El País has been opening its front page for three days with stories of sexual abuses and ecclesiastical cover-ups. It’s not journalistic zeal, it’s political strategy. The same Government that this week approves the project to mutilate the cross of the Valley of the Fallen knows perfectly well that the Spanish Church is tamed: just remind it of its shames. Each El País report is a mafia reminder: “We know what you did”.
The bishops are hostages to their sins. Out of fear that someone pronounces their name alongside the word “cover-up”, they accept everything: the closure of seminaries, the liquidation of orders, the imposition of immoral laws, and now the symbolic profanation of Spain’s largest Christian monument. What was an expiatory altar will become a museum of democracy. And all with the blessing of episcopal silence.
The Government profanes and the Church nods
The winning project for the so-called “resignification” of the Valley of the Fallen —titled with technocratic candor The base and the cross— will cost 30 million euros and is presented as “brave” for daring to “dialogue with the monumentality of the ensemble”. The Executive promises to respect worship and the chapels, but the operation is transparent: to convert the pontifical basilica into a space of “memory and reflection” without religious content. In other words, a church without God. The Valley will be transformed into a backdrop for tourists who will learn that Spain redeemed itself, not by the Cross, but by the BOE.
COPE joins the resignification
The most grotesque thing is not the Government: it is the docility of those who should resist. The COPE news, the bishops’ radio, celebrates with an almost satisfied tone that the project “will respect the agreements reached between the Church and the Government” and “will maintain the places of worship”. As if keeping a chapel in a profaned cemetery were a victory.
While the State erases Christian symbols from Spain’s history, the episcopal station highlights that “the interventions inside will be minimal”. The clerical euphemism reaches its peak: the amputation of a monument to faith presented as consensual cosmetic surgery.
The price of shame
The bishops’ silence is not prudence, it is panic. And their panic has a price. The regime’s media, which every week unearth a new case of abuses, know that one more headline is enough to reduce them to silence. That’s why they remain silent while the Valley is mutilated, that’s why they smile when talking about “resignification” and “dialogue”.
The Spanish Church, humiliated by its sins and ashamed of its own faith, is preparing to pay with its silence the bill for its weakness. And in the end, when the great cross is reduced to an empty postcard, no one will remember that the betrayal started inside: in the sacristies, in the episcopal offices, and in the COPE studios, where it was learned to confuse prudence with capitulation.