Palmarian Catholic Church

• 1. Introduction

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  The Palmarian Catholic Church has its seat in El Palmar de Troya, in Andalusia in southern Spain. It teaches that it alone is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church founded by Jesus Christ. It also says the Holy See, the headquarters of the papacy, no longer stands in Rome. In its account, the Roman Catholic Church fell into apostasy, and the papal seat moved in 1978 to a cathedral-basilica in this Andalusian village. The church traces its beginnings to reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary that started in 1968. Two men became closely tied to those visions as the years passed. Today the church is led by Pope Peter III, who has held the office since 2016. Critical scholars, journalists and former followers often describe it as a religious cult. How did a farm field become the claimed center of the Catholic world? Why did Spanish officials fight over the church's name? And what happened when its own leaders turned against one another?

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• 2. The Field at Palmar

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  On the 30th of March 1968, four Spanish girls aged 12 and 13 reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them in a field. They were Ana García, Rafaela Gordo, Ana Aguilera and Josefa Guzmán. The field lay on La Alcaparroa farm near El Palmar de Troya, then a district of Utrera in the province of Seville. Other reports followed. Rosario Arenillas, a devout woman, described seeing Mary there on the 11th of April 1968. María Marín, a neighbour from Utrera, said the same on the 20th of May. On the 6th of June, María Luisa Vila of Seville claimed a mystical ecstasy in which Jesus gave her communion. Witnesses said a bloody host lay in her mouth when she opened it.

  The setting was a country in religious and political upheaval. Francisco Franco was in his final decade as ruler of Spain, where Spanishness and Catholicism were presented as inseparable. Meanwhile the Second Vatican Council, held from 1962 to 1965, had brought a new openness to religious liberty and dialogue with other faiths. A New Order of Mass followed in 1969. Traditionalists were scandalised, and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the Society of St. Pius X in opposition. The Palmar messages sided with that pushback and alleged a Masonic infiltration of the Roman Catholic Church. Palmarians also see Palmar as the latest in a chain of apparitions, among them La Salette in 1846, Fátima in 1917 and Garabandal in 1961.

  José Bueno y Monreal, the Archbishop of Seville, strongly opposed belief in the apparitions. He refused to examine the seers or to open any enquiries. On the 15th of October 1968, Clemente Domínguez and Manuel Alonso Corral visited the site for the first time. Corral worked at an insurance brokerage that Serafín Madrid used to finance his charitable works. Once he became involved at Palmar, he was expelled from the company. After that, the two men came far more often.

  On the 12th of December 1969, Domínguez said he saw Dominic de Guzmán beside the Holy Face of Jesus. The message was to spread devotion to the Holy Face, the Stations of the Cross and reparative communion on the first Thursday of each month. Domínguez also claimed stigmata. He showed a cross-shaped cut on his forehead and cuts on his hands. At one point he revealed a 10-centimeter cut on his side, said to mark where the Roman soldier Longinus pierced Jesus with the Holy Lance. On the 2nd of February 1970, believers placed a picture of the Holy Face on a mastic tree. Palmarians call the spot the Sacred Place of the Lentisco. A crowd of 40,000 people reportedly watched one of his ecstasies and his stigmata.

  Domínguez was the visionary stigmatist, and Corral was the man who wrote down, copied and distributed the messages. The visions were translated into English, French and German. From 1972, a supporter named José María Andreu Magri published a newsletter, Ecos del Palmar, from Barcelona. In 1972 the Baroness de Castillo Chirel, then 90 years old, gave the pair 16 million pesetas, worth roughly 1.8 million euros in 2023. Throughout the 1970s the two men, often joined by their ally Carmelo Pacheco Sánchez, toured Spain and Western Europe. Later they made annual trips across the Atlantic to Latin America and the United States. Pilgrims came to Palmar from many countries, with Irish and German-speaking visitors overrepresented.

  They also tried to reach the powerful. On the 27th of December 1969, they turned up unannounced at El Pardo to give Franco a letter asking him to read a secret from God in his end-of-year speech. Staff sent them to his private secretariat at the Palacio de Oriente. On the way, Domínguez stopped to pray in a Carmelite church and said Mary told him the devil had deceived him, so he should not deliver it. On the 8th of July 1970 in Rome, Domínguez jumped a barrier, avoided the Swiss Guard and knelt before Pope Paul VI's procession to present a letter. By 1974 the pair could buy a 15,000 square meter plot at La Alcaparroa. After an alleged apparition of Jesus on the 30th of May 1975, followers were asked to build a sanctuary there, paid for by donations and a loan from the Central Bank of Utrera.

