My autumn campaign on the ‘Anna M’ is drawing to a close, along with the Church year on this feast of Christ the King. If I can get together the necessary readies over the winter to finish the job, the boat will be in good shape come the Spring.
Yesterday, Saturday, we took the bus to Batalha, to have a peek at the famous ‘monastery’ there. It’s an impressive Gothic complex, ‘built to thank the Virgin Mary for the Portuguese victory over the Castilians in the Battle of Aljubarrota in 1385’ as Wikipedia has it. I suppose it is just about conceivable that her sympathy would lie with the native and underdog in the battle (6,600 Portuguese heavily outnumbered by the invading Castilian host of 31,000), and indeed it would seem quite reasonable that some Spaniards were disposed to blame their own sins of pride for the defeat*.
The heavily outnumbered Portuguese, drawn up in their defensive position on a hill, probably were inclined to be praying for divine assistance, as two thousand heavy knights charged into the attack. The Castilian and French knights, in arrogance and anger, their foot soldiers however tired after a long day’s march in the hot sun, had closed their ears to a few wise voices among them who counselled delay. It was a classic case of ‘pride comes before a fall’!
However, as the monastery stands today, it appears to be more of a monument to the new Portuguese dynasty which the battle established than anything else. The concepts of a divine king and that of a humble Saviour bringing universal peace and brotherhood always sat somewhat uneasily together. Our King only smiles at human efforts to bolster his glory with our own attempts. Is not creation itself rather grander? Still I think there is one part of the buildings where prayerfulness lingers; in the humbler cloister, presumably used by the friars, beyond the very grand 'royal' one.
By the time Napoleonic troops had sacked the monastery in 1810, and Portuguese anti-clericalism had finished off the job in the 1830s, any aspirations to maintain a real prayer life there were finished. The Dominicans were gone. Nowadays the place mostly has the atmosphere of a museum. One is left pondering the relationship between patriotism and religion, and the differing strands of human pride and the nature of true kingship and humility and prayer.
If the Catholic Church is to recover her credibility as the Church of Christ, she was due a spell in the desert to rid herself of the smell of temporal power. But our European nations were nonetheless built up with some footing in her truth. Pride, the deadliest of the deadly sins, was duly noted, seen to be punished and occasionally repented of. As they became more and more obsessed with their own power, they lost what sure footing they once had in humility and prayer.
These nations will have to recover such a footing, along with that vocation to universal brotherhood, if their future is not to become more and more dire, as they continue on the path of pride and disintegration, trusting for their security in their own power. and their weapons of mass destruction for their security. But anyone should be able to figure out that it is 'soft' power that will triumph in the end.
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I welcome feedback.... Joe