Two South American travellers in the Orient

Travelling was a substantial part of the lives of Mariano Soler and Carlos Walker Martínez, both of whom journeyed through the Americas, Europe and the Orient, writing down their experiences and thoughts in works that reflect the emerging ultramontane culture of the time. By the 1880s, their names were known in various Hispanic American Catholic circles, associated with the defence of the ‘rights of the Church’ and the papacy. Their decisive commitment to the ‘prisoner of the Vatican’, together with their collaboration in transnational ultramontane networks and extensive travels, allowed them to develop a sensitive vision of the globalisation processes that had an impact on Catholicism in South America and beyond. Thus, the journey to the Orient can be interpreted as both a cause and a symptom of the same global Catholic consciousness.

A brief overview of our protagonists’ trajectories provides fuller context for these ideas. Born in the small Uruguayan town of San Carlos, Soler joined the Jesuit seminary in San Fe (Argentina) at a young age, thanks to the efforts of Montevideo’s first bishop, Jacinto Vera. He continued his studies at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he obtained doctorates in theology and canon law. He returned to Uruguay in 1874 to join the new ultramontane clergy that was slowly consolidating in the countryFootnote ⁸ and in 1885 he went to Europe once again, travelling from there to Egypt and Palestine. In early 1886, he began a fundraising tour of the Americas for the Colegio Pío Latino Americano, a key institution in the Romanisation project of the future Latin American Catholic hierarchy.Footnote ⁹ The voyage lasted just over a year. It began in the United States and Mexico, followed by Central America and much of South America before ending in Chile and Argentina. Soler was consecrated bishop of Montevideo in 1891, and six years later Leo xiii appointed him archbishop of the new ecclesiastical province of Uruguay. His commitment to the Romanisation process placed him among the first promoters of the Latin American Plenary Council, held in Rome in 1899, where the continent’s episcopate met to find answers to the challenges the Church faced at the time.Footnote ¹⁰ These new responsibilities did not prevent Soler from dreaming of settling in Jerusalem as a Franciscan Custodian, but the Holy See opposed his attempt to canonically disassociate himself from the Uruguayan Church.Footnote ¹¹ Nevertheless, he visited the East seven times and was one of the few Latin Americans to join the Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹² Afflicted by various illnesses and longing for a retirement that never came, he wrote to Pius x requesting the honorary title of titular archbishop of Pharan, in remembrance of his travels through Syria and Palestine. His unfulfilled orientalist aspirations found solace in the foundation of the Uruguayan-Argentinean sanctuary Hortus Conclusus, which he erected in the Holy Land in 1902.Footnote ¹³ The literary result of his excursions to the Orient is expressed in four books, articles and pastoral letters.Footnote ¹⁴

For his part, Walker Martínez, the son of an English industrialist who settled in Chile, spent most of his public life as a legislator and minister. He exercised significant leadership within the Chilean Conservative party, while the local ultramontane movement recognised him as one of its main figures. He held diplomatic positions in Bolivia in 1866 and 1874, where he met his future wife, Sofía Linares, daughter of the Bolivian dictator and president José María Linares and recipient of his Cartas de Jerusalén. After becoming a lawyer, he planned to enlist as a Papal Zouave to defend the pope’s territorial sovereignty, but an accident during his layover in the United States forced him to abandon this ambition. He remained in Philadelphia for a few months in 1867 and then began a long journey through Europe. Already married, he travelled to Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Europe between 1875 and 1876.Footnote ¹⁵ His last great adventure outside Chile took place in Palestine and Egypt in 1896. Though a less prolific a writer than Soler, Walker left testimony of his travels in several articles published in magazines and newspapers in Chile and abroad, in addition to two books dedicated to his journeys in South America and the Orient.Footnote ¹⁶

Soler and Walker Martínez shared a common travel culture that permeated the South American intellectual elite at the end of the century.Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, they were part of a distinguished group of Catholics who began to visit the East and recorded their experiences. The figures who preceded them include the Chilean clergyman José Ignacio Víctor Eyzaguirre, the Buenos Aires canon José Domingo César, the dean of Riobamba Vicente Cuestas, the bishop of Pasto Manuel Canuto Restrepo, and the Medellín doctor Andrés Posada Arango.Footnote ¹⁸ Women did not refrain from travelling to the East either, as seen in the case of the Chilean Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux and the Argentineans María Teresa Ortega de Obligado, in addition to Sister María Teresa Ferreyra, who also served at the Hortus Conclusus sanctuary in Palestine for several years.Footnote ¹⁹ However, few of them left a record of their Orientalist experiences due their limited access to travel literature.Footnote ²⁰

