La mala educacion
I guess I have never been more uneasy about Christianity as here, in Spain. Stop. Rewrite. Not about Christianity, not about Jesus nor agape, humbleness and love, but about institutionalising it, about giving it a hierarchical and much too well organized and controlling structure.A true cliche, as I have heard this over and over, I know, and I take it as a truism for our contemporary world and for myself " I believe in God, but don't necessarily affiliate with a historically developed structure. Being historical, it is ephemerical and human, thus maybe ungodly. Being developed, it is thus an evolving process, which supresses infaillablity. And what church can claim to be infaillible, when it has produced horrors such as the Inquisition?". Yeah, but here I had the overarching feeling of that, of a bitter taste, of increasing questions.
Being in the Toledo cathedral and being almost suprressed by its greatness, splendour and luxury, seeing today a Catholic cathedral implanted in the middle of the very special Cordoba mosque ( act which made Charles the Quint exclaim to the Church leaders " You have destroyed something that was unique in this world..."), came to me as my mind is full of images and thoughts about the Franco regime, where the Church was allmighty. And unconciously, the first image when I think about Franco, is the image of this Cathlic school in the deep countryside from Almodovar's La Mala Educacion, (in Franco's time, education was controlled by the Church, I may get it wrong, but I think it was the Jesuite order ), a dusty, miserable place that gave me the feeling of suffocating while watching the movie. Grey, grumpy. God institutionalized and sterlized of any real feeling, a dictatorial approach, making God for these kids a sort of controlling, patriarchal figure of vengeance and not of love and brightness. An image of a totally repressed Spain, not far at all from the centuries of Inquisition.
I saw today in Cordoba , after the visit to the Mezquita turned cathedral, the Alcazar de los Reyes Catolicos, a wonderful place with sunny gardens and joyous water games. But this happy place now housed the Inquisition, and terrible decisions were once made from its sun-loving rooms.
In my image of Spain, Catholicism seems to have an uneasy place. Far from the redeeming, nation-binding, hope-giving Catholicisms of Ireland and Poland. And a far greyer image than catholicism's fate in Republican, secular to the bone France. There I felt the anti-church measures placed the church into a true victim position. Seeing so many French towns and cities where " oh, X had 34 churches, but 23 were destroyed at the Revolution", or the extremely moving visit to Saint Denis, where the French kings were burned and put into a common hole with contempt, against any Christian respect for the body, made me feel uneasy about a Republican tradition sometimes too violently opposed to the Church. In fact, in Civil War Spain, somewhat the same things happenned, with priests and nuns being mercilessly shot. Civil War Spain presents in fact the most accentuated image of the two European traditions put face to face: the Church conservatism facing Socialist progressism. Both had a hatred for the other to reach the sky and both murdered, shed much, much blood. Conservatism won, but the bloodshed did not stop, this time being unilateral: tens, even hundreds of thousands of opposants were killed. A new , more politicized form of the Inquisition. In fact, the 20th century was full of Inquisitions on all political sides- from Fascist camps to the Gulag. Ideologies have replaced religion for a while, but now some return to religion more or less. But in Spain, where Franco's last statue in Madrid was taken out only last year, I still had this weird feeling when seeing the churches full. When seeing the old priests.
No, don't get me wrong, I don't equate Franco to the Catholic Church, no, I am just talking about the uneasy position of the Church in Spain, always associated with controlling the society , with reactionary politics. And yeah, politics is the key word. From the Inquisition to our times. I don't even want to get into the colonization...
I may have written nonsense, I am extremely tired. And I just got out from a church, where there was this Jesus on a cross that people took photos of. A lot of photos. I asked this girl what is happenning and she said that it is that time to kiss Christ's hand. I have no idea about what she was talking about. I stood in line, but I saw no one kissing. Only taking photos...
Everything is a commodity, an object, this is our world. The Mezquita, the Jesus. Let's take a photo. I felt the need to pray.
Being in the Toledo cathedral and being almost suprressed by its greatness, splendour and luxury, seeing today a Catholic cathedral implanted in the middle of the very special Cordoba mosque ( act which made Charles the Quint exclaim to the Church leaders " You have destroyed something that was unique in this world..."), came to me as my mind is full of images and thoughts about the Franco regime, where the Church was allmighty. And unconciously, the first image when I think about Franco, is the image of this Cathlic school in the deep countryside from Almodovar's La Mala Educacion, (in Franco's time, education was controlled by the Church, I may get it wrong, but I think it was the Jesuite order ), a dusty, miserable place that gave me the feeling of suffocating while watching the movie. Grey, grumpy. God institutionalized and sterlized of any real feeling, a dictatorial approach, making God for these kids a sort of controlling, patriarchal figure of vengeance and not of love and brightness. An image of a totally repressed Spain, not far at all from the centuries of Inquisition.
I saw today in Cordoba , after the visit to the Mezquita turned cathedral, the Alcazar de los Reyes Catolicos, a wonderful place with sunny gardens and joyous water games. But this happy place now housed the Inquisition, and terrible decisions were once made from its sun-loving rooms.
In my image of Spain, Catholicism seems to have an uneasy place. Far from the redeeming, nation-binding, hope-giving Catholicisms of Ireland and Poland. And a far greyer image than catholicism's fate in Republican, secular to the bone France. There I felt the anti-church measures placed the church into a true victim position. Seeing so many French towns and cities where " oh, X had 34 churches, but 23 were destroyed at the Revolution", or the extremely moving visit to Saint Denis, where the French kings were burned and put into a common hole with contempt, against any Christian respect for the body, made me feel uneasy about a Republican tradition sometimes too violently opposed to the Church. In fact, in Civil War Spain, somewhat the same things happenned, with priests and nuns being mercilessly shot. Civil War Spain presents in fact the most accentuated image of the two European traditions put face to face: the Church conservatism facing Socialist progressism. Both had a hatred for the other to reach the sky and both murdered, shed much, much blood. Conservatism won, but the bloodshed did not stop, this time being unilateral: tens, even hundreds of thousands of opposants were killed. A new , more politicized form of the Inquisition. In fact, the 20th century was full of Inquisitions on all political sides- from Fascist camps to the Gulag. Ideologies have replaced religion for a while, but now some return to religion more or less. But in Spain, where Franco's last statue in Madrid was taken out only last year, I still had this weird feeling when seeing the churches full. When seeing the old priests.
No, don't get me wrong, I don't equate Franco to the Catholic Church, no, I am just talking about the uneasy position of the Church in Spain, always associated with controlling the society , with reactionary politics. And yeah, politics is the key word. From the Inquisition to our times. I don't even want to get into the colonization...
I may have written nonsense, I am extremely tired. And I just got out from a church, where there was this Jesus on a cross that people took photos of. A lot of photos. I asked this girl what is happenning and she said that it is that time to kiss Christ's hand. I have no idea about what she was talking about. I stood in line, but I saw no one kissing. Only taking photos...
Everything is a commodity, an object, this is our world. The Mezquita, the Jesus. Let's take a photo. I felt the need to pray.
posted by Gruia Badescu at 11:50 AM
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