SANTO DOMINGO DE SILOS TO THE MEMORY OF FRAY JUSTO PÉREZ DE URBEL

 

Today, December 20, the Spanish church celebrates the feast of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the first abbot of Silos. Let us remember the famous sonnet to the cypress of the monastic cloister of the great Gerardo Diego as well as the literary meetings that took place in the shadow of the great cypress in which one of the participants was Rafael Alberti, a friend of his abbot fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, the great medievalist whose works I keep "The Christian Year", "Fernán González" and others. I met him in person. He came to visit one of the schoolboys (gossip said that this boy was his son with a militant from the Women's Section) tall, skinny, bald as a top, affable voice, on his chest he wore the pectoral cross of the mitred abbots .

He was a great disseminator of medieval Castilian culture, Creole prose, displaying a lexical load of transparency of the riches of Castilian.

  Born in San Millán de la Cogolla, Count Fray Justo was a novice.

He gave the seminarians sweets that he carried in his pockets under the cloak and encouraged us to be pious and good. this humility and monastic simplicity contrasted with the importance it had in the Spanish church during the Franco regime.

He did not like the Jesuits and in one of his sketches about Ignacio de Loyola he came to discover Machiavellian traits in him. One eye on the sky and one on the ground.

A monk actually has to withdraw from the world and disdain its pomp and varieties.

He held that monasticism was the backbone of the church.

Despite everything, he was honored and revered by Franco who gave him the miter of the Valley of the Fallen, the monastery that he founded to preserve the remains of those who died in the civil war and for the monument to the caudillo and José Antonio, the two tombs They have been exhumed by a "ukase" of the dictator Pedro Sánchez who understands democracy in his own way.

They want to demolish the famous cross whose arms from Guadarrama seem to protect Madrid in the distance to turn it into a theme park,

Therefore, on the feast of Santo Domingo I feel great pain when writing these lines but I think that the cross will not be dynamited or demolished as Sánchez and his government, governed by the enemies of Spain, the Iscariots on duty, intend. All these monasteries are the nursery trough of our spiritual strength.

Domingo de Guzmán belonged to one of the most important Visogothic families in the kingdom of León, based in Toral de los Guzmanes. He was persecuted by the King of Navarra, but Fernando I of Castile welcomed him into his kingdom.

  The data specifies a certain fact that coexistence among Hispanics was never easy, but we will continue forward because as Foreign Minister Bismark pointed out, it is a true miracle that the country that the Spanish intend to destroy continues to flutter.

For me, Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel in the last stage of his life (1895-1979) was persecuted, slandered and misunderstood and was on the verge of secularizing himself and being expelled from the Benedictine order, he is a teacher whom I try to imitate.

I feel like a lay monk, I try to follow the evangelical formula in the solitude of my cybernetic cell without the pretentiousness of blunt priests and cute faces that the last council gave us, because I think that the life of a Christian must be liturgy and tradition.

  Father Pérez de Urbel, justus ut palma florebit.

He died nearly a hundred years old. I will continue in the demand to examine the codices and palimpsests illuminated by his Reverence. He was a great abbot of Cuelgamuros and Silos