seemingly as a retort to negative reports about the visionaries. Reactions Many rightist Basque nationalists, preparing for a civil war against the Republic, supported the visionaries, believing the visions were a sign that the Virgin Mary supported them. It also draw a certain amount of attention among the Catholics of Catalonia. The official church, on the other hand, soon turned against the seers. At the invitation of the diocese, Jose Antonio Laburu, a Jesuit, preached against the "mental contagion" of the Ezquioga visions at San Sebastian in April and June 1932, contrasting them against the "true" visions of Teresa of Avila and Thomas Aquinas. Similarly the Republican government tried to suppress the visions. Rumor had it that the President Manuel Azaña had sent Dr Gregorio Marañón (then vacationing at San Sebastián) to investigate. In the fall of 1932, Pedro del Pozo Rodríguez, the governor of Gipuzkoa, briefly interned those who claimed to see visions at the provincial psychiatric hospital of Santa Águeda, Mondragón. The visions became a taboo subject in the region, and the visionaries went underground, meeting in small groups with loyal followers. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War came. It was not among Catholic and non-Catholics as many Ezquioga followers had expected: the Catholic Basque nationalists took the side of the Republic, while the also Catholic Navarrese Carlists took the side of the Francoist rebellion. Nevertheless, the Ezquioga visionaries keep meeting in secret and they were still doing so seventy years later. Works The Irish Catholic Hispanist Walter Starkie visited Ezquioga during the zenith of the apparitions and spent a whole chapter of his book Spanish Raggle-Taggle on them. He concluded quite convinced that the traditionalist and right-wing groups were using the Ezquioga events politically against the irreligious republic. William A. Christian Jr., wrote a detailed and influential study of the event, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ, , published in 1996, and an updated second edition published in Spanish in 2011, translated by José Luis Gil Aristu, El Reino de Cristo en la Segunda República; un historia silenciada (Barcelona, Ariel), . A Spanish language film titled Visionarios, in 2001, directed and written by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, and starring Eduardo Noriega, Leire Ucha, and Ingrid Rubio dramatized the event. The plot is that Joshe, a young man from Ezkioga is torn between two women who each claim to have seen a vision of the Virgin