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• 3. Bishops by Night

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  On the 30th of November 1975, just ten days after Franco's death, Domínguez claimed a vision of Jesus and Mary announcing a new religious order. It was revealed on the 22nd of December 1975 as the Order of the Carmelites of the Holy Face, with Domínguez as its General. Its members were to be the Apostles of the Last Times, a phrase drawn from the prophecies of Louis de Montfort. The order had three classes: friars, religious sisters and lay tertiaries. Each wore a Carmelite habit and a brown scapular bearing images of the Holy Face and Our Lady of Palmar.

  There was a problem. Domínguez and Corral were officially laymen, and both wanted to become priests and bishops. Cardinal José Bueno y Monreal of Seville opposed everything connected with El Palmar de Troya. The movement needed holy orders in the old rite from a bishop in communion with Pope Paul VI. Maurice Revaz, a sympathiser who taught at the Society of St. Pius X seminary in Écône, Switzerland, asked Lefebvre to go. Lefebvre declined and named the exiled Vietnamese Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục instead. In his words: "He is orthodox and he is not at present occupied. Go and seek him out. He will most certainly agree with your request."

  Pope John XXIII had made Thục the Archbishop of Huế in Vietnam. Then the 1963 South Vietnamese coup killed several close members of his family, and he went into exile in Rome. Paul VI named him Titular Archbishop of Bulla Regia in 1968. Deeply anti-communist, Thục had grown disillusioned with Rome's diplomatic approach and was drifting toward traditionalism. Revaz convinced him that the Virgin Mary had sent him to render her a service. After a three-day car journey, Thục was celebrating Pontifical High Mass at El Palmar de Troya by Christmas Eve 1975.

  On the 31st of December 1975, without permission from the Archbishop of Seville, Thục ordained five men as priests. Domínguez took the religious name Ferdinand and Corral took Isidore. The others were two Irishmen, Paul Gerald Fox and Francis Coll, and a Frenchman, Louis Henri Moullins. Father Ferdinand then reported a vision in which Mary said the order needed bishops. As proof, she placed the invisible Infant Jesus in his hands. He passed the Infant to Thục, who supposedly felt its weight and agreed.

  On the 11th of January 1976, in a five-hour ceremony through the night, Thục consecrated five Palmarian bishops. They included Domínguez and Corral. The others were Camilo Estévez Puga, Francis Bernard Sandler and Michael Thomas Donnelly. Sandler was an American Benedictine who had converted from Rabbinic Judaism and served as a parish priest in Sweden. Donnelly, an Irish priest from Belfast, left the Palmarians within two months.

  The Vatican moved quickly, acting through Cardinal Bueno, the nuncio Luigi Dadaglio and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It did not question the validity of the orders. It ruled them illicit and declared the men suspended and excommunicated. The Palmarians answered that Pope Pius XI had granted Thục special power in 1938 to ordain without further permission. They insisted the Roman Curia was packed with Masonic infiltrators who drugged Paul VI and held him hostage. Between 1976 and 1978 they consecrated 91 more bishops, with Irish and Spaniards making up over 40 percent.

  In May 1976, five Palmarian bishops were returning from Derval in Brittany, France, when their car crashed in the Basque Country. They had gone to Derval to handle a crisis, because some Palmarian bishops there had sided with the mystic Pierre Poulain. Shattered windshield glass blinded Domínguez, and surgeons at San Sebastián hospital removed his eyeballs. Palmarians say the devil attacked the car after Poulain cast a black magic spell on his rival. Spanish media began calling him the "blind-seer."

  After months of silence, Domínguez reported a vision of Christ in September 1976. He said Christ told him: "No one should think that the palm-tree is lying down. It is more upright than ever because victory is found in the passion and crucifixion. Then comes the resurrection." The blinding, the vision implied, was a trial. If he prevailed, Christ was preparing him to become a future Pope.

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• 4. A Pope Without Rome

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  Pope Paul VI died on the 6th of August 1978, and Domínguez was in Bogotá, Colombia. He and other top Palmarian bishops were there on one of their regular trips across the Atlantic to visit followers and recruit clergy. The Palmarians consider Paul VI a martyr. They claim he was poisoned by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot. A few hours after the death, while waiting to be deported from Colombia, Domínguez reported an apparition. In it, Jesus Christ himself crowned him Sovereign Pontiff, with Peter, Paul and the dead Paul VI in attendance.

