The South American Way of Death

Oh what a circus, oh what a show! Argentina has gone to town over the death of an actress called Eva Perón. We've all gone crazy, mourning all day and mourning all night, falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right.

But who is this Santa Evita? Why all this howling, hysterical sorrow? What kind of goddess has lived among us? How will we ever get by without her? *

You can visit the Duarte family tomb, in which Evita's remains officially rest, in Buenos Aires's Recoleta cemetery - so exclusive that it's said to be cheaper to live the life of a king than to die and be buried there. One tomb has recently changed hands (one wonders about the circumstances of the sale) for 250,000 US dollars. The Duartes' resting place (left) is a shiny confection in black marble and wrought iron, through which pilgrims' offerings of plastic flowers are permanently entwined. I say pilgrims, for it is indeed a shrine of sorts, where Argentinians worship the woman who, during her lifetime, was officially and secularly canonised as "the spiritual leader of the nation". (Her tomb, together with my opening quotation from Evita, reminds me a little of the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. One commentator wrote that the gates of Kensington Palace in the days before her funeral were "like a Marian shrine". Like Diana's, little seems to be known about Mrs Perón's own religious faith.)

Both Recoleta, near the city centre, and La Chacarita, the much larger and less expensive cemetery in a distant and dusty suburb, are as far from the English idea of a final resting place as it's possible to get in the Christian world. They are veritable cities of the dead, who occupy their own homes in their own streets - some of which are quite large enough for entire families of Evita's descamisados to live in comfortably. 

Indeed, some of the mausolea are grandiose to the point of pomposity, in the form of chapels complete with altar, candlesticks and prie-dieux, as if waiting for a priest to say mass in them, perhaps in imitation of early Christians celebrating on the tombs of saints. The coffins of the dead are beneath the altar and in chambers under the floor, sometimes running to several stories. Others bear huge statues of the family head or founder, and of patron saints and guardian angels.  Some are not much bigger than phone kiosks, resembling large stone cupboards; yet even the most modest can be assumed to have cost a small fortune to build and endow. The best are beautifully swept and polished, flowers clearly regularly renewed, their locks, steps and glass doors gleaming. Others are virtually derelict, unvisited and forgotten, the photos of the dead faded almost to invisibility, little temples of dust, memorials of and to decay. Walking these silent streets of the long departed, I was oddly reminded of Pompeii.

Death, one realises quite quickly, is big down here. Visitors to tombs touch them for luck as they might the statue of a saint in a church, as if to connect physically to the dead and to perhaps to share somehow in their assumed felicity. Roman Catholicism in South America seems more recondite than in the northern hemisphere; an age-old whiff of animism and folk-religion hangs in the air and is subtly - and probably necessarily - accommodated. One suspects that the ancestors are being prayed to, as well as (or even rather than) for. 

In La Chacarita is the tomb of Carlos Gardel, the French-Argentine singer, songwriter and "King of Tango" who died in a plane crash in 1935 at the height of his fame, and who has tragic superhero status across Latin America. Its walls of pale marble are covered with beaten and burnished metal plaques from well-wishers, thanking him (not God) for his life and his magical gift that enhanced the lives of so many. Some barely stop short of asking him for spiritual favours. The leading foot of his life-size verdigris'd statue (presenting him in the "Oxford" bags and double breasted and lapelled waistcoat of his day) gleams brassy gold from the hands that touch it daily.

I wrote recently that our life beyond the grave is but the next stage of our life here. For the Christian there is only one life, and it is eternal, provided and sustained by and for God. I sense that this notion of continuum, which can seem radical to western Christians, is pretty much unquestioned by South Americans. They seem to make no bones about, indeed positively engage with, the physical reality of death. They do not internalise, privatise or over-etherealise it as we perhaps do. It is just the door between the house and the street.

