FERNANDO DE VALDÉS BLANCO OF THE BLACK LEGEND. I'M GOING TO ROOMS. NOTES FROM MY DIARY (2)

 

Recovered from my kidney condition, yesterday they removed the tube and stiffer than a turnip I took the carrilana from the Sierra de Faedo and Pando and went to Salas, one of the Asturian councils that I most like to visit.

  It is a towered town with battlements and castles, its collegiate church a bulwark that listens to the rumor of the rough waters of the Nonaya river.

Drawbridges and in the collegiate church that seems to me a small Escorial I pray before the tomb of the great Archbishop of Seville Don Fernando de Valdés, defender of the faith who fought against heresy, patron of culture and founder of the University of Oviedo.

He must have been an outstanding, generous, impregnable, whole Asturian for whom his faith in Christ was the most important thing.

  He had enough guts to paper the primate of Toledo Carranza who was a Judaizer, confessor of Felipe II whom he married to María Tudor, but during his stay in England he must have been contaminated by his Erasmian ideas.

Valdés ordered him arrested (I have written on this matter glossing the drama Proceso al bishop Carranza de Joaquín Calvo Sotelo, I read the magnificent biography of González Novalín from Oviedo) the primate "was found and arrested his goods sold in auctions for everything they wanted to give" . The seated statue that lies next to the gospel on the altar of the collegiate church invites me to make a guest of stone and ask him if the infamies of which he is accused are true. Certainly the great men of the Black Legend cannot see it.

And thanks to him the union of the Spanish kingdoms could be maintained.

He forbade the use of vernacular languages such as Catalan and Arabic in the liturgy.

This led him to a confrontation with Pope Pius V and Felipe II, who at first welcomed his policy, then showed coldness towards his person. The Netherlands rose up in arms, England declared war on Spain. Objectively, the great Sevillian archbishop remained unscathed in his defense of Catholic dogma and what better proof to endorse this than a visit to the Seville cathedral, one of the greatest and richest in Christianity.

  He must have been stony and massive, inexorable as a syllogism.

Educated at the University of Salamanca, he was one of Cardinal Cisneros' field assistants. He helped him in the work of translating the polyglot Bible. An Asturian never gives up.

They are part of a very friendly but tough and brave breed. When it came to morals and codpiece issues, those medieval prelates were true princes.

Relations with women were not given importance, Cardinal Mendoza has at least fifteen natural children, another primate Carrillo had a son whom he loved deliriously.

  And one of the bastards of don Fernando Valdés was called Diego Nuño who embarked to the Indies and was one of the conquerors of Peru. For these bishops and cardinals, faith prevailed, the greatness of the kingdom of God, embodied in the liturgy, art, sacred oratory and the love of beauty of the Renaissance.

They were imbued with that philokalia (lovers of the good and the beautiful) the search for an ideal and the good things that existence holds.

In his works the presence of Christus musicus, Christus legens, Christus pictor, Christus gaudens, Christus constructor or architect transcends.

Catholic Spain showed the world the literary, architectural, musical and pictorial greatness of this episcopate guarded on the border that did not renounce its arms against Islam when necessary but founded schools, hospitals and monasteries. This Asturian bishop, vilified by the black legend, was the epitome of all that greatness, although a man, after all, was not exempt from the miseries of the human condition.

He did not burn heretics, he sent to prison those who renounced his errors.

  Unfortunately the descendants of those papered by the Holy Office have a high standard in the Spanish church.

  He died at the age of eighty-five; the transfer of his remains from Seville to Oviedo was quite an adventure.

  In the middle of January he caught a sleet in the procession that was held for fifteen days in the Pajares port.

After this visit and buying two enfiladas in a bakery in the square, I return home comforted by my faith and hope. Salas, the town of the Inquisitor, is a bulwark for those of us who think against the grain.

 

Wednesday, February 1, 2023