Marian Festival Sheds Light on Soul of Troubled Nicaragua

Crippled since birth and forever poor, Agustin Delgadillo somehow managed to buy enough oranges, bananas and toy whistles for the scores of children making their evening rounds of shrines in his Managua barrio.

The modest altar outside his two-room shack was illuminated by a bare light bulb. The centerpiece, nearly hidden among palm fronds and flowers, was a five-inch statue of the Virgin Mary, the object of intense devotion last week in Roman Catholic Nicaragua.

“What causes so much happiness?” shouted each gang of children as they stopped at the altar. Answering their own question, they shouted even louder: “The Immaculate Conception of Mary!” and then broke into song.

Kneeling on the stumps of his legs, Delgadillo handed out treats for hours, until there were no more. It is a family tradition he has carried on alone since his mother’s death in 1980, using savings from his income selling chicha, a sweet corn drink, from plastic buckets on the street.

Despite the worst economic crisis in Nicaragua’s history, hundreds of thousands of Catholics, many as poor as Delgadillo, opened their doors to neighbors Wednesday night on the eve of Purisima, a Halloween-style Marian worship that marks the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

“This is the happiest night of the year,” the 30-year-old said. “Even if I have to beg for money, I will never stop celebrating Purisima . It is an act of faith.”

This was Nicaragua’s first Purisima in seven years without the backdrop of a full-scale war against the Contras. But with prices doubling each month and the economy shrinking, sales of everything used in the festivities, from flowers to fireworks, have dropped.

Even so, everyone involved in the tradition seemed to carry on with less, often by pooling their efforts in communal altars.

“We must continue with this enthusiastic love for Mary so we do not lose hope,” Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo said in a homily Thursday. “Although we do not have abundance, we can offer Mary our souls and our hearts.”

Purisima celebrates the Catholic doctrine that the mother of Christ was conceived without original sin. That belief originated in 17th-Century Spain and was spread to Latin America long before the Vatican proclaimed it.

Religious scholars say that devotion to Mary is probably most deeply rooted in Nicaragua. She has inspired native music and poetry. Elaborate shrines in her honor have become an art form.

“ Purisima is the most significant and revealing expression of the national soul of Nicaragua,” said Edgardo Buitrago, a leading scholar on the subject.

As with so much else in revolutionary Nicaragua, Purisima has changed since the Sandinista takeover in 1979.

Fearing the Sandinistas would try to abolish the festival, Nicaraguans put greater effort that year into the quality of their altars and treats. But the young Marxist leaders decided Purisima had Nicaraguan roots and decided to adopt it in their own way.

Towering altars put up by 11 government agencies lined Managua’s main boulevard Wednesday night, and thousands of parents brought their children to collect wooden birds, baseball bats and other toys handed out there by President Daniel Ortega and other officials.

Traditionalists say that by “massifying” Purisima in this way, the Sandinistas have made it more popular but also have undermined the communal celebrations.

Cardinal Obando has gone a step further by accusing the Sandinista comandantes of politicizing Purisima and capitalizing on the festival’s popularity to enhance their own.

Speaking to reporters on the boulevard, Ortega gave his own political interpretation of the holiday, saying it shows “there is no contradiction between Christianity and revolution.”

In some Managua neighborhoods, where Sandinistas live among anti-Sandinistas, Purisima is a time of amiable coexistence. At one gathering, a Sandinista police commander and a Cabinet minister joined 100 other guests in singing, praying and sipping chilled cocoa around the altar of a prominent businesswoman who is a critic of the government.

“For me, Purisima is a happy mixture of faith and folklore,” said the hostess, Rosario Daboud. “It’s a time to gather people in my home to give thanks to the Virgin.”

A more typical celebration was the modest spread offered by Lola de Rosales, a nurse who lives down the street from the crippled chicha salesman.

Behind two ceramic figures of Mary inherited from her grandmother, she hung lace tablecloths from a wall and decorated them with tinfoil stars and prayers. “Virgin Mary: Nicaragua needs peace, love and food,” one sign read. As children came to sing, she gave them sugar cane, bananas, lemons and wooden noisemakers.

“This is like the birthday of a loved one,” Rosales said. “In the family there are different ways of observing it. The government has one way, the church another. For me, it is a very personal celebration of my faith.”