A Celebration, a Storm, and Memory

 At midnight, the city rocked with explosions.  

Not to worry, although for a moment I did. It was a large fireworks show, I assume in honor of the día festivo, holiday, declared for today and tomorrow which gives people four days off, essentially, 

Spain values celebrations and the resultant time off from work. 

Last evening, when I went to the supermarket to buy raw ingredients for at least today, the clerk—a lovely man named José, told me he couldn’t wait. He looked forward to kicking back and relaxing, he said. 

While the main businesses take the holiday some smaller ones do not, especially those providing necessary servicies such as many cafes. That was fortunate for me.

I left home shortly after sunrise—no I did not get up that early. The noise last night kept me stimulated and awake. And, anyway, it does not turn light until around 8 AM. As I left my place, I saw the homeless man across the street putting on his shoes and carefully arranging his things to stow them somewhere. 

Spain does indeed value celebrations and so, the fireworks as well as many official acts, just not the massive thunder storm that has also cut loose today.

The day is an intriguing one of keeping historical memory alive and tying it to the present, It is a celebration of when the King of Aragon and duke of Barcelona, the young Jaume I (Jaime 1), after failing in his endeavors to acquire land by conquest north of the Pyranees in what is now France, turned south and conquered Valencia. 

The festivo remembers that event, something also marked in street names and other events in this dependency of Valencia, by linking it to a celebration of the Community of Valencia, of which Alicante is a part. 

Communities in Spain, roughly equivalent to US States, also mark historical, economic, and cultural units. 

In the present, the memory is tied to a political effort to rid the Community of its president, Mazón, who happens to be from Alicante, for his abysmal failure of leadership a year ago when a different massive storm hit, caused extensive flooding, and the death of more than 200 people due to government inaction. The poll released today says 70% of the Community’s population demands he resign. As that number has grown he drops his eyes and toughs it out. 

Today, this may be about poll results, marches and court actions, but it is notably not supported by the movement of troops and sword or cannon battles. 

While the image is one of a day in which there was a clean break; Valencia changed from being Arabic and became Valencian and Spanish, although that is a hot topic these days and many, especially in other parts of Spain say it is OK if they keep their language related to Catalan, but they should officially speak Spanish and just be Spanish.  

In days in which the airwaves and internet are filled with images of Israelis trying to destroy Arabic Hamas in Gaza, and perhaps “cleanse” the area for Israeli settlement, a bit of attention to the notion of ethnic and religious replacement here is a question worth reflecting on.

The moment of the reconquest is ostensibly memorialized in the battles between Christians and Moors celebrated here in almost every town and neighborhood though on different dates. I say ostensibly because, they have come more to represent the little invasions of slavers from North Africa who would strike almost at random along the coast and even a bit inland to take merchandise and perhaps even more important humans as slaves to sell in the markets of Algiers and perhaps elsewhere.  

Those moments of invaders from the sea—a brief entrance and not a long lasting one with a population replacement—came to be the material for the celebratory representations and popular memory.

In them, we note the population has already been Christianized, They unite against the invaders, the Islamic moors who come from the sea. 

I do not know the history of this transformation, although it is an important one. The whole Mediterranean coast of Spain has stone watch towers, look outs and castles on hill tops to see and give early warning of the invaders as well as to serve to defend against them. When the invaders could they would sneak up and catch people unawares, working in the fields or elsewhere, even mending their fishing nets, to capture them and take them to North Africa. 

That moment in history changed almost two centuries ago with the destruction of the regimes in Tangiers and Algeria. Yet the memory remains, codified, and annually performed. People come of age playing roles in these dramas in the streets.

Today, though, Valencia has a new Moorish population, as the rightwing Vox would call them, the Moroccans and Algerians who have come to work, especially in agriculture and construction. That relationship has tension in historical memory and gets activated every year when people dress up as Moorish pirates and Moorish women to have sword fights with Christians in the streets. I am told contemporary North African immigrants do not participate in this and, I imagine, many stay home those days. 

This day pretends a triumphal entry of Jaime I on horseback with his soldiers into the glorious and ancient city of Valencia. That may be fictitious, but one wonders how they were received, especially in the middle ages, i.e.October 9, 1237. 

These seem to have been changes of feudos, where the people became vassals of a new Lord. I imagen that moment was dramatic and emotional. But, there does not seem to have been a major exchange of population. Some of Muslim lords had supported Jaume for a time and Valencia had been paying an onerous tribute to the throne of Aragon, which had also been a major Muslim center. 

Alicante still was not in Jaume’s hands. It ended up attached to Castilla and Alfonso el Sabio, its great monarch.  

In 1264 the Muslims of Alicante and near by down to Murcia, rose up. They were still numerous, but slowly the pressure was on to convert such that by the nineteenth century there were few if any Muslims in Alicante or Valencia. 

That story of change of religion, language, and perhaps of people is one I shall study a bit and write about later. 

For today we will celebrate with the rain fall and waters running in the region’s exotic streams and rivers the existence of a Valencian Community, now perhaps the most diverse in Spain even if fraught with politics over language and perhaps, if Vox has its way, over ethnicity and race.   

Meanwhile lightning explodes in the sky and rain beats a tattoo on the awnings and side walks of the city. 

The Right and the Church, a Very Spanish Challenge

Catholicism, the historical rock of Spain, showed cracks and breaks this last few weeks. In this it displays some of the challenges faced by Churches during these years of a resurgent Ultra Right.

