Matamoros statue in the Cathedral

[claudia castellani]

A famous fresco in the Cattedrale di Bologna showing Mahomet being thrown to
hell, according to Dante's suggestion in his "Divina Commedia - Inferno",
created a similar debate in Italy. San Petronio - the Cathedral - seems to
be one of the targets of islamic terrorists in Italy, who declared the
fresco should be removed.......
Another very small islamic political group in Italy applied to court to stop
the sale of Oriana Fallaci's last book.
Some theologians proposed to abolish the non-"politically correct" parts of
the Bible, Old and New Testament, in order to "purify" it from violence of
all kind.

Are we back in the barbarian times of censorship and of the burning of
books?
I think history should not be changed or "purified" by our modern
"pruderies" or censorships: we are the fruit of our history and of the
memory of our past. If we "purify" it, we lose a part of ourselves and of
our collective memory.

How can we forget that our ancestors doing the Camino in the year 1000
risked to be killed, hurt, robbed, kidnapped and sold as slaves in the
middle-east slave-markets? How can we remove Santiago Matamoros (Matamoros:
"Killing the Arabs") without removing, for example, El Cid Campeador or the
Reyes Catòlicos and the Templar knights?? And if we remove Santiago
Matamoros, we should stop calling Fernando and Isabel the "Reyes Catòlicos"
(Catholic Sovereigns) because, again, Catholicism is for peace and
love........ (and rock and roll??). And we should start burning in a big
fire all those "horrible" books that hurt the relationships between
different civilizations! So let's start burning Dante's Divina Commedia (he
put Mahomet in hell) and Cervantes' Don Quijote (in the Prologue of Don
Quijote he wrote that Arabs have a double tongue, for example).

I really think that if we start this absurd process of "purification", there
will be no end to it. We will have to remove the cross (too violent for
children, they might be shocked by the story of a man hanging from a piece
of wood!) from our churches and burn the marvellous wooden statue of "Santa
Marìa del Camino" in the Cathedral of Carriòn de los Condes, because it
represents the story of the Virgin Mary saving some people (I don't remember
the details of the story) from the Arabs who wanted to kill or kidnap them.
And so on.

No. I think it's a wrong behaviour. If we feel we are obliged to cancel our
history, this means our freedom is in serious danger and that we are already
slaves in our own countries.

Claudia



>From: Rosina Lila <Blaroliaaol.com>

>Hello you all,
>Any pilgrim who has visited the Santiago Cathedral will remember the large
>Matamoros statue on a glassed large niche on the right as one enters the
>Cathedral through the Azabacheria door.

.....  True, the moors themselves beheaded many people, and scenes of them
doing
>so are ubiquitous throughout Spain; (a particularly striking one can be
>seen
>as a, colored, frieze, impressively well sculpted, on the altar wall of the
>second chapel to the right as one enters the Pamplona Cathedral through the
>main
>door). But the idea of "an eye for an eye, a foot for a foot" etc., is the
>very antithesis of Christian doctrine which is  based on the teachings of
>Christ: human love and forgiveness.
>Many Christians, myself included, have long been baffled and made sad and
>uncomfortable by the Matamoros images inside Christian churches.
>Well, yesterday that prominent one in the Santiago Cathedral was removed
>and
>stored away from view.  Apparently the Archdiocese has concluded that
>religious diversity has become politically laden and that the statue was
>unnecessarily
>provocative in these terrorism-threatened times.  (You may remember that
>after 9/11 there were several reports in the international press that the
>Cathedral of Santiago had been targeted by Islamic extremists for
>destruction.....-the
>reports were never confirmed, by the way-).
>.......................

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