José M. Rodríguez Maza. | This year the Bicentennial of the opening of the municipal Cemetery is being celebrated in the Town of La Orotava. On July 19, 1823, 36 years after King Charles III prohibited burials in churches by Royal Order, the new municipal cemetery had to be hastily blessed in order to bury the body of the child Vicente Barroso, who was no longer He had a place for his burial in the town churches.
During these two hundred years, the Cemetery has gone through various transformation processes, given the population boom of the municipality, while it has experienced multiple historical events worthy of mention. One of them, perhaps the most important along with the fight between the Municipality and the Church for ownership of the new cemetery, has to do with Freemasonry and the prohibition of burying any of its members in Catholic cemeteries.
The second half of the 19th century was the period of greatest confrontation between the Church and Freemasonry, especially under the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII. The first, in his Apostolic Constitutione Sedis, threatened with excommunication “all those who gave their name to Freemasonry,” while Leo XIII wrote in April 1884 the largest and most extensive Encyclical against it, where he presented it as “ a criminal, impious, immoral, subversive, revolutionary association and a monster of hypocrisy and lies.”
But despite this, Spanish Freemasonry began to reorganize itself after the September Revolution of 1868, which facilitated the founding of the National Grand Orient of Spain and the implementation, above all, of the United Lusitanian Grand Orient, which established some 83 lodges in our country until 1890. among which it is worth highlighting the Orotaven Taoro and Portuense Esperanza de Orotava lodges. Therefore, they were years of expansion and rise of Freemasonry that, despite having a more tolerant state policy, had to endure, as we have seen, condemnations and ecclesiastical persecutions, especially in relation to the burial of these “heretics” in the Catholic cemeteries. In October 1878, the La Laguna newspaper El Eco collected the sentiments of the Church: “The Church is a society that one enters through baptism. He who does not receive it has not come to belong to this society and therefore cannot enjoy the honors and privileges that are only granted to the children of the Church. The same is done with those who, once baptized, renounce the privileges of Christian society, refusing to receive the sacraments or embracing in life doctrines condemned by the Church. Not giving such an ecclesiastical burial fulfills the law of Jesus Christ.”
in Interdicho the cemetery in 1878
And this was what happened in La Orotava after the death in 1878 of the watchmaker José Nicolás Hernández and his subsequent burial in the Orotava cemetery. His membership in the Taoro lodge, where he called himself “Berthoud” in homage to the famous French watchmaker Ferdinand Berthoud, and the subsequent denunciation of the parish priest of La Concepción to the ecclesiastical governor, despite the latter being, for years, secretary of the Brotherhood of the Calvary, led to the opening of a file and the subsequent declaration of Interdicho of the Orotavense cemetery by ruling of the Ecclesiastical Court of December 23, 1878. The declaration of Interdicho was so serious that any representative of the Church was prohibited from visiting the interior of the cemetery , which is why the parish priest of La Concepción was prohibited by a canonical imperative from officiating any liturgical act in that place.
José Nicolás Hernández was buried in a separate area within the cemetery and his grave was surrounded by an unmarked wooden fence, as required by law. The Catholic press echoed these events that occurred in Orotava and wrote the following: “Does the parish priest do well by refusing to give an ecclesiastical burial to the body of someone who dies outside the guild of the Church? He does it perfectly. The mandates of the popes are strict in the matter that concerns us. These mandates are obligatory for all the faithful, be they emperors, be they kings, be they cardinals, be they bishops, be they wise men, be they the last of the Catholics. The Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ and his spiritual power embraces all the faithful, without exception of hierarchies. Now, it results from all these fulminating condemnations against Freemasonry, that those who become Freemasons are excommunicated with greater excommunication, that is, the Freemason is separated from Catholic society.
But not only the Freemason incurs such a terrible penalty, the greatest that the Church has, but all those who protect them in any way also fall into it. The Freemason, being a Freemason, cannot, without renouncing Freemasonry, receive any Sacrament, nor even appear in church to hear mass. In papal bulls and documents, it is strictly prohibited to give ecclesiastical burial in Catholic cemeteries to Masons, nor to pay funeral honors to their corpses, nor to say masses in favor of their souls. They have died outside the communion of the Church, they have not wanted to be members of the Church. Catholic cemeteries are places as holy as the temples themselves. The corpse of a Mason, the same as that of another heretic or pagan, desecrates the cemetery, and reduces it to a vulgar place, to any piece of land.”