In tune with many of these travellers, Soler and Walker Martínez encountered the Orient in intimate relationship with the sacred and a strong commitment to ultramontane ideals. Their journeys triggered an emotional resonance that aroused desires and images that had originated in their childhood and youth. For Soler, as he confessed during his first trip to the Orient in 1885, the destination ‘had long been the ideal of [his] predilection’.Footnote ²¹ In the case of the Chilean, his initial imaginative encounters with the Orient were linked to childhood readings, particularly of the Bible. Given that his mother was fond of the work of the French Romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand, it is likely that from a very young age Carlos was exposed to Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811),Footnote ²² a text that features prominently in Cartas de Jerusalén. Footnote ²³

The bishop and the politician represent two different modes of travel through the Orient. Soler wished to escape the tourist experience, which he dismissed as a trivialisation of travel and pilgrimage. Walker Martínez derided the stereotyped figure of the Victorian tourist in Palestine but took advantage of the facilities offered by the modernisation of transport in the region. Though dissimilar, these two attitudes are testimony to the rise of the tourist mentality and enterprise, as well as the economic and social transformations of the landscape of the East. ‘The railway line between Jaffa and Jerusalem has made the old difficulties of that desert disappear; travellers are no longer robbed by Bedouins; … the journey is now three hours long, when a few years ago it took two days; expenses have been considerably reduced in the same proportion as the comfort that has been gained’, wrote Walke Martinez to his wife.Footnote ²⁴ In a few decades, Ottoman Palestine underwent remarkable changes driven by a series of local, regional and global factors, including improvements in security and reduced travel times; the activity of travel agencies and tour operators; the creation of maritime routes that regularly connected European ports with Beirut, Haifa, Jaffa, and Gaza; and the development of services to provide comfort to European standards and tastes.Footnote ²⁵ These changes also brought the decline of a certain strictly Oriental experience and, from a Western perspective, caused the East to lose part of its aura of mystery, sensuality, fierceness and hostility.Footnote ²⁶

Faced with this modernising advance, Soler’s chosen itinerary sought to elevate the authenticity of the experience, thereby distinguishing himself from other South American travellers and reinforcing the authority of his narrative. His excursion to Mesopotamia and Jerusalem in 1893, which gave rise to Viaje bíblico por Asiria y Caldea, lasted just over three months. It was Soler’s third journey to the Orient in his lifetime. It began at the Italian port of Brindisi and he disembarked shortly thereafter in Alexandretta, northern Syria. From there, he travelled to Aleppo, accompanied by a dragoman – acting as guide and interpreter – and an escort of Turkish soldiers, as he made his way from the coast to the desert. Three weeks later, he set up camp in Nineveh to study its ruins for several days, after which he visited the city of Mosul, where he met the Dominican apostolic prefect, the vicar of the papal delegate and the French consul. He then resumed his journey along the Tigris before arriving in Baghdad. The excursion took on an exhausting pace when he decided to travel by horseback through the desert for twenty-four days along the Palmyra route. Upon entering Abu Ghraib, he headed towards Damascus, despite the spring floods of the Euphrates suggesting an alternative route. Finally, he bid farewell to the caravan and continued to Beirut, arriving in Jerusalem in May, just in time to attend the Eighth International Eucharistic Congress.Footnote ²⁷

Three years after Soler’s journey, Carlos Walker Martínez travelled to Jerusalem, his only time in the Holy City. The experience of otherness was mitigated by a thriving touristic spirit, which he never sought to escape nor disown. The itinerary focused on Palestine and the sacred sites of Christian tradition, extending into Egypt, where he travelled to revisit the Exodus of the Israelites and the Holy Family’s flight from King Herod’s persecution. While Soler travelled by caravan and boat, set up camp in the middle of the Assyrian ruins and rode on horseback for weeks through the desert, Walker Martínez preferred the comfort of rail travel.Footnote ²⁸ The Uruguayan bishop was to follow the same itinerary as the Chilean a year later, but his obsession with escaping from the domesticated Orient led him to avoid ‘the trite and vulgar road of Port-Said and Jaffa’ to reach Arabia Petraea.Footnote ²⁹ Walker Martínez’s journey lasted about a month. After a week in Rome, he sailed from the port of Brindisi in February 1896, bound for the Orient. He continued through Port-Said and Cairo, travelled along the coasts of Palestine, and finally entered the gates of Jerusalem in early March. Overall, it took him two months to travel from Chile to Jerusalem, with ‘a few days in Buenos Aires, Rome and Cairo’.Footnote ³⁰

