The drought that part of Spain is experiencing has revived processions and prayers to ask for rain. In March, the Bishop of Solsona, Francesc Conesa, presided over a mass and a procession at the Mare de Déu dels Torrents sanctuary at the request of the peasants of the area.
In his homily he called on the Lord "to grant us the precious gift of rain, to irrigate and make our fields fertile and help us earn our daily livelihood." In April, the bearers of the Crist Negre de Peralada took it out in procession with the same objective. The examples follow one another, as do the calls from the dioceses to pray for "the Lord to offer us water."
On April 11, the Cardinal Archbishop of Barcelona, Juan José Omella, asked priests and deacons, among others, to echo the concern about the drought. He recommended that they make daily prayers in the Eucharist to ask for rain and prayers with that intention.
"May our sincere prayer be heard and the Lord offer us the much-desired water for the fields, for the towns and for the cities," he said in the letter addressed to the communities of the archdiocese.
"Praying makes us realize that the rain is a gift and that leads to gratitude," says Joan Torra, dean of the Faculty of Theology. "Begging you become aware of what is missing and that you can do something", adds the vicar Enric Termes.
Asking the divinity to rain in times of drought comes from afar. The historian Josep N. Pujol places this moment in prehistory, when man ceased to be nomadic and became sedentary.
The cultural manager and expert in popular religiosity Joan Arimany explains that rogationes were already made in Roman times, collective prayers to the divinities to ask for rain.
“Divinity has always been prayed for to help in times of calamity or drought. We find examples in mythology or biblical and sacred texts”, says the journalist and author of books on popular traditions Àngel Rodríguez Vilagran.
He explains that in Catalonia the main invocation is made to the Virgin. He gives the example of the image of the Virgin of La Gleva. In the year 1337, after 18 months of drought, the Bishop of Vic, in the company of parish priests and her faithful, went to look for her in a procession to her sanctuary and they took her to the river Ter. She was wetted and after some prayers they returned her back to the temple. “The rain accompanied them on the way,” he says.
He explains that the Marian sanctuaries have been visited by pilgrims asking for rain. In Sant Feliu del Racó (Vallès Occidental) they have the Virgen de las Arenes, known as the Mare de Déu de la Galledeta, since she has a bucket hanging from her arm. The image was given by the peasants as a sign of gratitude for his intercession.
And the residents of Canet de Mar implored Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia in 1703 following a great drought. In Catalonia, he adds, the Virgin of Siurana (Priorat), the Virgin of Lledó (Valls), the Virgin of Passanant (Conca de Barberà) or the Virgin of Montserrat have also interceded in cases of rain.
The manager Joan Arimany points out that it was between the 14th and 19th centuries, coinciding with an adverse climatic period that brought about an average drop in temperatures, with long and persistent droughts combined with extreme phenomena, when "more effervescence" had this type of religious manifestations. .
“At that time –known as the Little Ice Age–, popular piety articulated a series of collective actions, in the form of prayers, with the aim of appeasing heavenly anger”, he affirms.
An example is the diocese of Vic, which around 1820 established a protocol. The first level was the prayers at masses to ask for rain. If it did not work out, it was recommended to move the relics to the main church or images of the Virgin or Christ to the cathedral.
If even so not a drop fell, they prayed outside the parish or the Vera Cruz was carried in procession and the municipal area was blessed, and if that was not enough either, they went in a massive procession to the sanctuary of La Gleva with the relics of the holy martyrs of Vic, Llucià and Marcià. The last performance was the transfer of the Virgin to Torelló.
The other great concern of a time without scientific or technological means to predict the rain was the hailstorms that could damage the harvest. To avoid this, for San Marcos, on April 25, or the festival of the Invention of the Holy Cross, on May 3, the term was blessed in procession with the Vera Cruz.
Arimany explains that until September 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, after the Sunday mass, the priest and the parishioners would go to the nearest census to the church to pronounce prayers made up of fragments of the Gospels related to the Passion of Christ, which were read each one in a direction of the cardinal points so that God would protect the crops.
Josep N.Pujol highlights in the book Creus de terme the importance of the local crosses or oratory crosses to which the population went to ask for "divine clemency". Also the prayers that were made in the conjuring house, a small building located near the church where the priest who conjured up hailstorms with prayers or exorcising formulas was sheltered. Some of these buildings are no longer preserved and, although the credulity of other times has diminished, it is still alive.