  From then on, Palmarian believers called him Pope Gregory XVII, and the Holy See was said to have left Rome for El Palmar de Troya. His motto was Gloria Olivae, taken from the Prophecy of the Popes, a Christian apocalyptic writing. Back in Seville he held a consistory that raised 24 Palmarian bishops to cardinal, including Corral. He kept details of the heavenly coronation from the press at first. The public ceremony took place on the 15th of August 1979, when four cardinals, Corral among them, placed the papal tiara on his head.

  On the 26th of August 1978, the Vatican announced Albino Luciani as the new Pope. A Palmarian pronouncement called him "that clown of an Antipope" with a "false smile." He lasted only a month before Pope John Paul II replaced him. In his Twenty-Fourth Document, dated the 24th of October 1978, Domínguez claimed authority to "excommunicate and anathematise the Antipope Cardinal Wojtyla." He called John Paul II a "marxist spy." The two reigns, one at Palmar and one in the Vatican, ran in step from 1978 until 2005.

  From 1978 to 1997 the leadership was a tight trio of Spaniards. Gregory XVII sat at the top, Corral served as Secretary of State, and Carmelo Pacheco Sánchez was Vice-Secretary. Members complained, so the three were described as "three apocalyptic bulls who attack heretics with their mystical horns." Not everyone accepted the leap. Bishops Maurice Revaz and Alfred Seiwert-Fleige were among those who left. Between 1978 and 1980, the Pope published forty-seven pontifical documents. They canonised over 1,000 new saints and anathematised freemasonry, communism and capitalism. They also called on all nations to enact the death penalty for abortion.

  On the 19th of May 1982, Gregory XVII and several bishops visited the basilica at Alba de Tormes, near Salamanca, the resting place of St. Teresa of Ávila. Rumours had spread that the Palmarians planned to carry her relics off to El Palmar de Troya. The allegedly drunk Pope and his bishops shouted that John Paul II was an Antipope. They also called women in trousers whores, since Palmarians consider trousers on women immodest. A large crowd of locals attacked some of the bishops and tipped one of their vehicles into the River Tormes. The clerics took refuge in the convent until the Guardia Civil dispersed the mob.

  On the 30th and the 31st of July 1982, Gregory XVII answered with decrees. Only Palmarians, he ruled, could receive grace and indulgences from holy relics and images. Outside the Palmarian Church, he declared, all powers of bishops, presbyters and deacons were withdrawn. Around the same time, the church was pursuing something more worldly than relics, namely legal recognition from the Spanish state.

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• 5. A Contested Name

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  The official name of the Palmarian Church in Spain's register of religious entities is Iglesia Cristiana Palmariana de los Carmelitas de la Santa Faz. In English, that is the Palmarian Christian Church of the Carmelites of the Holy Face. It exists because of a legal process that began in 1980. That year the church applied to the Spanish Ministry of Justice for recognition as a religion under a far grander title. The title read Iglesia Católica, Apostólica y Palmariana, Orden Religiosa de los Carmelitas de la Santa Faz en Compañía de Jesús y María.

  In 1982, the Director-General of Religious Affairs rejected the application. He said the Palmarian use of the terms "Catholic," "pope" and "cardinal" bore "excessive resemblance" to those used by the Roman Catholic Church. He also noted that the Palmarians simply claimed to be the Catholic Church. A few months later, they filed again with the current name, using "Christian" in place of "Catholic." Inside their own documents they kept using other versions, including the Holy Catholic Palmarian Church and the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Palmarian Church.

  The director-general rejected the second application as well, because the changes were only "semantic." The Palmarians did not give up. They pushed their registration through the Supreme Court of Spain, and in 1987 they won it under the current official name. That ruling arrived while the First Palmarian Council was still in session, and its work on doctrine would not finish until 1992.

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• 6. The Purified Bible

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  On the 30th of March 1980, the First Palmarian Council opened and the Palmarian Credo was published. The council ran until 1992. Within the Palmarian Church it is recognised as the 21st ecumenical council, following Trent from 1545 to 1563 and the Vatican Council of 1869-1870. The Second Vatican Council is declared invalid. The Palmarian Latin-Tridentine-Palmarian Rite of the Mass was introduced on the 9th of October 1983. The council's final doctrinal work was the Treatise of the Mass in 1992. It reads scripture allegorically through the Mass, drawing on Gregory XVII's visions and on mystics such as Maria de Jesús Ágreda and Anna Katharina Emmerich.

