According to the statement itself, during the previous day several tastings were practiced with drilling machinery on the outer esplanade of the Basilica, within the framework of the preparatory works awarded by the “competent authorities”.
The same note reports that the machinery dawned covered in paintings and messages against the civil authorities, a fact that the community condemns “resoundingly”.
The text rejects that the Valley serves as the scene to offensive demonstrations against the authorities and concludes by reiterating its “trust in the action of the courts of justice”.
The most significant thing about the note is what it omits. At the arrival of the drilling machinery to the very environment of the temple, the Abbey does not object to any objection.
The tastings are described in strictly administrative terms — ‘material actions’ of a project ‘awarded by the competent authorities’ – a formulation that is of full legality and presents them as a neutral fact.
All the energy of the communiqué, and the only express condemnation it contains, is directed instead against the paintings and against those who have offended the civil authorities.
Asymmetry is difficult to overlook. The community to which it is appropriate to ensure a consecrated cemetery full of martyrs does not express qualms about those who intervene their environment with drillers, and yes in front of those who protest against this intervention.
With this, the order of priorities is reversed: the reproach shifts from the desecrating project to the ways in which some oppose it.
The rest of the text reinforces that impression. The “sacrality of the Basilica” is mentioned, but only to warn its defenders to abide by the legal channels; and the communiqué is closed by referring the issue to the courts.
It is striking that the final word of a monastic community about the intervention of the good that it guards is the trust in the jurisdiction and not the defense, with its own voice, of the sacredness of the place and of the memory of its deceased. The spiritual custody of a martyr’s enclosure is more than the observance of the current order.
Particularly revealing is the framework in which the note decides to place the controversy. The communiqué invokes the “social and democratic rule of law” as the ultimate horizon to which any discrepancy was to submit. The formula, taken almost literally from article 1 of the Constitution, is a demoliberal category, alien to the language and mission of a monastic community.
That Benedictines measure the defense of a place consecrated with the rod of the current constitutional order, and not with that of the cult due to the martyrs they guard, reveals to what extent they have assumed as their own coordinates that are not.
It is not a minor fact than the note not signed by the abbot or the prior, but by a representative.
The form accompanies the content of a text that systematically lowers one’s own commitment and raises the deference to the civil authority.
Political times change, and it is advisable not to lose sight of it. When they change, it may be worth considering whether the custody of such a unique place would not be better entrusted to a Catholic community willing to take seriously the martyred example of what it holds.