Death of the VIII Marquis of the Quinta Roja
All this worsened after the death of the eighth marquis of the Quinta Roja Diego Ponte del Castillo, venerable of the Taoro Orotaven lodge. The marquis died in the early morning of April 5, 1880 at his residence in Garachico when he was barely thirty-nine years old. But when he was to be buried in the Orotava cemetery, and despite the authorization granted by the municipal judge of La Orotava César Benítez de Lugo, the parish priest of La Concepción demanded from the mayor that the lifeless body of said marquis be buried there. designated for those who die apart from the bosom of the Church, indicating a potato garden as the ideal place for their training. The mayor responded that according to the Royal Order of May 30, 1878, burial in the Catholic Cemetery of any baptized person cannot be prohibited without the formation of a canonical file, documentation that had not been presented to him. The parish priest reported the situation to the bishopric of Tenerife from where they responded that since the cemetery was already “desecrated” by the burial of Jose Nicolás Hernández, he would allow the marquis to be buried there although without ecclesiastical pomp of any kind and consequently without the presence of any member of the Church and that the appropriate ecclesiastical file be formed immediately.
Diego’s remains were deposited in a private grave without any religious sign next to his father’s tomb and later after the years established by law, they were transferred to the family pantheon, where they remain today, along with the remains of the seventh and of the ninth marquis of the Quinta Roja.
Given the refusal to give a Christian burial to the remains of Diego Ponte del Castillo in the municipal cemetery and the scandal that this entailed, his mother, Doña Sebastiana, decided to transform the back garden of her house on San Agustín Street, into a garden where build a Mausoleum where both the remains of her son and her husband and her own would receive eternal rest when she died and the laws authorize it. From that moment on, his only idea was to erect that monument in order to “perpetuate the memory of his son and the injustices committed against him and so that it would serve as an example in the future and contribute to banishing the horrors of fanaticism and ignorance.” For her, this mausoleum would be a monument to religious intolerance, so she decided to install it at the top of her garden, within sight of the four churches existing at that time in La Orotava: La Concepción, San Juan, San Agustín and Santo Sunday.
Other examples of intransigence
The events that occurred in La Orotava between 1878 and 1880 were not isolated cases but also occurred in other municipalities, since the intransigence to bury anyone suspected of being a member of Freemasonry was not exclusive to this town. What happens is that along with these scandals there were situations of permissibility when it came to burying Freemasons in Canarian cemeteries. Thus, for example, in Puerto de la Cruz, the doctor and surgeon José Martínez Medina y Esquivel was denied a Christian burial for being a member of the Taoro and Esperanza de Orotava lodges, in March 1877, but he was allowed to give it to the remains of José María Blardony, “with magnificent funerals accompanied by requiem songs that echoed inside the main church of Nuestra Señora de la Peña” despite having been a man who throughout his life spoke out against religious intolerance and “His membership in Freemasonry was public and notorious.”
However, the favor that Blardony received from the Church was applauded by the Masonic press of the La Orotava valley, thinking that the clergy of Puerto de la Cruz had already entered a period of tolerance. The same thing happened in La Orotava with the death of Gabriel Perera López in 1881, also a member of the two lodges of the Valley who, to the general astonishment, received funeral honors and ecclesiastical burial in the La Orotava cemetery, with even the clergy accompanying the coffin to the door. entrance to the cemetery, by then already declared in Entredicho. Pure mirage because a few years later two more Masons, José Sierra y Alfonso and Andrés Hernández Barrios, were again denied burial.
Blessed in September 1884, with authorization from the ecclesiastical authority of the Nivarian Bishopric, and with the declaration of Interdicho still in force in the Orotavense cemetery, it was taken as a first step to be able to lift said interdiction. But further from reality since this chapel was built as if it were an island in the ocean. It was required that in no way could its interior be seen from the cemetery field, so that “in no way could the image of Jesus Christ who would be presiding over the sacred precinct be said to also preside over the whole of the desecrated place.” .
The interdict took twenty more years to be lifted after the blessing of the chapel, once it was verified that the remains of Jose Nicolás Hernández lay in the general ossuary built under the chapel and were impossible to identify and that there was no way to declare the marquis of the Fifth Red Mason.
Freemason pantheons
Apart from the famous pantheon in which the remains of Diego Ponte del Castillo rest and which under the name of Francisco Ponte Llarena, Marquis of the Quinta Roja, appears with number 8 in said Orotavense cemetery, there are other pantheons or mausoleums in which the remains rest. from prominent members of the Taoro lodge, or were acquired by one of them.
