Following in the footsteps of father Vilaplana in Gibraltar – Made famous by Molly Bloom

By Marti Crespo

For the first time, a group of Gibraltarians has brought Bloomsday to the Rock. On the website of the James Joyce Centre, Gibraltar now appears among the list of cities around the world that, on 16 June, host readings and walks focused on the characters, settings, and major passages from James Joyce’s famous novel Ulysses (1922). The absence of Gibraltar from such celebrations had long been surprising, considering that Molly Bloom — one of the novel’s three narrative voices and the protagonist of its final monologue — was set by the Irish author as having been born in this very Mediterranean location. For this reason, a statue dedicated to her has stood for over two decades in the Alameda Gardens — the undisputed focal point of this first edition of the celebration.

Even more surprising is the fact that the final pages of this universal work are full of memories and references to Gibraltar, even though the author never set foot in this British Overseas Territory, nor is he known to have had any special connection to it.

Indeed, it is known that in order to transport the reader to the Gibraltar of the mid-19th Century, Joyce consulted a number of books — especially the Gibraltar Directory and Guide Book, an annual publication listing all the addresses, businesses, and streets of the city. According to some researchers, he likely used the 1884 and 1912 editions to accurately contextualise Molly’s thoughts in this multi-ethnic and multicultural corner of the world. Accordingly, the text contains allusions to Andalusian figures and customs, to the British atmosphere that permeates the Rock, to Jews and Arabs in its streets, to Genoese fishermen in Catalan Bay, to the Gibraltar Chronicle itself and, of course, to the lush Alameda. There are also references to merchants in business at the time such as Benady Bros and to Abrines — an establishment run by a family most likely to be descendants of Menorcans who settled in Gibraltar in the 18th Century.

Another name that appears in the Gibraltar directories which Joyce consulted to craft his novel is that of the rector of the Church of St Mary the Crowned: Father Vilaplana. It must have sounded exotic enough to him to warrant inclusion in Molly’s monologue:

“[…] Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit”

Montserrat and the Benedictine Diocese of Gibraltar

Articles X and XI of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), concerning the cession of sovereignty over Gibraltar and Menorca to the British monarchy at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, expressly refer to the “free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion” for the inhabitants of the two territories. In Gibraltar’s case, the ongoing spiritual dependence on the Diocese of Cádiz was soon perceived as a dangerous gap in defence by the British authorities. By the 1730s, military governors were already requiring that church vacancies be filled by subjects of the Crown.

For this reason, until the end of the century, St Mary the Crowned was led by priests from Menorca, which at that time also fell under British rule, making them British subjects: Francisco Ignacio Ximenes (1735–1743), Antonio Fontcuberta (1747–1749), Juan Febrer (1749–1750), Rafael Messa (1771–1773), and Francisco Messa (1773–1792).

It was under the latter’s tenure that, in the final years of the 18th Century, a formal request was made to Rome to separate the parish of Gibraltar from the Diocese of Cádiz. This only materialised in 1816 with the creation of a local Apostolic Vicariate directly dependent on the Vatican. A century later, during the tenure of the Benedictine bishop Guido Remigio Barbieri (1836–1910) on the Rock, a request was submitted to elevate the vicariate to the rank of diocese — a petition granted by Pope Pius X (1835–1914) in the apostolic brief Quae ad spirituale, dated 19 November 1910. Along with creating the new diocese, the Pope decided to entrust it to the Benedictines by appointing the Welsh bishop Gregory Thompson (1871–1942) as Barbieri’s successor. The Spring 1911 edition of St Augustine’s College Magazine reported on his arrival:

“The Bishop of Gibraltar left Ramsgate at the close of last year, and after a short visit to his relatives in the Channel Islands, he proceeded to Rome, where he had several audiences with the Holy Father, and renewed his acquaintance with his old University of St. Anselmo. He spent some days at Subiaco, the cradle of his beloved Order, where he paid his respects to our Abbot-General, the Most Rev. Dom Maurus M. Serafini. On leaving Italy he went to our monastery at Montserrat, where many of his old St. Anselmo fellow-students are monks. Accompanied by one of these, the Rev. Dom Ildephonso Vilaplana, O.S.B., whom he has made his secretary, he set out for his diocese.”