Beyond the differences in how they chose to travel, Soler and Walker Martínez did share a disregard for certain travel traditions and a preference for others. The meaning and purpose of their journeys led them to perceive themselves, first and foremost, as ‘pilgrims’ and ‘travellers’, as opposed to ‘tourists’. As Ian Reader points out, a pilgrimage is related to travel and movement, and implies devotion to certain places with special meaning, usually associated with the sacred.Footnote ³¹ For Soler and Walker Martínez, the experience of the supernatural and the divine determined the meaning and disposition of the journey. According to the Chilean, the distinction between the pilgrim and the tourist – a recurring theme in the accounts of Catholic travellers of the time – lay in the former’s willingness to contemplate realities that transcended the social and geographical landscape of Jerusalem and thus provoke deeper reflection. The latter, on the other hand, were unable to perceive anything more than ‘unpleasant ruins [and] narrow and dirty streets’ in the same setting.Footnote ³²

Though Soler did not always reject the label of ‘tourist’ for himself, when he did adopt it, he either gave it greater depth with scientific and philosophical views or, on the contrary, relegated it to the more trivial dimension of the journey.Footnote ³³ As bishop, he dedicated a pastoral letter encouraging Uruguayans to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land, at the same time warning them of the danger of assuming the trip as ‘simple tourists’, for which he meant ‘dilettanti tourists’, or those who undertook the journey for mere pleasure and amusement.Footnote ³⁴

However, Walker Martínez and Soler did not find the pilgrim’s religious aspirations incompatible with the more profane interests of the tourist. Visiting the Orient for its spiritual significance did not preclude an appreciation of the trip’s historical and archaeological interest and the two aspirations could in fact coexist in the same person. In that sense, our travellers and their discourses were akin to the figure of the ‘modern tourist pilgrim’ who appeared in Palestine at the time.Footnote ³⁵ They contended that the trip should be planned for both spiritual and secular significance, with a previous selection of readings and the Bible as the main reference. Walker Martínez recommended travelling ‘with a certain degree of education and some reading’, ‘a small and selected library’ being sufficient for the case.Footnote ³⁶ Soler preferred authors like the explorer and archaeologist Austen Henry Layard and the Assyriologists Henry Rawlinson and Julius Oppert to make the expedition through Mesopotamia and the ruins of Babylon with ‘scientific benefit’.Footnote ³⁷

While Soler’s choice of destination for his third trip to the Orient prevented him from describing the journey as a pilgrimage in the strict sense, he did use the term in his account. Referring to the archaeological interest of visiting Mesopotamia, he wrote that his journey constituted an ‘obligatory pilgrimage for those who wish to experience sublime emotions upon contemplating immortal ruins and paying homage to the prodigious discoveries of modern genius’.Footnote ³⁸ He uses the term ‘biblical journey’ for the title of his book, thus rendering an otherwise profane trip religious. This responds to the historical, geographical and archaeological framework of the journey, determined by the Old Testament and the recent discoveries of Assyriology. In discursive terms, Soler distances himself from the flâneur, who dwelled on picturesque impressions and exotic gestures. On the other hand, the narrative style of Viaje bíblico is determined by the scientific and informative nature that Soler gives to the account and his systematic refusal to conceive of travel as a tourist experience, considering only philosophical reflections and scientific arguments to be useful. Therefore, travelling through Mesopotamia was a dual joy for him: one of an intellectual and moral order, aroused by the contemplation of ruins that announced ‘the most recent and splendid triumph of the Bible over unbelieving criticism’;Footnote ³⁹ and another philosophical and religious, originating in the testimony of the expansion of Catholicism and the modernisation of Oriental societies.

When the Israelites came to the Americas

In the works of Soler and Walker Martínez, a distinct identity stands out along with the self-representation of Catholic travellers and pilgrims: that of being (South) Americans. Both authors adopted a ‘peripheral’ perspective in their writings, enabling them to interpret various historical and contemporary processes while drawing connections and parallels between South America and the Orient. Their travel accounts offer two interconnected readings. On the one hand, an archaeological interpretation with theological implications, which relied on the findings of Assyriology to uphold the inerrancy of the Bible and establish links between the religious origins of humanity and the New World.Footnote ⁴⁰ On the other, a political reading sought to present a westernised, though not necessarily European, perspective on the political, social and religious transformations in the Orient. The latter reflection included an analysis of the crisis of the Ottoman Empire and the situation of the Jewish people, making analogies with the perils of political liberalism in Latin America.

