal measures taken shortly before the start of the surrender negotiations (around the turn of the year 1825/26), when those trapped had practically no supplies, but Rodil still strictly refused to surrender and shot numerous soldiers willing to surrender as deserters. The most recent source-critical investigation into the course of the siege sticks to the reconstruction confirmed by the Spanish military historian Verardo García Rey in 1930, according to which a mutiny of several captains was discovered and their shooting took place in the second half of December 1825. Marieluz does not appear in these representations, some of which are based on Rodil's own memories, so that it is not fully clear whether the priest was actually shot in the course of the suppression of this revolt or possibly earlier (perhaps in September) for another reason.

In the run-up to a beatification process opened in the Archdiocese of Lima in 1887 at the instigation of the Camillian Order , five witnesses who had known Pedro Marieluz were heard; including two family members and three eyewitnesses who belonged to the trapped garrison of the fortress. Their statements confirm that the Camillian priest was valued by the soldiers as a priest and pastor and that his death was related to the fact that he had made confessions from two insurgent officers and that the commander Rodil asked for information about its contents. That is why Pedro Marieluz was regarded by many as a saint .

Ricardo Palma

In his story El secreto de confesión ("The Confessional Secret "), first published on May 15, 1886 in the newspaper Nacional in Lima, the Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma passed on some details of the event, which are historically only partially secured and in the one for Palma typical mixture of fiction and historiography are presented. Accordingly, the conspiracy was betrayed and on the afternoon of September 23, 1825, Rodil was informed that an assassination attempt on him was planned for nine o'clock in the evening under the leadership of his major Montero. He promptly arrested and interrogated the alleged conspirators, but all stubbornly denied the existence of a conspiracy. Nevertheless, Rodil decided to have all suspects shot at nine o'clock, the time the assassination should have been carried out. Three hours before the appointment, Rodil called the fortress vicar, Father Marieluz, to prepare the thirteen condemned for death and to take confession from them .

Immediately after the execution of the conspirators, Rodil Palma had doubts as to whether he had actually discovered all those involved in the plot. He therefore had Marieluz called to him because he assumed that the full extent of the conspiracy of the executed must have been revealed to him before their death. After the clergyman had refused any information about the content of the confessions, referring to the confidentiality of confession , Rodil presented him with the choice of either giving evidence or being shot himself for refusing to give orders . Pedro Marieluz stuck to his refusal and was then shot by four fusiliers under the command of Captain Iturralde on Rodil's orders .

iconography

Fantasy representation of the martyr with iconographic attributes: stole and palm trees

Before his death, at the orders of the henchmen or following his own inspiration, he is said to have laid himself in one of the coffins provided in the courtyard or kneeled down in such a way that he was hit by bullets and fell straight into the coffin. This representation can be found on a wooden panel painting from 1887, which is preserved in the Camillian convent in the Barrios Altos district of Lima.

Otherwise Pedro Marieluz is as beardless or shortly bearded monk very similar to St. Camillus de Lellis in the religious habit of the Camillians (black cassock with sewn blood-red cloth cross on the chest, one reason the Camillians in Lima Kruziferarier , or "cross-bearer" called), sometimes with Cope (also black with red fabric crosses on the shoulders), where he wears a purple confessional stole and martyr's palms as attributes .

distribution

The story of the martyrdom of the Camillian Pedro Marieluz was occasionally retold in Catholic papers from around 1890 and up into the 1920s, with the depictions always based on the popular tale written by Ricardo Palma. About the Baden pastor and school teacher Joseph Anton Keller (1840-1916), who took the German version of the story, translated from Italian, from a Salzburger Kirchenblatt published in 1886 and included it in his series of examples that were compiled from the Catholic press and published "by the hundred" Episode also entry into the German-language Catholic example literature of that time.

Today's admiration

The memory of the priest is cherished within his congregation, the novitiate house of the Camillians in Lima is named after him, and his beatification process is looked after by the general postulator of the order.

literature

• General Postulation of the Camillians (ed.): Testimoni di Carità della Famiglia Camilliana. Profili biografici. Edizioni Postulazione Generale Religiosi Camilliani, Rome 2007 (Italian, excerpts in Spanish translation online ).
• Virgilio Grandi: El convento de la Buenamuerte. 275 años de presencia de los padres camilos en Lima. Bogotá 1985, pp. 125–129 ( proof of works ).
• Ricardo Palma : El secreto de confesión , in: Tradiciones peruanas ( Wikisource ).
• Constantin Kempf SJ , Francis Breymann SJ (transl.): The Holiness of the Church in the Nineteenth Century. Saintly Men and Women of Our Times. Benziger Brothers, New York 1916, pp. 375-377.
  The episode by Peter Marielux is not yet included in the German 2nd edition of the book ( Die Heiligkeit der Kirche im 19. Jahrhundert. Benziger, Einsiedeln, Waldshut, Cologne 1912), on which the translation is based.

