In a post addressed to his followers, Fr. Tomás Beroch starts from a nuanced premise. The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was, in his view, a political decision and not free from error, but a political error “is not always a sin.” From there he argues that the decision must be judged from the mindset of the fifteenth century and should not prevent the Church from recognizing the personal holiness of the queen.
A cause opened in 1958
The facts about the cause are documented. The diocesan phase began in 1958 in the archdiocese of Valladolid and ended in 1972. Already in Rome, the historical positio received approval in 1990. The next step remains pending: the Vatican Theological Commission must issue its opinion so that Isabella may be declared Venerable, a prerequisite for beatification.
Requests from the Spanish episcopate have not been lacking. The Episcopal Conference asked John Paul II in 1993 to speed up the cause, and did so again in 1997 and in 2001. Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, then prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, assured that the cause was not stalled but was moving forward. Fr. Beroch attributes the stagnation to pressure from the Jewish community, for whom the queen is responsible for the expulsion. That explanation has circulated for years, but Rome has never officially confirmed it.
Two popes, two silences
The priest compares Isabella’s cause with that of the martyrs of religious persecution in Spain. He maintains that under Paul VI those processes were frozen due to pressure from the Soviet Union, although he offers no known documentary support. Other historians place that halt within a line of Vatican prudence that dated back to Pius XII. The change came with John Paul II, who beatified hundreds of them. For example, in March 2001 he raised 233 martyrs to the altars and insisted that they were martyrs of the faith and not of politics. Subsequent popes continued that path. Today more than 2,200 martyrs of that persecution have been beatified, and eleven of them have been canonized.
For the author, both cases show the same thing: the Church would have renounced its memory so as not to inconvenience those who attacked it. In Isabella’s case the pressure would have been moral. In the martyrs’ case, geopolitical.
Memory, forgiveness and the Black Legend
The reflection ends in the realm of historical memory. The author cites Vittorio Messori (Black Legends of the Church) and Cristián Rodrigo Iturralde (The Inquisition: a Tribunal of Mercy) to argue that ecclesial self-criticism has ended up becoming self-contempt. He recalls that John Paul II’s requests for forgiveness referred to the sins of the Church’s children, not to a condemnation of its institutions.
That distinction, which Fr. Beroch calls “subtle, yet decisive,” lies at the center of the debate over the cause. The declaration of heroic virtues does not canonize governmental decisions: it examines the Christian life of a person. The question remains open whether the Holy See can separate the two planes in the case of Isabella I of Castile without the gesture being read in a political key.