The Alternative by Nick Romeo

Author:Nick Romeo [Romeo, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2024-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE WORLDLY PRIEST

The town of Arrasate-Mondragón lies in a green river valley surrounded by the Cantabrian Mountains. Its two names reflect the region’s linguistic and cultural duality: street signs, graffiti, and conversations are bilingual in Spanish (Mondragón) and Basque (Arrasate).

The center of the town of twenty-five thousand is a medieval city, with stone archways looming over narrow cobbled streets and a Gothic church in its central square. Traces of its long history are everywhere: the public library occupies a gorgeous old Franciscan monastery, while the local music school is in a former palace where the king of Spain is rumored to have spent the night in the Middle Ages.

On my first afternoon in Mondragón, Etxeberria and I walked into the dark interior of the church beside the central square. On one side of the shadowy central aisle lies the tomb of a twentieth-century priest named Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, who launched and shaped the Mondragon cooperatives. The sound of a choir rehearsing a hymn floated down from the loft. Etxeberria pointed to a stack of pamphlets beside the tomb of Arizmendiarrieta. I took one. It was part of a campaign to canonize the priest, described as “the apostle of cooperation.” It included a suggested prayer to Arizmendiarrieta and information on whom to contact if it were answered. The Mondragon Corporation has no official position on the canonization campaign, but Arizmendiarrieta is venerated even among the secular. Back outside in the sun, Etxeberria told me, “There are earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and there is Arizmendiarrieta. We are lucky he struck here.”

He almost didn’t strike at all. After being captured by Franco’s troops in 1937 during Spain’s civil war, Arizmendiarrieta narrowly escaped execution. While working as a journalist for a Basque-language newspaper during the war, he frequently criticized the Nationalists led by Franco. After his arrest, according to one account, his interrogators spread his own articles before him on a table and demanded to know which he had written. Unwilling to lie, he settled for a partial truth, admitting authorship of harmless lifestyle pieces on rural Basque customs, but declining to mention that he had penned all the articles, including fiery denunciations of the regime that would have sealed his execution.

In 1941, the twenty-five-year-old priest was assigned to the town of Mondragón.4 The area’s economy was deeply impoverished, and its society riven by the civil war. There was virtually no middle class. Roughly 90 percent of the population barely survived on low wages, and the other 10 percent was split between wealthy business owners and somewhat less affluent rural landowners.5 Over the next dozen or so years, Arizmendiarrieta mobilized the citizens to launch a raft of civic and cultural initiatives that would transform the region, including a technical school that became today’s Mondragon University, a sports stadium, a medical clinic, and a housing complex for workers.

Perhaps most consequential was the Young Catholic Workers study circle he founded, with meetings held in a small, converted seventeenth-century palace that still stands in the old medieval town.

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