The Spanish Bishops’ Conference publicly criticized the efforts of the Ultra party VOX in Murcia to ban Muslims from celebrating public prayers or ceremonies in order to protect the heritage and traditions of Spain. 

VOX then criticized the Church for its position on immigrants and accused it of timidity given how mired it is in the latest reports on sex abuse in the Church. 

Now, the Archbishop of Tarragona, and president of the important Tarraconense Bishops Council, Joan Planellas, is striving to build a nuanced wall between the Church and the claims of the Nationalists of VOX while also providing pastoral council to the Catholic base of VOX, a group opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and increasingly to the immigration of Muslims which VOX paints as antithetical to Spanish traditions.  

“A Xenophobe cannot be a true Christian,” Planellas strongly asserted.  A true Christian must “love. To love deeply is the message of the gospel. To love your neighbor is to try to make others happy” in evident contrast with hatred of Muslim immigrants.

While he hoped to draw the distinction between ideas and the changes they take on when they become political slogans, the line between love and xenophobic hatred became the headline. 

Within the Church the issue is not always so clear. El País reported that the Bishop of Asturias, for exsmple, called muslims “moritos”, a troubled and dismissive term. The Archbishop of Taragona insists this opinion is simply not in line with the majority of Spain’s Bishops. He asks political leaders to stop polarizing the issue of immigration lest it lead to problems such as in France.  

Yet, Santiago Abascall, the head of VOX, sees an opening and is likely to continue to pick at it it for political advantage even if that means disagreeing with and challenging publicly Spain’s clerical hierarchy although with certain gentleness. 

Behind this conflict is the old idea that Spain and Catholicism should fit together like hand and glove. In truth they never have, yet Spain has lived centuries of political and religious projects to make them so. 

In the Franco period, the Church was one of the main props of the dictator’s state marginalizing the religious left from power in the Church and to innoculate Spanisard against cultural modernism.  

After the coming of democracy. before the pederasty scandal, that alignment contributed to the Church’s loss of popular support. Within the Church, however, the political right and the support of the state have not always been accepted. The Church is a very complex and varied institution. 

I am learning about Spain given my background as a Latin Americanist. Let me give some examples from there—especially since the contemporary nationalists, the Hispanists, insist that Spain’s American domains were never colonies but part of Spain and given that Spain and Latin America are historically interconnected over and over again.  

In the sixteenth century, the Dominican Bishop of Chiapas, the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas, strongly and publicly criticized the colonial secular order and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. His suits ended up in the courts of Spain and have left a legacy, from within the Church of support for less privileged and non-Western people that still have an impact today. 

 Another more recent Dominican articulated the Theology of Liberation while a professor at Peru’s Catholic University, Gustavo Gutierrez. This movement took off, and not solely on the basis of his influential work, it gave a heart ache to the anti-Communist and hence anti-Left Pope John Paul and the Catholic right more generally including to Spain one of the major suppliers of clerics to Latin America.  

Specifically, the Cardinal of Lima, Juan Luís Cipriani of the very powerful and very Spanish Opus Dei, saw Liberation Theology as a barbarism and attempted to destroy it. Father Gutierrez proved untouchable, in part because of the institutional separation of the Catholic University from the ordinary hierarchy of the Church.  Gutierez survived until age took him, while Cipriani suffered a less fortunate demise. 

The much celebrated Cardenal of Opus Dei, Cipriani, supported a very right wing religious organization that caused his downfall, the Sodalitium of Christian Life. It grew up among privileged young people in Lima and spread to become very powerful and numerous. 

It was created by Luís Fernando Figari. among others, in 1971. Figari, though Peruvian, leaned strongly toward the Spanish Falange, the Fascists, and over the decades came to be taken as a charismatic and almost untouchable religious hero and political influence.  

In El País, sociologist Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio wrote last year  “My hypothesis is that the Sodlitium belongs to a political project. It is the resurrection of fascism in Latin America using the vertebral connections of the church.”

Figari’s power continued until the Vatican intervened and gave credit to reports of his sexual abuse of youths within the Sodalicio. Figari was not alone in this use of sexual power. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican did what had seemed impossible earlier. It closed Figari’s Sodalitium and excommunicated him. This was a double blow: both against pederasty and also against the powerful right wing of the Church. 

While Opus Dei, founded in Spain by José María Escrivá may indeed maintain some untouchability, its first Cardinal, Cipriani, was undone by Sodalicio, and his years of creating enemies from his rabid capitalism and more general opposition to popular movements in society and in the Church.

Indeed Francis moved to bring Opus more directly under Vatican authority and reform it. Still, it and its related groups, is very strong among the American Catholic Right Wing, including the Supreme court and members of the Administration and congress. The US Catholic right has been a strong force of opposition to the reformist Francis as well as one of the most important supports for the regime of Donald Trump.

The Church, as led now by the Agustinian Pope Leo, faces this difficult political terrain of a still powerful Right Wing in the Church in the Americas and in Spain, while also containing a progressive Church. 

VOX sees this and is, I believe, deliberately pounding crack lines in the Church it to see if it can splinter the left from the right and from Church legitimacy despite the Archbishop of Tarragona’s hasty denial of such a possibility. The hope for VOX would be for the right to gain ascendency within Spain and within the Church. 

After all, Spain and Catholicism should go together, I expect he feels, like hand and glove which unity is supposed to be a key of Spanish tradition.