In relation to the first of these readings, our travellers used the Old Testament and the Book of Revelations as theological and hermeneutical devicesFootnote ⁴¹ for reflecting on Latin American history and its Christian roots. Before travelling to the Orient, both had published several works exploring the history of pre-Hispanic cultures. Walker Martínez wrote an essay entitled La cuna de los incas, originally published in Europe and later included in his book Pájinas de un viaje al través de América del Sud in 1876.Footnote ⁴² Soler addressed the subject in América precolombiana, published in Montevideo in 1887.Footnote ⁴³ The former summarised the subject in the seventh epistle of Cartas de Jerusalén, which he entitled ‘Israel in America’. In it, he discussed the hypothesis that the ten lost tribes of Israel were in fact a part of the Asian migrations that eventually populated the American continent, an idea that allowed him to explain certain analogies between the monuments and customs of the indigenous peoples from the Pacific coast of Mexico and Peru with the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Asia,Footnote ⁴⁴ while at the same time Orientalising the Amerindian landscape and cultures.Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, he highlighted certain similarities between the religious traditions of the New World and the Orient of antiquity. He went so far as to state that ‘the physiognomy of the Indians [particularly the Quechua and Aymara peoples] is very similar to that of the Jews. The broken nose, the shape of the eye, their melancholic aspect, even the way they wear their hair … And it is even more remarkable when one hears these Indians speak: their language has the same harsh, guttural sound of the Hebrew language’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The theory that the Americas were settled by way of Asia is also present in Viaje bíblico. However, the main interest here is a better assimilation of the inroads made by European Oriental studies in Americanist research, based on the assumption of a relationship or contemporaneity between pre-Hispanic civilisations and those of Assyria, Chaldea and Egypt. The bishop of Montevideo was convinced that archaeological and philological advances in the Orient could shed light on the origins of America’s settlement and its ancient civilisations. Aside from this scientific interest, the argument was strongly apologetic. For Soler, Assyriology and Egyptology, together with archaeology in America, were contributing to the triumph of Christianity by corroborating the unity of the human species. Ultimately, the bishop intended to defend a primitive monotheism against the theories of those ‘transformists, etymologists, and mythologists’ in favour of religious naturalism, who questioned biblical teachings.Footnote ⁴⁷

Our travellers’ second interpretation from an American perspective comes in a politico-religious framework. Analysing the so-called the ‘Orient question’, Soler identified possible solutions based on ‘an American criterion’. First, he advocates Western intervention to accelerate the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration and reorder the political map, as long as European powers committed not to annex the dismembered territories. Linking the political solution to its religious counterpart, he comments for a South American audience on the implications of missionary expansion and the Vatican’s unionist policy towards the Eastern Christian Churches in the context of the East’s modernisation.Footnote ⁴⁸ The extensive commentary he dedicates to the subject is related to his participation in the International Eucharistic Congress in Jerusalem, a significant event in the history of Roman diplomacy with the East.Footnote ⁴⁹ Soler not only witnessed the event but also participated as one of the two Latin American bishops present.Footnote ⁵⁰ After the meeting, he acknowledged the milestone he had witnessed while admitting that there was still much to be discussed regarding the liturgical, doctrinal and jurisdictional conditions of the union. Shortly thereafter, a new breakthrough occurred when Pope Leo xiii invited the Eastern Catholic Patriarchs to Rome in 1894. The meeting ended with the promulgation of the Apostolic letter Orientalium dignitas and the Holy See’s recognition of the wealth and dignity of Eastern rites.Footnote ⁵¹ Viaje bíblico’s analysis of the events surrounding the Jerusalem congress once again reveals a clear apologetic intention: to demonstrate the vitality of the papacy as an international moral authority and, by extension, its relevance in the construction of a new world order.Footnote ⁵²

On the other hand, Walker Martínez believed he saw a warning for the Americas in the bitter reality of the Jewish community in Palestine, a sign of the socio-political consequences of abandoning Christian foundations to succumb to ‘the impious current of French Jacobinism’. This reflection was rooted in an intense critique of liberalism that he had been developing for several decades. His memorable speech to Congress in 1887 against ‘absolutist liberalism’ not only earned him the pompous title of ‘Defender of the Church’ from the Santiago clergy but also led those words to circulate in editions published in Buenos Aires, Cochabamba, Guayaquil, Ibagué and Potosí.Footnote ⁵³ Now, in Cartas de Jerusalén, Walker Martínez once again lashes out against the same ideological adversary. ‘When I see what is happening in South America’, he asserts, ‘so different from what it should be, and when contemplating the history of all countries of the Latin race over recent years, I fear what happened to the Hebrew people will happen to us: they forgot God, and God forgot them, placing His altar among the gentiles.’Footnote ⁵⁴ This dreaded amnesia was already expressing itself in the Americas, where liberalism was progressively replacing Christianity with an ‘impious Caesarism’ with Hegelian connotations as the structuring element of society. Figures such as José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia and Francisco Solano López in Paraguay, Tomás Cipriano Mosquera in Colombia, and Domingo Santa María and José Manuel Balmaceda in Chile were considered part of the same ‘political sect’ of liberalism.Footnote ⁵⁵ The underlying philosophy of the liberal programme was rationalism, which guided political action to ‘banish God from the law, from home, from all civil acts’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Behind the critique of liberalism, driven by the desire to restore a wholly Christian society in which the Church maintained control over the legal frameworks governing collective life, there was also an underlying awareness of the dangers inherent in the sacralisation of politics. The condemnation of the ‘atheist state’ and ‘impious Caesarism’ not only expressed opposition to the process of secularisation but also reflected fear of a return to the era of ‘paganism’, with its idolatry of the state, a threat that jeopardised religious autonomy in relation to the political sphere.Footnote ⁵⁷

