On 19 July 1936, Communist militiamen arrived at the Carthusian
monastery of Santa Maria de Montalegre in Tiana, Barcelona
Twenty monks live there, dedicated to a contemplative life, strictly separated from the world and from any kind of politics.
The
militia burst in like a pack of demons, armed and furious. They
searched the cells, destroyed images and desecrated the church. They
called the monks 'parasites', 'lazybones', 'fascists with scapulars'.
The monks were given the choice of leaving or dying. The prior ordered them to leave. Some took refuge in the homes of friends.
But the communist criminals were not satisfied with the expulsion. They tracked down the monks one by one.
The
prior, Dom José María Reig, was arrested along with several brothers.
They were imprisoned in inhuman conditions, without charge, without
trial, without rights. Only with a signed sentence: to die for being
monks.
They were driven along the Catalan roads in lorries, like
animals. At each stop, more insults, more beatings. And at one point or
another they were ordered to get out. On your knees!' they shouted:
'Apologise to the [Spanish Communist] Republic!'
But they did not
apologise, they just prayed. One was seen moving his lips in silence.
He was reciting Psalm 50: 'Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam
misericordiam tuam...'.
Then the criminals killed him. The body
of the prior remained with his arms open, as if in a cross. Another's
skull was crushed with a rifle butt before he was killed. One of the
brothers had his fingers cut off because he wouldn't let go of his
rosary.
The Carthusians were executed without honour, without a name, without a trial.
"Even
today there are those who, from their episcopal offices, prefer to
remain silent about these things," writes Jaime Gurpegui on
InfoVaticana.com (2 April), "so that history will not interrupt their
congresses on synodality" and their dreams of a domesticated, neutral,
anaesthetised Church.
"This is what Franco saved us from,"
Gurpegui notes, "from the whole of Catalonia becoming an open-air Cheka,
from monasteries being razed to the ground, from monks being persecuted
like dogs".
"The Carthusians do not cry out. They do not
demonstrate. They do not write manifestos. They live in silence, they
pray, they do penance. Their world is the cell, the chapel, the garden.
That is why their martyrdom is all the more impressive: because it
speaks without raising its voice. Because it cries out in blood. Because
it is the testimony that neither cloister nor hermitage can save from
hatred when that hatred is directed against Christ."