On the first Saturday of the month, in the Ave María nave, next to Prado Nuevo, the order of the acts is as follows. First, a message is projected: the recorded voice of Luz Amparo Cuevas, who died in 2012, transmitting what the Virgin of Sorrows told her on another first Saturday twenty or thirty years ago; in April 2025 it was the one from February 2001. Then the rosary is prayed. Then Mass is celebrated, which the Public Association of the Faithful erected by the Archdiocese of Madrid has been authorized to hold there since 2009 and which is preached by the priests of the Work. At the foot of the altar, during that Mass, I have seen the seer’s portrait the size of a painting. On a poster in the same nave it reads that her book of messages is the most important after the Bible. And one morning, in the homily, Father Sergio Frades said that Luz Amparo is a saint, although the Church has not yet canonized her. It is worth keeping the order in mind, because it is the entire argument: the voice, then the Virgin, then Christ; the portrait, then the altar; the book, then the Bible; the priest, then the Church.
Those who cannot go to the nave can go to the official website, which says the same thing with more candor. In the “Prayers” menu of pradonuevo.es the entries are, in this order, Jesus Christ, Mary, Saint Joseph, the Holy Spirit, the Eternal Father, Saint John Paul II, Angels, and Luz Amparo. The last one has a page titled without circumlocution “Prayer to Luz Amparo.” It is a proper collect: it reminds Christ that he made his handmaid “a partaker of the sufferings of your Passion and Death,” asks through her intercession for the grace to be faithful to one’s own vocation plus the personal petition each person wishes to add, declares the intimate desire to see her glorified by the merits of that participation, closes with the “you who live and reign” and prescribes the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be. The page carries no ecclesiastical license, no clause of submission to the judgment of the Church, no warning of private use. It carries a linked holy card to print. The thesis of this column is that nave and website tell the same story: in El Escorial devotion has migrated from the Virgin to the seer, and not because of an excess on the part of the faithful but because of the internal logic of the messages.
Because in Lourdes and in Fátima the seers disappear, Bernadette in Nevers, Lucia in Coimbra, and the message never speaks of them. In Prado Nuevo the message speaks of her without stopping. There are more than three hundred texts, transcriptions of dialogues in trance, and in all of them the Virgin or the Lord address Amparo as my daughter hundreds of times, give her physical orders, and comment on her life. “Kiss the ground, my daughter, in reparation” opens message after message for twenty years. In August 1990 she is ordered to drink a few drops from the chalice of pain and the official transcription notes in parentheses that she is heard swallowing and coughing. In February 1990: “I want you humble, very humble.” Already in 1980, before the first apparition, the Lord had set her the tariff: for each of her pains three hundred souls would be converted, and the stigmata that bled before the pilgrims each first Saturday were the coin of that exchange. And the message defends her. After the assault she suffered in the meadow in 1983, the Virgin speaks to her of “your three executioners.” In the midst of the war with the Town Council that fenced the property, she asks that this place be watched against ungrateful men. And in 1990, when other seers came forward to compete, she settles the personnel question: “I took an instrument to communicate the universal message to the world”; the others are false prophets. Like the Gospa taking sides for the Franciscans, the Sorrowful Virgin of Prado Nuevo takes sides in a boundary dispute and in a competition of seers. The last message, on 4 May 2002, finishes it off: there will be no more, but meditate on all of them, from the first to the last. A text that closes itself and orders its own meditation has done what in theology is called a canon; the Work has since published “the messages meditated,” in which it verifies, it says, their agreement with the Gospel. The text examines itself and approves itself.
And what do they say when they are not speaking of her? Mostly catechism with trembling, and interspersed, phrases no bishop would sign: that Freemasonry has entered the Church; that perhaps at times the Body of Christ is not consecrated because the priest does not make the intention, a line that the website itself has had to gloss with citations from Exodus so that it does not sound like what it sounds like; that “seconds are lacking before the Chastisement comes,” in February 1983, and we have had forty-three years of seconds; that, presenting herself as the Virgin of the Pillar, “everyone who does not believe in Mary will not enter the kingdom of heaven”; that on All Souls’ Day 1996 the souls in purgatory came out through the meadow “in a throng.” And, above all, a catalogue of promised catastrophes, cloudbursts, hurricanes, earthquakes, seas overflowing, spread over twenty years of first Saturdays. A corpus like this is harmless as long as it stays in the nave. The problem is what it produces when it goes out into the street, and that was seen on 9 November 2024, ten days after the DANA in Valencia, with more than two hundred thirty dead still not entirely buried. That Saturday Father Frades went up to the nave’s ambo with a little book of messages, looked up one from November 2000 that announced cloudbursts and nations buried under rubble, asked the faithful what year it was from, and explained that what happened in Valencia, and the volcano in the Canaries, and I don’t know what earthquake, were purifications that God permits and that God uses to save souls; that saying it was not politically correct, but it had to be said; that “it is not threatening or instilling fear, it is a reality.” The homily is on the official YouTube channel and was picked up by the national press in January 2025. The delirium is not in the messages, which are so vague that twenty-four years of rains in Spain are enough to fulfill them. It is in the use: a Catholic priest replacing the lectionary with a booklet of private revelations to explain two hundred thirty deaths. And it is in what he omits. When they told Christ about the eighteen crushed by the tower of Siloam, he said two things: that they were no more guilty than the others, and that unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Frades kept the second half and put the seer in place of the first. The Gospel denies the arithmetic of punishment; Prado Nuevo preaches it with a message date.