  The liturgy had been a priority from the start. In his first proclamation on the 8th of August 1978, Gregory XVII made the Tridentine Mass of St. Pius V obligatory. He anathematised the New Order of Mass as "confused, ambiguous, equivocal and heretical." Palmarian papal documents mock it as a "Lutheran supper." Faithful were forbidden to serve at it, or to receive communion in the hand or standing.

  In 1997, the leadership suffered a double blow. Carmelo Pacheco Sánchez and Bishop Camilo Estévez Puga died within two months of each other, and Pacheco was hit by a truck. The Pope lost two trusted supporters and was deeply affected. Ginés Jesús Hernández, a Spaniard who had been an electrician, became the third-ranking figure. That same year, Gregory XVII reported that the prophet Elijah had appeared to him. Elijah, he said, revealed that enemies of God, described elsewhere as "Jews and Masons," had falsified scripture over the centuries. The text had to be purified.

  That project became the Second Palmarian Council, which ran from 1995 to 2002. Members and clergy were asked to hand in their old Bibles, based on the Vulgate or the Septuagint, to be destroyed. Some objected that without them they could not even study the Treatise of the Mass, which cites scripture throughout. The new Holy Palmarian Bible, also called the Sacred History, appeared in five volumes in 2001. Smaller two-volume and children's illustrated versions followed. Scholar Magnus Lundberg judged the changes "dramatic," with entire parts of books omitted and many passages almost unrecognizable. In 2018 Lundberg scanned one English version and later published it on his blog.

  Inside the church, doubts were growing. Some bishops, nuns and lay sympathisers quietly questioned the Pope's mental health and conduct. They disliked the Bible changes and the tightening of the Palmarian moral code, known as the Norms, which they felt had become coercive. On the 30th of March 1995 the Palmarian Cardinalate was suppressed, so no conclave would follow the Pope's death. The dissidents took to burner phones to hide their talks. Leaders uncovered the network, and Hernández played a part in unmasking them. A knife found in one dissident's room was presented to the Pope as part of a plot to murder him.

  On the 24th of October 2000, fearing a coup, Gregory XVII named Corral as his successor. On the 5th of November 2000, eighteen bishops and seven nuns were anathematised, excommunicated and expelled from the property. José Antonio Perales Salvatella, the Pope's former confessor, was labelled the heresiarch in chief and a new Martin Luther. Many of the exiles moved to Archidona near Málaga and called themselves Palmarians who now considered the chair of St. Peter vacant. Some even settled for a time in Paraguay. Two others, Robert McCormack and Juan Marquez, rejected Palmarianism as a fraud and accused the church of psychological abuse. With the arrival of the internet, they became vocal anti-Palmarian activists.

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• 7. After Gregory

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  Gregory XVII died in 2005, and Manuel Alonso Corral automatically became Pope Peter II. He took a name that popes had avoided since Peter the Apostle. Corral claimed no visions of his own, and his papacy focused on defending Palmarian orthodoxy. In 2006 he defined a dogma about the Antichrist. The Church did not seek new members in this period and avoided having any presence on the internet. It suffered from departures and a shortage of vocations. Peter II died on the 15th of July 2011 after a long illness.

  Ginés Jesús Hernández, the former electrician, then became Pope Gregory XVIII. Lacking Domínguez's charisma and Corral's intellectual polish, he was described as a managerial Pope. His style was authoritarian and militaristic, and critics called him unpredictable and angry. He hardened the Norms. Families were split, teenagers were expelled from homes, and schoolchildren were told not to play or talk with non-Palmarian classmates. Leaving property in a will to apostates or public anti-Palmarians became an excommunicable offense.

  In 2012, the Palmarian Holy Week was fixed permanently so that Holy Friday always fell on the 25th of March. That year Gregory XVIII declared a Third Palmarian Council, which focused on codifying the Norms, and banned internet use. He said newspapers, radio, television and the internet were controlled by "Freemasons and Zionists." He also referred to Pope Francis as "Antipope Pancho." A six-volume work, Palmarian Lives of the Saints, was published, and the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Crowned Mother of Palmar was completed by 2014. In 2016 he created a Palmarian Papal Guard in red berets and khaki uniforms reminiscent of the Carlist requetés, drawn mostly from German-speaking Palmarians.

