An Awful Disaster in Chile:

Conflagration in the Church of the Jesuits in Santiago. Nearly Two Thousand Persons Burned to Death.

(From the Valparaiso Mercury, Dec. 10.)

A catastrophe gigantic, horrible, unexampled in the annals of our country, and perhaps of the world, has absorbed everyone’s mind for many days past.

We will use the utmost brevity in relating the particulars of the calamity to our foreign readers.

Ever since the newly invented mystery of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was declared at Rome in 1857, the church of the Company, formerly belonging to the Jesuits, had become the focus of devotion of a vast sisterhood called the Daughters of Mary, in which, on payment of so much a year, almost all of the women of our capital were enrolled.

Every year, from the 8th of November till the 8th of December, the day of the Immaculate Conception, lasted a splendid festival, in which orchestral music, singing, and astonishing prodigality of incense, of lights, of oil, liquid gas, wax, and every luminous combustible in the world, glittered and flared in every part, in the cornices, in the ceiling, and particularly on the high altar. Every night the church blazed with a sea of flame and fluttered with clouds of muslin and gauze draperies. It could only be lighted up in time by beginning in the middle of the afternoon, and the work of extinguishing was only ended when the night was far advanced. In 1858 they thought of adopting hydrogen gas, but the engineer’s plan, though convenient and safe, was rejected.

A priest named Ugarte, whose mind mariolatry had marked for its own, headed that Sisterhood from the beginning, and worked his way down to such a depth of superstition, that one of his least extravagances was the invention of a Celestial Post Office trick, by which the Daughters of Mary might correspond with the Virgin in writing.

At the entrance of the temple, the Virgin’s letter box was constantly open, and there persons of a robust faith deposited, in sealed letters, their wishes and their prayers. Every Wednesday that letterbox for eternity was placed before the high altar, and Ugarte, who acted as a postman between the Mother of God and her daughters, exhibited to the divinity the offerings – of course keeping that singular correspondence to himself.

This same mountebank got up a religious raffle for the favor of the Virgin – in a recent instance two prizes being drawn by a skeptical Minister of State and a woman whose character was dubious. The old ties of pagan idolatry had resuscitated in the center of this exaggerated Catholicism.

The church of “the Company,” built in the latter half of the seventeenth century, possessed a spacious nave, but a roof that dated from only fifteen years ago of painted timber. The only door of easy access to the congregation was the principal one in the center, the small doors leading into the aisles being opened only half-way, and obstructed by screens. Near the high altar there was a little door communicating with sacristy.

A few minutes before seven in the evening of Tuesday, the 8th of December, more than 3,000 women and  few hundred men knelt in that church crammed to overflowing. However, that did not prevent a compact mass of fanatics from attempting to fight their way in from the steps, because it was the last night of the Month of Mary, and no one could bear to lose the closing sermon of the priest, Ugarte, who always succeeded by his exciting declamation in drowning in tears that place so soon to be a sea of fire. The Eizaguiroe, the Apostolic Nuncio and favorite of Pius IX, the founder of the American college at Rome, was to preach also. It is said that Ugarte wounded in his feelings as chaplain of the “Daughters of Mercy,” because Eizaguirre had told him that the illumination of his church could not be compared with what he had seen in Rome, exclaimed with enthusiasm: “I will give him, when he comes to preach, such an illumination as the world has ever seen.” Nobody can deny that Ugarte has kept his word!

Indeed, the lighting of all the lamps and candles had hardly finished when the liquid gas in a transparency on the high altar, set on fire its woodwork and wrapped in flame a kink of tabernacle wholly composed of canvas, pasteboard and wood. In less than two minutes the altar, about 23 yards high and 10 broad, was an inextinguishable bonfire.

The advance of the fire was perhaps even more rapid than the panic of the audience. When the fire had flown from the altar to the roof, the whole flock of devotees rushed to the principle door. Those near the lateral doors, were able to escape at the first alarm; others, and particularly the men, gained the little door of the sacristy, and lastly, those near the chief outlet forced their way through the throng, even still struggling to get in, even in the face of the fire, stimulated by the desire of getting a good place, which on this occasion meant a good place to die in.  Then the flames having crept along the whole roof, and consequently released the lamps of oil and liquid gas from the cornice in which they were strung, a rain of liquid, blue fire poured down upon the entangled throngs below.

A new and more horrible conflagration broke out then in that dense living mass, appalling and affrighted gaze with pictures tenfold more awful those herein the Catholic imagination has labored to give an idea of the tortures of the damned. In less than a quarter of an hour two thousand human beings had perished – including many children, but very few men.

Although many heroic men performed prodigies of daring and strength in tearing some from the death grasp of the phalanx of death that choked the door – in some cases literally tearing off their arms, without being able to extricate them – the number of the saved by this means fall short of fifty.  More than five hundred persons of our highest society have perished – the greatest part young girls fifteen to twenty years. One mother has perished with her five daughters. Two-thirds of the victims are servant, and there are many houses in which not one has escaped.  Several houses have been noted by the police as empty, because all their inhabitants have perished.

The people think of nothing but the victims and their obsequies.   All with one voice demand the demolition of the ruinous walls of the fatal temple and the offering of a monument to the dear memory of the martyrs.   The municipal body solicited this by the medium of a commission on the 12th, and the Government is resolved on compliance. Resistance is threatened on the part of the clergy, but such exasperating and indecorous folly would infallibly call forth a general rising of the people.

The past fortnight has produced no other occurrences worth chronicling, and even if it had, they would not seem deserving of mention in this night of heavy anguish.

During the last week the tribunals and the Government itself have suspended their labors.

The people only weep, and their public writers could only offer tears to the nation’s mourning.

An eye witness of the scene writes:

“To see mothers, sisters, tender timid women, dying that dreadful death that appalls the stoutest heart of man, within one yard of salvation, within one yard of men who would have given their lies over and over again for them. It was maddening – the screaming and wringing of hands for help as the remorseless flames came on; and then – save when some already dead with fright were burnt in ghastly indifference – their horrible agony, some in prayer, some tearing their hair and battering their faces.

“Women seized in the embrace of the flames were seen to undergo a transformation as though by an optical delusion – first dazzling brightly – then horribly lean and shrunk up – then black statues rigidly fixed in a writing attitude.

“The fire, imprisoned by the immense thickness of the walls, had devoured everything combustible by 10 o’clock. Then defying the sickening stench, people came to look for their lost ones.

“Oh! What a sight the fair, placid moon looked down upon! Close-packed crowds of calcined, distorted forms, wearing the fearful expression of the last pang, whose smile was once a heaven – the ghastly phalanx of black statues, twisted in every variety of agony, stretching out their arms, as if imploring mercy – and then of the heap that had choked up the door, multitudes with the lower parts perfectly untouched, and some all a shapeless mass, with but one arm or foot unscathed by the fire.

“Two thousand souls had passed through that ordeal of fire to the judgement seat of God.”

And all the work of superstition! All the result of a maddened priest’s ambition and folly! Yet, consoles the writer, whose account we condense and follow, the dreadful visitation will not be without its blessing. It will melt away the dark degrading dominion of the priests, in the smoke of that awful burnt sacrifice, which, laden with the dying breath of two thousand victims, will roll up to accuse UGARTE and his accomplices of murder, before the throne of God.

Article Retrieved from The Smoky Hill and Republican union. [volume] (Junction City, Kan.), 06 Feb. 1864.