The construction of the saint has not needed to be improvised: it is in the official biography. She was baptized Luz and called Amparo by her godmother, and according to her biographers she was unaware of it all her life until in the first apparitions she heard the Lord call her Luz; so that “your handmaid Luz Amparo,” the vocative of the prayer, is a name that exists only if the apparitions are true. The biography lists her charisms as one would inventory a sacristy: bilocation, cardiognosis, prophecy, healing, assumption of others’ illnesses, osmogenesis or supernatural perfume, multiplication of foods, thirty-one years of stigmata. She died, it says, at the ninth hour, the same hour at which Christ died, and on a Friday, the last of her prolonged passion, and she died in the odor of sanctity, a formula the same page applies to her spiritual director. The death of her son in 1996 figures in the chronology as a martyrdom for the Work, without any judicial cause being recorded. There is a little pocket book of thoughts of Luz Amparo, ideal for meditating every day, and in 2026 a new book of her life whose title repeats the epitaph on the tomb, next to the site of the demolished chapel: “She is the one who taught us to love.” In a Christian cemetery that phrase has only one owner, the one who loved us first, and here it has been given to her. When the family wanted to move the remains after the demolition, in 2020, the followers opposed it in writing: moving them would harm the direct petition of the faithful before the tomb and the future opening of the beatification process. The page adds, as a disclaimer, that it will be the Church that pronounces on her possible sanctity. They leave the Church the decree, which is the least of it.
Here it is convenient to be exact, because the word idolatry is strong. It is not idolatry in the sense of the catechisms: no one in the Ave María nave adores Amparo Cuevas as God. It is something older and more Spanish: the saint of the house before the saint of the altar, the seer before the Virgin, the voice before the Word. The prophets called idolatry any cult that occupies the place of another. And the law of the Church distinguishes little more. Canon 1187 reserves public cult to those whom the authority of the Church has inscribed in the catalogue of saints and blesseds; a prayer said at home is not public cult, and asking the intercession of a deceased person with a reputation for sanctity is permitted, is in fact the presupposition of every cause. What the Church prohibits before beatification are public signs, the portrait on the altar, the invocation in the liturgy, and it prohibits them to the point that every cause must verify, first of all, that such cult does not exist. That is why the prayer on the website is doubly revealing. First, by its genre: it is the typical prayer of the Servants of God with an open cause, without the title, without the license that praxis requires of holy cards as canon 826 requires of books of prayers, and without the clause “if it be your pleasure” that leaves the outcome to God; it does what a cause would do, produce fame and attributed graces, without there being a cause, and it does so from the institution that one day will present them. Second, by its premise: “partaker of the sufferings” admits the Pauline reading, valid for any grandmother, and that of Prado Nuevo, which are the stigmata; and the merits by which it asks her glorification are those of that participation. The prayer makes whoever prays it affirm, before God and as a premise, that the stigmata were the work of God, which is exactly what the Church says is not established. Each piece is defensible separately: the tomb for the direct petition, the holy card for the petition at a distance, the biography for the reputation, the portrait for the altar, the homily for the verdict. Together they are a cult. And a cult is the only thing that can prevent the canonization they ask for: if one day a bishop were to open the cause, the first thing he would have to do is order the painting to be removed.
Hence the value of Frades’s phrase. “She is a saint, but the Church has not yet canonized her.” The adverb is the tense of Prado Nuevo. The Work displays a letter from Suquía of 1986 in which the cardinal qualifies his note of 1985: the Church has only said that it does not yet appear. It does not yet appear that the apparition is supernatural, the seer is not yet canonized, there is not yet a chapel. The “yet” turns every silence of the Church into a delay and every no into a not yet. And the one who pronounces it from the ambo is not an exalted pilgrim. It is a priest of the Work who has served as pastor in Santa María de la Alameda, in the same archdiocese, and who preaches at a Mass that Cardinal Rouco authorized in that same nave in 2006 and for all first Saturdays since 2009, in a place to which the Archdiocese allowed the clergy to come in 2010, for an association whose chaplains the archbishop has appointed since 1994 and which acts, by canon 315, under the high direction of the authority that erected it. In September 2024 Cardinal Fernández placed El Escorial in the category of curatur, whose first instruction to the bishop is not to encourage the phenomenon and to seek alternative forms of devotion. The alternative forms of devotion practiced in Prado Nuevo are the portrait of the foundress at the foot of the altar and the DANA as the reading of the day. The Archdiocese repeats that it has never recognized anything supernatural there. It is true and it is irrelevant: what it has recognized is everything else, and two lines would suffice, to remove the painting and the holy card or to license them with the clause they lack. Neither of the two has been written, as far as is known.
There remains the poster, which is the most serious and the least visible. The Catechism, in its number 67, teaches that private revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith, that they neither improve nor complete the definitive Revelation of Christ and that they serve to live it better in a determined epoch. Ratzinger, commenting on the secret of Fátima in the year 2000, summarized it in a textbook phrase: a private revelation is a help that demonstrates its credibility precisely by returning us to public Revelation. A poster that declares the book of the messages the most important after the Bible does the opposite: it places the voice of a woman from Peñascosa above the Fathers, the councils, and the Catechism I have just cited, in the place where that voice is projected before the rosary and before the Mass, and where a priest reads it instead of the Gospel to explain the dead of Valencia. It is not a devout exaggeration. It is the claim of a second deposit, and a private revelation that says that of itself has answered on its own account the question the Church has spent forty-one years without answering. It does not appear that it is supernatural. What it wants to be does appear.
Father Frades is right in the second half of his phrase. The Church has not yet canonized Luz Amparo. The only thing it has done, for the moment, is to lend the altar to the one who canonizes her.