Catholicism, modernity and Orientalism

Though Latin American Orientalism did not emerge from an imperial relationship with the Orient – leading several authors to described it as a ‘peripheral Orientalism’ – it was often grounded in what Edward Said termed a ‘sovereign Western consciousness’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In general, Latin American travellers who visited those regions in the nineteenth century did so with the conviction that they belonged to a superior Western culture. This perspective remains in the case of Soler and Walker Martínez, albeit nuanced by the principles of ultramontanism. The Orient appears as a source of spiritual renewal in their writings, capable of counteracting the corrosive effects of materialism and individualist liberalism,Footnote ⁵⁹ as well as a fruitful testimony to the ‘civilising’ work of Catholic missions, integrated into a Catholic internationalism under the pope’s leadership. Thus, the Orient becomes a real and symbolic space from which to challenge secularising discourses that questioned the political and cultural relevance of religion and its role in the symbolic ordering of society.

Pursuing those intentions, the two accounts analysed here reveal a clearly apologetic intention to overcome the dichotomy between Catholicism and modernity. Viaje bíblico grew from Soler’s personal interest in biblical archaeology. The second part of the work explores the tensions between archaeology and biblical theology, responding to the rationalist critique that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was a collection of myths created by Hebrew hagiographers, and that the traditions narrated therein regarding the religious origins of humanity lacked historical basis or were even plagiarised from other religious traditions. In contrast, Soler argues that archaeological and philological findings dismantled this narrative because biblical prophecies found their strongest confirmation in cuneiform inscriptions. The discoveries by Assyriologists and other Orientalists, such as George Smith, Henry Rawlinson, Julius Oppert, Charles Joseph de Harlezm, François Lenormant and Fulcran Vigouroux, supported the authenticity of the biblical account. One of Soler’s central theses was that, in the context of the controversy with rationalism, Catholics – especially the clergy and university youth – should integrate the contributions of modern sciences as ancillary to theology.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus, Viaje bíblico becomes an exhortation and a model for apologetics – original within Latin America – addressed to an audience committed to the defence of the Catholic faith embedded in the culture wars.Footnote ⁶¹

If archaeology confirmed that modern science was an ally of theology, the political and religious dimension of the ‘Orient question’ showed that Catholicism and the papacy were civilising forces that could not be underestimated in the face of an increasingly globalised European modernity. In his book, Walker Martínez recorded the civilising work carried out by Catholicism in the East through the custodianship of the Holy Sites, the construction of schools, convents, guesthouses and hospices. He presented it as a task paid for especially with the blood of Franciscans and which perpetuated the ideal of a new crusade begun by St Francis of Assisi, ‘the crusade which, according to his prophecy, will last until the end of times!’Footnote ⁶² For his part, Soler argued that the Orient’s entry into the ‘concert of universal progress and civilisation’ had to be through the door of religion, and the unionist policy led by Leo xiii would play a decisive role in that process. The overwhelming expansion of Western modernity in the East left the Eastern Christian Churches at a point of no return, due to the inability of their ‘immobile and backward traditions’ to assimilate social, political and cultural changes.Footnote ⁶³ Based on this crude Orientalist approach, the issue was then reduced to whether those churches would embrace union with Rome, thus overcoming the dialectic between modernity and conservatism, or whether they would dissolve amid irreligion and the advance of Protestantism. An optimistic answer seemed to be found in the International Eucharistic Congress in Jerusalem. According to the Uruguayan bishop, it confirmed the pope’s moral authority and provided the world with a sign of his role as a promoter of the universal union of nations. Through this event, the East demonstrated that the papacy, as a ‘cosmopolitan power’, was prepared to morally accompany and guide modern societies in their mutations.Footnote ⁶⁴ ‘All those who observe and consider things from above’, Soler asserted, ‘note that the pope is the only fixed point amid the rapid and profound transformations that Europe, lord of the world and invader of the East, is the theatre of, to communicate its own fate with its great conquests.’Footnote ⁶⁵

