The Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross issued on June 9 an informative note, signed by its representative Antonio Torres, reporting the start of the physical works of the so-called “resignification” project of the Valley of the Fallen, which they refer to as the Valley of Cuelgamuros, the formula preferred by Pedro Sánchez’s government. According to the statement itself, the previous day various test drillings were carried out with drilling machinery on the esplanade outside the Basilica, as part of the preparatory works awarded by the “competent authorities.” The same note reports that the machinery was found covered in graffiti and messages against the civil authorities, acts that the community “roundly” condemns. The text rejects the Valley being used as a stage for offensive demonstrations against the authorities and concludes by reiterating its “confidence in the actions of the courts of justice.”
What is most significant about the note is what it omits. Faced with the arrival of the drilling machinery right up to the temple’s surroundings, the Abbey raises no objection. The test drillings are described in strictly administrative terms—“physical works” of a project “awarded by the competent authorities”—a formulation that endows them with full legality and presents them as a neutral fact. All the energy of the statement, and the only explicit condemnation it contains, is instead directed against the graffiti and those who have offended the civil authorities.
The asymmetry is hard to overlook. The community responsible for safeguarding a consecrated cemetery full of martyrs shows no qualms about those who intervene in its surroundings with drilling equipment, yet it does object to those who protest against that intervention. In this way, the order of priorities is inverted: reproach is shifted from the desecrating project to the manner in which some oppose it.
The rest of the text reinforces this impression. The “sacredness of the Basilica” is mentioned, but only to warn its defenders to stay within legal channels; and the statement closes by referring the matter to the courts. It is striking that the final word of a monastic community on the intervention in the site it guards should be confidence in the judiciary rather than a defense, in its own voice, of the sacred character of the place and the memory of its dead. The spiritual custody of a martyrial enclosure is more than mere compliance with the prevailing order.
Especially revealing is the framework in which the note chooses to place the controversy. The statement invokes the “social and democratic State governed by the rule of law” as the ultimate horizon to which all disagreement must submit. The formula, taken almost literally from Article 1 of the Constitution, is a liberal-democratic category, foreign to the language and proper mission of a monastic community. That Benedictines should measure the defense of a consecrated place by the yardstick of the current constitutional order, and not by the worship due to the martyrs they guard, reveals the extent to which they have adopted as their own coordinates that are not theirs.
It is not a minor detail that the note is not signed by the abbot or the prior, but by a representative. The form matches the content of a text that systematically lowers its own commitment and raises deference toward civil authority.
Political times change, and it is worth keeping that in mind. When they do change, it may be worth considering whether the custody of such a singular place would not be better entrusted to a Catholic community willing to take seriously the martyrial example of what it guards.