* From Evita, by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Apologia Pro Sua Ecclesia

In my dumbed-down, over-simplified, rule-of-thumb grasp of Church history and theology, I associate the term via media with John Henry Newman.  He it was, I think, who, long before kicking the dust of Anglicanism from his Oxford brogues, used the term to describe the "middle way" between Puritan Protestantism and Roman Catholicism which was the Church of England's inheritance from the Elizabethan Settlement onwards.  Newman himself believed - at that stage, anyway - that the Church had, during the 18th century, forgotten its ancient Catholic heritage enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, and had in the process become a dull department of a Hanoverian Protestant state.  He and his fellow Tractarians - who were to become the founding fathers of the Oxford Movement - fretted about Erastianism (the idea that the state should have authority over the Church in ecclesiastical matters) and worried that the Church of England was in danger of losing its identity, squeezed as it was between a newly restored and growing Roman Catholic Church and the vigorous Protestant sects that had grown during the evangelical revival of the previous century.  With reference to the Early Fathers and the Elizabethan and Caroline divines, the Tractarians re-imagined the true English Church.  This Church looked quite a bit more Catholic than it had done (and indeed than many were comfortable with) and effectively began what some regard as the recatholicisation of Anglicanism.  The Oxford Movement begat Anglo-Catholicism - a term I believe also coined by Newman, and a movement which survived his defection to Rome and which profoundly influenced subsequent Church of England life and polity.

But Tractarianism did not want England to revert to Rome; it wanted the Church to recover what it had lost or deprecated but which was there in black and white in the pages of the 1662 Prayer Book - its liturgical and ecclesiological authority. This, they believed, envisaged much more frequent access to the sacraments (Newman's "keys and spells"), the most radical expression of which was perhaps their espousal of the restoration of auricular confession in the Church of England.  But the "excesses" of Rome were not on the agenda, any more than were the radical claims and uncanonical practices of evangelical Protestantism.  The Church of England was not a confessional denomination like Lutheranism; it was the liberated and reformed catholic (ie universal) Church of England.  Seen from this perspective, the via media was not just a matter of advocating a moderate Christianity: it had been the Church's calling from the beginning.

If I were a fundamentalist evangelical I would be expected to believe in some or all of the following: the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of God; the claim that He created the world in six days about 6000 years ago; that ordained priesthood is at best unnecessary (and that when the Bishop put his hands on my head, nothing happened beyond his spoiling my hair-do); that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are merely symbolic; that the dead are dead and beyond my prayers; that some are predestined for salvation and that the rest are irretrievably doomed; and that the Church on earth is no more than a convenient way of organising Christians.

If I were a Roman Catholic I would be obliged to believe: the notion that a human being, however wise and holy he might be, is infallible (when speaking ex cathedra but not otherwise); that it is possible for that same person to arrange for me to spend less time in purgatory in return for my attendance at a service or event; that belief in the "immaculate" conception and bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary are necessary to my salvation; that a prayer to a native Canadian woman who died in 1680 recently and miraculously cured a little boy of a fatal disease, warranting her canonisation last year; and for good measure, that my church is not a church at all, and that my holy orders are "absolutely null and utterly void". 

As it is, I am free to believe any or all of these things - but not obliged to.  (It would actually be rather odd if I believed the last of them, but some Anglican priests are doing just that in respect of the so-called "Ordinariate".)  It is probably good for me to make my confession to a priest, but my salvation does not depend upon it.  If I believe that the substance of the bread and wine of the Eucharist is changed by their consecration, I may so believe entirely legitimately, but may not insist on the same belief on the part of my fellow-worshipper.

For occupying this middle ground, and notwithstanding my decidedly illiberal credal orthodoxy, some will accuse me of being a wishy-washy fence-sitter, and/or a milk-and-water relativist. Others will conclude simply (and perhaps sadly) that I am going to hell in a handcart and that there is no help for me unless I repent of my wilful rejection of the truth. Well, they may or may not be right.  As it is, I count myself rather fortunate not to be obliged to adhere to dogma which I find ridiculous while keeping it to myself.  I belong to a Church and Communion which does not invite people to sign up to any theological propositions beyond those "uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds", but which says to them merely: "We are your church. This is what we do. Can you worship with us?"