Walker Martínez had read Soler’s book at the time of writing Cartas de Jerusalén. Moreover, he considered Viaje bíblico one of the most important works ever written on the biblical East and claimed to be proud that its author was South American.Footnote ⁶⁶ Though he shared Soler’s apologetic zeal for the harmony between modern science and the Catholic religion, he decided to base his reflections on the ‘authority of [his] eyes’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, while Soler built his argumentation on a foundation of works by European and North American authors, the Chilean made sporadic and superficial references to modern excavations that attested to the fulfilment of ancient prophecies. In truth, he did not show much interest in biblical archaeology. In his experience, the journey to the East lacked the formative meaning it had for Soler. Nevertheless, both agreed in perceiving the global effects of European modernity in the East and reflected on how the world was moving towards the constitution of ‘a single nation with respect to its customs and the way of being of peoples in their reciprocal, commercial, and social relations’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Technical progress, through trade, the telegraph, newspapers, industrial development, legislation, steam, fashion and tourism, facilitated global connections and movements. However, it was an unstable union, under the threat of planetary war. This opened an opportunity for Catholicism in the changing landscape of the modern world. In the Chilean’s view, the nineteenth century had achieved sufficient technical and material conditions for ‘Christian civilisation’ to carry out its project of universal peace. The arms industry and the fear of mass destruction prompted the urgent need to form an arbitration system to resolve international conflicts. ‘The excess of the facilities of harm will bring the efficiency of remedy’, he argued, ‘and then will be time to seek that moral authority with sufficient prestige to quench passions and inspire around it the confidence of unquestionable impartiality.’Footnote ⁶⁹ That moral authority, of course, could be none other than Christ’s representative on earth.

In 1885, shortly before Soler and Walker Martínez travelled to the East, Leo xiii intervened in the conflict between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands, acting as arbiter and scoring an international victory for pontifical diplomacy. This event marked the beginning of a period in which Latin America acquired strategic importance for promoting the papacy in the arbitration system. Toward the end of the century, Leo xiii participated in several instances of mediation and arbitration, including the disputes between Peru and Ecuador, Britain and Colombia, Haiti and Santo Domingo, and France and Brazil. Walker Martínez and Soler added their voices to a broad Latin American chorus advocating for the pope’s recognition as an international arbiter.Footnote ⁷⁰ A few months before travelling to the East, Soler wrote a proposal for arbitration centred on the papacy, with the aim of his friend Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, Uruguay’s plenipotentiary minister to Spain, presenting it at the Ibero-American Juridical Congress of Madrid in 1892.Footnote ⁷¹ The project was never read, but Soler continued to defend this idea in later works, such as Apología del pontificado, written in 1902, where he engaged in a defence of the papacy’s temporal power in the system of arbitration and the Catholic social doctrine promoted by Leo xiii.Footnote ⁷²

Prophetism and the end of times

Like no other region in the world, the East stimulated our travellers’ reflections on ancient and modern prophecies. From there, they sought to respond to the local and global challenges that Catholicism faced regarding modern science, rationalism and political liberalism. Both agreed to look at world history and its evolution ‘with the Bible in hand’.Footnote ⁷³ However, there are substantial differences in this hermeneutic stance in each case. While the Uruguayan prelate focused on the destinies of civilisation from a philosophy of history that interpreted the processes of Western globalisation and the mutations of the religious landscape in the East providentially, the Chilean politician theologised and set his sights on the eschatological horizon of Judgement Day.

In Viaje bíblico, Soler focuses mainly on Old Testament prophecies, with no direct consequences for the present or the future, except for the confirmation of the biblical accounts through the discoveries of Assyriology. The problem of prophecy was a matter not so much for soteriology as for apologetics, since the interest was to demonstrate its fulfilment, thus assuring the inerrancy of the holy book. The purpose of this approach was to demonstrate that the most recent archaeological and philological findings made it possible to verify the fulfilment of past promises. Hence, he commented on the prophesies that had fulfilled their historical function, and therefore no novelty was to be expected.

When Soler reflected prophetically on the immediate future of civilisation, he did so with recourse to ‘prophets’ of his time linked to French ultramontane thought, particularly Joseph de Maistre.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to the prelate, the revolution in communications and transport, which connected every corner of the earth at an ever-increasing pace; the expansion of science and advances in freedom of the press and worship, which weakened major religions such as Buddhism, Islam and Confucianism; and the conquests of a European modernity linked to the colonialist enterprise, which paved the way for missionary work in Africa and Asia, would all build the bridge for a global recomposition of Catholic unity in the near future. He did not expect this process to proceed without violent setbacks, for the ‘progress of the religious spirit’ would have to contend with the development of a ‘social plague’ fuelled by indifference, disbelief, socialism and anarchism. Despite this, the social and political crisis underscored the need for a return to Catholicism, whose beneficent influence was concentrated and represented in the Roman pontiff. Therefore, the commitment to an ultramontane modernity involved ‘believing, along with Maistre and Chateaubriand, that we are taking great strides towards great unity’.Footnote ⁷⁵ If Soler claimed to be on the ‘eve of the end of the world’, he was not referring to the biblical eschatology, but to a change of era augured by the advent of a ‘democratic and social civilisation’ more in keeping with the spirit of the Gospel.Footnote ⁷⁶