  On the 22nd of April 2016, Gregory XVIII announced he was abdicating because he had lost the faith. Just before, he had issued The Easing of Several Norms, citing the "morbid scruples" that some rules had caused. The papacy passed to Secretary of State Joseph Odermatt, a Swiss who was the first non-Spanish Palmarian Pope. He took the name Peter III. It emerged that Hernández had been in a relationship with an ex-Palmarian nun, Nieves Triviño, and had left El Palmar de Troya to marry her. The church branded him Ex-Pope Gregory XVIII the Apostate. It accused him of stealing church assets and compared him to the Borgia Pope Alexander VI.

  Hernández spoke to Spanish media, including El País. He said that through study he had concluded the original apparitions of Our Lady of Palmar were genuine, but that Clemente and Manolo had hijacked them for financial manipulation. Peter III declared the Third Council erased, which rolled the Norms back to where they stood in 2011.

  On the 10th of June 2018, while most religious were at Mass inside the Cathedral-Basilica, two figures in balaclavas climbed the compound walls with a telescopic ladder. They carried a knife, two clown masks, cable ties, duct tape, two pairs of pliers and a crowbar. Bishop Silvestre María met them outside and was attacked with the crowbar. Bishop Jesús María heard the noise and came to help. The intruders were Hernández and Triviño. All four were injured, and Hernández took a knife wound to the chest from his own knife. A helicopter took him to hospital in Seville. He was convicted and sentenced to six years, and Triviño to five, though the sentences were suspended after they paid a large fine to the bishops.

  Under Peter III the church became more visible. Part of the renewed interest came from the novelist Dan Brown, whose 2017 book Origin gives the Palmarian Church a key role in its plot. From 2019 the church launched a multilingual website and accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain there were cases in the compound, including 4 deaths, which drew media attention. On the 13th of February 2021, Secretary of State Benjamin María was demoted. His post went to Abraham María, who is Paul Fox, the Irish priest ordained on the last night of 1975 and a Palmarian from the earliest days.

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• 8. Beliefs and Norms

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  When two Palmarian faithful meet, the established greeting is "¡Ave María Purísima!" The reply is "sin pecado concebida," meaning conceived without sin. The church professes Trinitarian Christianity. Lundberg says it follows the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the definitions of the Councils of Ephesus in 431 and Chalcedon in 451. Yet devotion to Mary is intense. A Palmarian text says: "It is common among Palmarians to love the Most Holy Virgin Mary intensely. This is a point where no discussion is allowed."

  On the 12th of August 1978, in his Second Document, Gregory XVII proclaimed four infallible Marian doctrines. Mary is Mediatrix of All Graces, Co-Redemptrix, Queen of Heaven and Earth, and Mother of the Church. The church also teaches that the soul of Jesus was created before anything in the material universe, followed at once by the soul of Mary. This borrows in a limited way from the early theologian Origen of Alexandria. From it flows the Mystical Espousal of Christ and Mary, in which a particle of Christ's Sacred Heart and a drop of his blood are enthroned within her, and the same is true of her within him. Baptism gives the baptised a drop of Mary's blood, which washes away original sin. A mortal sin makes it disappear until confession.

  Saint Joseph has a special place too. In his Third Document of the 13th of August 1978, Gregory XVII taught that Joseph was sanctified in his mother's womb in the third month after conception. He was therefore born unable to sin. The church also holds that Joseph remained a virgin all his life. It teaches that the year after the resurrection of Christ, Joseph was raised and assumed into heaven in body and soul.

  The Palmarian view of the end of the world is detailed. Souls judged worthy go to the Planet of Mary, and the godless go to the Planet of Lucifer, each awaiting a final battle. Heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo are understood as states rather than places. According to the Palmarian Catechism, the Antichrist was born in Jerusalem in 2000 and made a brief entry into the world in 2012. A final battle of Armageddon will follow. After it the dead are raised, Christ returns at Jerusalem and the final judgement takes place. Only two destinations remain: the Sacred Heart of Christ for the saved and the heart of Satan for the damned.

  Daily life is governed by the Norms. They are compulsory moral and behavioural standards covering strict modesty in dress, restricted media and limits on social interaction with non-Palmarians, among many other rules. Breaking them can lead to excommunication. Some Palmarians then shun those who have been expelled or who have left the church altogether.

  The church does not allow its religious works to be sold for profit. It gives them to members free of charge. In the internet age, however, many of the documents are now freely available online for anyone to read, although the Palmarian Bible is not held in public libraries.

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