Thus, Father Vilaplana arrived in 1911 in this small British enclave. Thanks to information kindly provided by the current archivist of Montserrat, Josep Galobart, we now have an outline of the life of Ildefonso Vilaplana Vallés, his full name. Born in Sarroca (Catalonia) on 6 March 1877, he entered the famous Catalan monastery in December 1892 at the age of 15. He was ordained a priest on 9 July 1900. The abbot of the time, keen to raise Montserrat’s cultural level, sent the young Vilaplana to study philosophy at the Benedictine college of St Anselmo in Rome. On returning to the abbey, he taught philosophy, canon law and moral theology to the younger monks until 1911 when, following the appointment of his fellow student Thompson as Catholic bishop of Gibraltar, he requested permission to follow him to the new diocese.

Indeed, in the 1911 Gibraltar Register of Inhabitants, the priest “Ildefonso Vilaplana” is recorded — a name that reappears in later censuses with slight spelling variations: “Ildefonso Villaplana” in 1914 and “Raymond Vilaplona” [sic] in 1921. Though he had initially arrived as the bishop’s secretary, from at least 1922 (as recorded in that year’s Gibraltar Directory and Guide Book) he also held the post of Vicar General of the diocese. Also listed in the same directory were two other monks from Montserrat: Bonifacio Soler Boronat (born in Montferri in 1881), from Catalonia, and Bernardo Adell Guimerà (born in Chiva de Morella in 1878) originally from Valencia.

Bonifacio Soler (or Solé), who joined the monastery in 1896, served at the Church of Our Lady of Montserrat in Naples in 1917, just before being definitively posted to Gibraltar. By 1922, he was enthusiastically involved in the formation of a local religious association, the Adoración Nocturna. Father Bernardo Adell (born Vicente), who entered the monastery in 1895, was ordained in 1903 and was sent to the Philippines shortly after, remaining there until the First World War. Like Soler, he spent the 1920s ministering at St Mary the Crowned alongside Vilaplana, who in 1927 also became rector of St Joseph’s, founded in the mid-19th Century in the South District by another priest of Menorcan descent, Gabriel Femenias.

The year 1927 marked a turning point for the Benedictine diocese, as Bishop Thompson resigned and returned to his monastery in England. According to researcher Neville Chipulina, the resignation had much to do with the monks of Montserrat and the tense relations they had developed with local clergy: the former insisted the entire Catholic community follow the Benedictine rule, while the Gibraltarians resisted. Bishop Thompson, who did not speak Spanish, could not maintain peace between them, and after an official visit by Rome’s delegate, Archbishop Peter Amigo (himself born in Gibraltar), he stepped down on 25 May 1927. His successor, Irish bishop Richard Joseph Fitzgerald (1881–1956), arrived five months later.

As noted by Lázaro Seco in the reference work Los benedictinos españoles en el siglo XX (1931), the young diocese granted by Pius X to the Benedictines no longer had a bishop from that order, though this did not result in the immediate departure of the Catalan monks. Father Vilaplana, for instance, continued in his roles as Vicar General and rector of St Joseph’s until Christmas 1931 when, due to poor health, he returned to his monastery for convalescence. On 9 January 1932, he seemed recovered and expressed a wish to return to his diocese, but on 4 August that year he passed away at Montserrat at the age of 55. Faced with this loss, his companions Adell and Soler briefly returned to the abbey but remained based in Gibraltar for a while longer. Soler, in fact, died on the Rock on 22 November 1937.

The unexpected resignation of Bishop Thompson and the sudden death of Father Vilaplana thus brought an end to the direct connection between the Rule of St Benedict and the Diocese of Gibraltar. But through the unpredictable twists of the long creative journey behind Ulysses, this episode of Gibraltar’s unique ecclesiastical history — and particularly the name of a little-known Catalan monk — unexpectedly gained universal fame thanks to one of the most famous, most read, most discussed and most analysed literary works of the 20th Century.

This piece was translated by Brian Porro.