Web links

• Blog entry by the Spanish-Peruvian historian José Antonio Benito (November 2010, Spanish).

References and comments

1. ↑ Necrology of the Peruvian Camillians ( Memento of February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 121 kB), edition 2009, without page count (page 8/11 of the file).
2. ↑ In some cases, his death is only dated to January 1826, i.e. immediately before the fortress was abandoned (see General Postulature of the Camillians (ed.): Testimoni di Carità della Famiglia Camilliana. Profili biografici. Rome 2007), which also reflects the historical reconstructions of the revolt would correspond better. The votive picture in the convent of Lima gives the date of death of Pedro 23 September 1825.
3. ↑ For the German-speaking area, see the Sunday supplement of the Allgemeine Zeitung of August 9, 1834, p. 1241 . A week earlier, the same story was written almost word for word in the Swiss messenger (supplement to no. 61 of August 2, 1834, page 241).
4. ↑ Verardo García Rey: La defensa del Callao by D. José Ramón Rodil, durante el período comprendido entre la capitulación de Ayacucho y el embarco de Rodil en la "Briton". Imprenta Palomeque, Madrid 1930 ( proof of works ).
5. ^ Christian Anthony Rodríguez Aldana: Las últimas banderas. Rodil, el Callao y las últimas batallas por la independencia del Perú (1824-1826). UNMSM , Lima 2017, p. 181.
6. ↑ ^{a b} There is different information about the number, rank and name of those concerned; A captain or major named Rafael Montero is usually mentioned as the leading person (cf. General Postulature of the Camillians (ed.): Testimoni di Carità della Famiglia Camilliana. Profili biografici. Rome 2007). In accordance with Rodil's memoirs and the older literature, Rodríguez Aldana also names the artillery captain Rafael Montero as the leader of the conspiracy uncovered in December, who is said to have been a confidante of the commander whose betrayal surprised and angered Rodil. He admitted his plans and named three other captains as co-conspirators ( Las últimas banderas. UNMSM, Lima 2017, p. 181). The poet Ricardo Palma spoke of thirteen people executed and called Montero a "major". According to rumored press reports from the 1830s, a “colonel and about 120 officers and commons” were shot (according to the “Schweizererbote” and, following it, the “Allgemeine Zeitung”); none of this is reliable.
7. ↑ Cf. Bolletino Salesiano , Jg. X (1886), edition 9 (Sept.), pp. 110f. ( Italian translation with evidence of first publication in Peru). Publication in book form followed in 1889 (Lima) and 1896 (Barcelona) as part of the seventh series of Tradiciones peruanas by Ricardo Palma ( Tradiciones peruanas. Séptima series: Ropa vieja. Montaner y Simón, Barcelona 1896, pp. 157-160).
8. ↑ Examples: O Brasil , Rio de Janeiro 1890 ( port. ); La Lectura dominical , Madrid 1895 ( span. ); La Croix , Paris 1897 ( French ); Gość Świąteczny , Kattowitz 1908 ( Polish ); Freeman's Journal , Sydney 1912; Amigoe de Curação  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) , Bonaire , Aruba 1924 ( ndl. ).
9. ↑ On basement cf. Wolfgang Brückner : Art. Exempelsammlungen , in: Kurt Ranke u. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of fairy tales. Concise dictionary for historical and comparative narrative research Volume 4 (Ente - Förster). De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1984, col. 592-626, here: col. 625 f. ( limited preview in Google Book search).
10. ↑ Joseph Anton Keller: Evidence for the beneficial effects of holy confession and martyrs of the confessional seal. Verlag Anton A. Schmid, Durach 2004, ISBN 978-3-932352-79-9 (new edition of the one hundred and thirty evidences of the blessings of the holy sacrament of penance and martyrs of the confessional seal: a defense of this holy sacrament in examples: according to truthful sources , published 2nd ed., Kirchheim 1899), pp. 154–156. The source is: "'The Missionary' (Salzb. Kirchbl., No. 42, 1886)" (p. 156).
11. ↑ Noviciado Camiliano Pedro Marieluz Garcés | Facebook .