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Online Martyrs: Virtual Tours of the Miguel Agustín Pro Museum, and the José Simeón Cañas Central American University Martyrs

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Online Martyrs: Virtual Tours of the Miguel Agustín Pro Museum, and the José Simeón Cañas Central American University Martyrs religions Article Online Martyrs: Virtual Tours of the Miguel Agustín Pro Museum, and the José Simeón Cañas Central American University Martyrs Marisol Lopez-Menendez Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad iberoamericana-Ciudad de México, 01219 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico; [email protected] Received: 24 June 2019; Accepted: 6 September 2019; Published: 10 September 2019 Abstract: This article examines two commemorative projects on 20th-century Jesuit martyrs turned into Internet tours. A comparison between the official online tour of the Father Pro Museum in Mexico City, and two unofficial tours through the Martyrs Memorial Hall at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, El Salvador, suggests paradoxes regarding a museum’s online representation and ways in which violence and martyrdom are represented. Keywords: martyrdom; memory; museums; Internet 1. Introduction Social networks and the impact of the Internet have been analyzed from different theoretical lenses, and a growing number of publications can confirm academia’s interest in understanding a phenomenon that in only 30 years appears to have transformed cognitive, social, and information-spreading habits. Virtual museums date back to the 1990s; some authors (Coddy 1997; Jones-Garmil 1997) note that they have been criticized both as museums and educational arenas, and as spaces for memory and commemoration. Virtual museums bring together discussion techniques about the past and new visual technologies, thereby recovering in a way the origins of the modern museum (Bennett 1995). Being virtual in this sense represents the possibility of being in a certain place that for whatever reason is inaccessible physically, making the visit possible and thus building an alternative way of taking in the past that might otherwise seem disassociated from the geographic location. The idea for this article came from a comparative effort between two commemoration projects on 20th-century Jesuit martyrs who have been represented in museums. This type of representation is particularly interesting, since a museum is more characteristic of modern, (secular) nation-states than of the Catholic Church. This point provides us with some guidelines to interpret the subtle and often troublesome gray areas where religion and politics insist on overlapping, despite its separation in modern conceptions and mindsets. A museum, conceived originally as a place for the selective representation of episodes related to the reinforcement of the nation-state and its commemorations, has become a “delocalized” event (Deloche 2002). There has also been a worldwide tendency to preserve memory by creating museums that commemorate violent events and attempting to reproduce for the visitor the experience of genocide—such as the Yad Vashem or the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum—or of systematic, ongoing violent practices, such as the recently inaugurated National Museum of African American History and Culture. As Benedict Anderson notes in his classic Imagined Communities, the educational industry of the museum has been consistently linked to the dynamics of remembering/forgetting violent acts (Anderson 1991). Religions 2019, 10, 523; doi:10.3390/rel10090523 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2019, 10, 523 2 of 14 In this sense, the virtual museums we shall study here have significance. Even though both make the virtual experience possible, their very existence is centered on the place as a symbolic arena where the events occurred, where the protagonists lived, and, in the case of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA), the very place they died. The goal of this article is to analyze virtual projects created in physical museums—the Monsignor Romero Center and Martyrs Museum at José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, and the Father Pro Museum in Mexico City. Both cases represent projects protected and embraced by the Society of Jesus. Both cases refer to violent acts, and both have been built on sites of memory, according to Nora’s (2001) classic definition. According to this French historian, the notion refers to places where memory is anchored, crystallized, and expressed collectively, and can be resignified to incorporate new ways of thinking about the past. The site museum transformed into a virtual tour is unique in that it preserves its nature as a “place of memory”, while at the same time its delocalization allows it to respond to different narratives; delocalization allows the museum to be read from different historical and cultural viewpoints, so the virtual tour opens the possibility of creating different types of memory. The virtual museum is more than a tour, more than an experience to be had, more than a specific place. It is something paradoxical in museums whose main meaning is linked to a place—such as in the case