Walker Martínez also devoted numerous pages of his book to Old Testament prophecies that had foretold the downfall of empires, cities and peoples of the ancient East, such as Tyre, Babylon, Nineveh, Moab and Edom. At the same time, he gathered various biblical prophecies, the implications of which he extended to his own present. For example, he interpreted foreign domination over Egypt and social petrification in Palestine in the oracles of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Amos and Jeremiah. However, the originality of Cartas de Jerusalén lies in a set of musings on the end times and the fate of the Jewish people. These ideas were influenced both by the rise of apocalyptic prophetism in the ultramontane and counter-revolutionary culture that emerged after the fall of the Papal States,Footnote ⁷⁷ as well as a personal reading of La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad, a work by the Santiago de Chile-born Jesuit Manuel Lacunza during his European exile in the late eighteenth century and widely known in nineteenth-century Chile.Footnote ⁷⁸

Walker Martínez’s praise of Lacunza’s work was not without controversy, given that La venida del Mesías had been confined to the Index librorum prohibitorum since 1824.Footnote ⁷⁹ This circumstance explains why the Jesuit’s work was received, with rare exceptions, with caution among Chilean ultramontane circles. Cartas de Jerusalén does not reflect the pessimistic or critical view of the history of the Catholic Church that characterises Lacunza. Instead, his influence is expressed in the use of eschatology to analyse the challenges of a secularising modernity which, both locally and globally, threatened to relegate Catholicism to the private sphere. This preference for the apocalyptic method, though not predominant among the Chilean Catholic intelligentsia, was not exclusive to Walker Martínez either.Footnote ⁸⁰ Other figures of the time, such as the lawyer Lorenzo Beytía and the journalist Justo Abel Rosales, had expressed similar concerns in their writings.Footnote ⁸¹

The Lacunzian and apocalyptic tradition Walker Martínez followed led him to make a series of observations absent from Soler’s work. Two of these closely related reflections revolve around the prophecies concerning the city of Jerusalem and the role reserved for the Jewish people in universal history. Walking through the city’s narrow streets and contemplating the region’s arid landscape, it was clear to him that the Jews had summoned a curse upon themselves. The historical persecution of this people was a ‘terrible and ongoing testimony to the truth of the prophecies, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the eternal justice that hangs over them and to the extraordinary destinies that await them over the course of the centuries to come’.Footnote ⁸² He condemned antisemitic persecution – tepidly, it should be noted – but at the same time reaffirmed their mystical and providentialist dimension linked to the prophecies of conversion and recognition of Jesus as the Messiah. However, he foretold that the prophecies announcing forgiveness for the people of Israel and their return to take possession of its ancestral lands would soon be fulfilled. At that time, Jerusalem would cease to be the ‘cursed city’ and become the ‘city of truth’.Footnote ⁸³ While for Soler the centrality of Rome could not be eclipsed by Jerusalem, in Walker Martínez’s eschatological view, the relationship was somewhat inverted, as Jerusalem would open its gates ‘to admit the righteous’ on the final day.Footnote ⁸⁴ In an ambiguous comment, but with a strong millenarian echo, Walker Martínez adds: ‘Then the reign of the golden age will return on earth – Paradise – and Jerusalem will be the metropolis of the entire world.’Footnote ⁸⁵

Walker Martínez was convinced that Old Testament prophecies, the Book of Revelation and some New Testament passages, as well as various modern oracles, provided solid grounds to believe that the end of the world was imminent and would happen towards the end of the twentieth century. This belief was supported by the so-called ‘Epistle of Barnabas’ – which, however, he mistakes for the apocryphal gospel also attributed to Barnabas – in which each of the six days of Creation is interpreted as corresponding to a thousand years, implying that the world should last about 6,000 years, followed by a millennium of the triumphal reign of Jesus Christ. Walker Martínez pointed out that this millennialist view had been held by saints such as Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Hilary, Jerome and Bellarmine, among many others. To extend the argument, he recalled that other Asian and American cultures had held similar ideas about a sextipartite periodisation of the world. According to his calculations, the beginning of the millennium corresponded to the year 2000.

