Religious Freedom

 We visited a monastery near Potries with the idea of just walking around to see the place only to discover that it is privately owned and you can only visit it as part of a tour group.

Luckily we had timed our visit to coincide with the time of a tour with the idea of maybe choosing to join if we felt like it, turned out we suddenly had no choice.

It was another interesting experience, listening to a Spanish guide and trying hard to decipher what was said - fortunately the guide was aware of the few English speaking visitors and translated many of the important details for us.

 

We didn’t realize as we started the tour how important a commentary it would be on religious freedom. 

 

The monastery was  built on a settlement that was bought from the Moors in 1388 - the Muslim conquerors from North Africa and Syria who occupied much of Spain for 700 years, roughly between 711AD and 1492AD - who had settled and lived there for years.  

The occupation by the Moors had brought a era of religious tolerance that allowed the Catholics, Muslims and Jews to co-exist in what appears to have been a 700 period of growth and trade, with scientific and artistic developments that helped to usher in the the French and Italian Renaissance.

The monastery was given to a group of monks who in 1374 had established a hermitage near the coast in some cave but they were sacked by Berber pirates from North Africa who kidnapped them and demanded a large ransom.  A duke paid their ransom but they were too afraid to return to their hermitage and the land was bought from the Moors and then offered to them as a place for a monastery.

In 1492 King Ferdinand and his wife Isabel heralded the start of a violent repression of religious minorities (and the Spanish Inquisition) which forced Muslims and Jews to start living as Christians or be expelled or enslaved.  A stark contrast to the more tolerant rule by the Moors.

In the late 1700s the monastery had fallen into some disrepair and was not able to keep up with the running costs and resorted to feudal rents and harvest taxes.  

 

It turns out that this was a problem for many monasteries over the centuries world-wide - they accumulated land from benefactors who left the land to the church rather that parceling out to children as inheritance (as was usual with other land) and this built great resentment among people and made the monasteries vulnerable to governments who might one day confiscate the land.

So it was in Spain in the 1800s, decrees were issued that monastery land would be confiscated without compensation.  

 

The prime minister at the time considered the influence of the Catholic Church to be too great and this move effectively suppressed the church with the added benefit of allowing for the distribution of land held by the church.

The justification for the confiscation was that the land would be divided to benefit the poor, but well-connected political figures and the rich were the benefactors instead.

The dislike for the monastery is quite evident in how the people ransacking the monastery tried to deface the statues of monks in the halls.

The monastery was used as a hospital during the Spanish Civil war between 1936 and 1939.  

 

Irish Catholics joined the war to support the Catholics (with Franco, supported by the Germans and Hitler) against the Spanish Republic which had support from the Communists.  One of these Irish families later bought the Monastery and settled in Spain, restoring the buildings after all the destruction that it had witnessed.

Unfortunately the walls inside the cathedral have been lost to history with only a few remnants of they former beauty showing under the plaster and coats of white paint that had been applied when it was used as a hospital. 

And so in this short tour we learned a whole lot of things about religious freedom that I had not known before.