of the museums analyzed here. These two museums are places where the memory of violent acts is preserved and emotions are evoked in the hopes of moving the spectator and pushing him or her to take a stand against state policies. Both museums are also historical landmarks and places where grief and homage are associated with history to build narratives that make sense of the protagonists’ deaths, and are positioned explicitly as stories of martyrdom. This text compares the virtual tours of the museums dedicated to the Mexican Jesuit priest Miguel Agustín Pro in Mexico City, and the martyrs of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in San Salvador, identifying similarities and differences between the two Jesuit projects and the ways in which virtual religious tourism is presented according to the particular politics of each of the two sites. It is important to note that the virtual tour of the Father Pro Museum is an institutional outreach related to an institutional effort and a cause for his canonization, sponsored by the Society of Jesus in Mexico, while the virtual tours of the UCA museum are not linked to the UCA institution or to the Jesuit order. One of them is the pet project of the Methodist pastor Ochoa(2011), who acts as the narrator and guide, while the other was created by members of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) during a museum visit. In the second tour, the chronicler interviews several museum representatives who offer complementary information and reference framework that define the images by linking them to martyr narratives that came out of the Salvadorian civil war. That the tour of the Father Pro Museum has no narrator marks a significant difference; since it is a mute tour, it prompts the Internet user to turn to other sources for narrative guidelines, especially information available on the canonization movement’s website and Facebook page. Here, I compare the ways in which the use of images and narratives of martyrs adapts to local conditions and varying audiences while at the same time offering the opportunity for contact with historically relevant places of devotion. Although the original idea for this article centered on virtual “museums”, I have decided to turn to the notion of virtual tours; anchored in a fleeting, repeatable experience, the tour is not equivalent to a museum, but rather to the experience of having access to one as an observer from afar, whose characteristics and agenda are not easily discernible. A virtual tour qualifies, highlights, ignores, and separates objects, processes, and expressions incorporated in artifacts, thus building a metanarrative of the curatorial experience itself. Virtual tours make use of relics and other artifacts, creating a specific narrative anchored in the antique Church traditions studied by Brown(1981) ; Geary(1990), and Bynum(2011). Thus, relics remain as a relevant mnemonic device in which materiality expresses itself, embodying ideas of pain, suffering, and redemption. The importance of relic-showing in virtual tours remains a topic to investigate further. Religions 2019, 10, 523 3 of 14 The study of the two virtual tours is complemented with Ignacio Ellacuría and Miguel Pro’s official Facebook pages, considering the different audiences and expectations these pages represent. Here, a word about the general outlook of those supporting the projects is in order. Miguel Pro remains a somehow controversial character. To many, he was responsible for plotting against President Elect Alvaro Obregon’s life in 1927 and masterminding an attack against the politician. To others, Pro was a martyr to Catholicism, because his execution was ordered not because of what he did, but because of his firm belief in the Catholic Church´s teachings and prerogatives. His death also stands out for demands of religious freedom. Yet to others, he died as a victim of injustice: the absence of due process leading to his execution makes him an early example of human rights abuses in Mexico. As we can see, Miguel Pro´s story has competing narratives supported by very different groups within the Catholic milieu both in Mexico and globally. The UCA martyrs are different. Inspired by the Second Vatican and Medellin, three of the martyred Jesuits were important thinkers of the Theology of Liberation movement. Their philosophical and theological perspectives were aligned with progressive Catholicism, and those who promoted their memory are, too. The text is divided into four sections. The first one analyzes the specific characteristics of the virtual museum, about which there is a large body of literature, although it is not yet analytically relevant. Sections two and three cover the virtual tour of the Martyrs Memorial Hall at the Central American University in San Salvador, and the virtual tour of the Father Pro museum, respectively. The last section summarizes and discusses aspects of the representation of violence in an attempt to find similarities between the museums’ approaches and how the virtual tours supported by the websites retrieve them. This final section underscores the importance of the debasement of the martyrs’ bodies in the virtual tours and in the actual museums discussed.
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