Daniel’s prophecy also occupies a central place in his apocalyptic reflections. Disagreeing with the traditional Catholic interpretation that saw the Roman Empire as the last of Daniel’s four empires (Daniel ii.31–45), Walker Martínez followed Lacunza in placing it third. In whichever order it is considered (Western Empire, Eastern Empire, Holy Roman Empire or Papal States), the Roman Empire had disappeared, and the prediction was fulfilled. Consequently, the prophecy announcing the end of times with the fall of the fourth empire – now identified with modern Europe – was once again active in its promises for the near future. Another passage in the book of Daniel (Dn xii.4) caught the attention of Walker Martínez, who interpreted the ‘multiplex erit sciencia’, which announced an increase of knowledge towards the end of times, as the expansion of science and its applications in the modern world.Footnote ⁸⁶ To support the idea that the end would coincide with the turn of the century, Walker Martínez appealed to the popular Voix prophétiques, a work originally published in 1870 by the French clergyman Jean-Marie Curicque.Footnote ⁸⁷ It contained numerous modern prophecies and visions of saints and blesseds such as Malachy, Hildegard, Bridget, Catherine of Siena, Vincent Ferrer, Anna Maria Taigi, Anna Katharina Emmerick,Footnote ⁸⁸ among others, who were, however, unable to overcome the haze of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁹ ‘Is it a coincidence? No. It is not. It is divine inspiration’, the Chilean assured his readers. ‘Fulfilment of the past ensures fulfilment of the future.’Footnote ⁹⁰

Lastly, our traveller added another two signs linked to the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. xxiv.10–14). The first was confirmation that the message of the Gospel was reaching the entire world, facilitated by globalisation and missionary work. The second was the ‘apostasy of nations’, which he related to the instrumental development of modern science, interpreted in apocalyptic terms based on the prophecy of Daniel. Regarding this last sign, Walker Martínez made a connection with rationalism, seen as the creed of liberalism, which not only dominated the vast majority of Western governments, but also exerted a corrosive influence on global religions like Christianity and Judaism.

‘Quid existis videre? Quid quaeritis?’ What did Soler and Walker Martínez see in the East? What were they looking for? What were their motives for undertaking this pilgrimage and what were their expectations? When confronted with these questions, Soler answered grandiloquently: ‘I went to contemplate the field of a victory so splendid and renowned …, the august field that, covered with the most celebrated monuments of the Orient and the whole world, has been the theatre of the most resounding scientific-apologetic triumph of the Bible over contemporary criticism.’Footnote ⁹¹ Through their accounts, the Uruguayan bishop and the Chilean politician offer us a South American reading of the Catholic world that reclaimed the significance of the Holy Land and the Orient for the ultramontane imagination. If, on the one hand, the Orient was related to the longing for the historical and mythical origins of religion and the ‘cradle of civilisation’, it became the place to dig for answers regarding the biblical roots of the Americas on the other, which made it possible to universalise its past and future in a process that tended towards the return of the unity of humankind.

Soler and Walker Martínez, writers who travelled, travellers who wrote, were mediators and translators of the globalisation of modern Catholicism for local and American audiences. Both Viaje bíblico and Cartas de Jerusalén were written to redirect the Catholic and South American gaze towards the East and signal the construction of an alternative modernity based on a global Catholicism under the papacy. Both advocated a Catholic civilising project whose challenge was to consecrate universal peace, with the pope as the world’s moral authority and arbiter in international conflicts. Soler’s work also interweaves the scientific relationship that popularised the idea of a Catholicism in harmony with the discoveries of Assyriology and Egyptology, with the political and religious appreciation of the East, from an Orientalist, Catholic and American perspective.

The stories analysed present providentialist and prophetic ideas about the future of history in relation to religion. The East aroused in the two travellers a reflection on ancient and modern prophecies as they sought reasons to nourish Christian hope in the face of the challenges posed by secularisation, modern science and liberalism. The appeal to a prophetic and, in the case of Walker Martínez, apocalyptic and millenarian discourse, was intended to invigorate the spirits of South American Catholics in times of political, social and religious uncertainty and instability. The prophecies that had foretold the defeat of the Church, from Celsus and Diocletian to the French Revolution, had failed. However, the exacerbation of the ‘culture wars’Footnote ⁹² against Catholicism and the threat of the sacralisation of politics were interpreted as a sign of the approaching end of times. In the face of this troubling scenario, Walker Martínez transcendentalised the acceleration of time linked to Western modernity within an eschatological horizon that would recover the shortening of apocalyptic time.Footnote ⁹³ The Uruguayan prelate, on the other hand, maintained an immanent hope in the fulfilment of other ultramontane ‘prophecies’ announcing the unity of the world under a new Christian order. However, these and other differences do not obscure the fact that our travellers’ experiences bear witness to the significant place that the East held in the South American ultramontane imaginary in the late nineteenth century.