A temporary return, authorized by the pontifical commissioner, which Bishop Ángel Pérez Pueyo wants to make permanent.
After more than fifty years, the Romanesque image of Our Lady of the Angels of Torreciudad, carved in poplar wood in the 11th century, crossed the threshold of her former shrine this Saturday, September 5. She did so on the occasion of the 47th Pilgrimage of the Virgins of Ribagorza and Sobrarbe, which this year was held in Torreciudad coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the construction of the new sanctuary, and which brought together pilgrims from the Huesca regions and the provinces of Huesca and Lérida along with nearly forty Marian advocations.
The transfer was authorized by the plenipotentiary pontifical commissioner for Torreciudad, Monsignor Alejandro Arellano, Dean of the Roman Rota Tribunal, at the request of the Bishop of Barbastro-Monzón, Ángel Pérez Pueyo. The original statue remained in the shrine during the celebration, while for the subsequent procession to the new temple the pilgrim copy was used, specifically prepared for this type of movement.
“We are not facing just another transfer or a simple day of celebration. There is something much deeper. A people is once again encountering a part of its own history, and a Mother is returning to the place where her children learned for centuries to call her Mother,” the bishop had written in his communiqué of August 31.
A temporary return that the bishop wants to be permanent
Saturday’s event comes at the moment of maximum tension in a conflict that has already lasted five years. Pérez Pueyo demands that the image remain permanently in its “millenary home” and has even announced that he would offer his resignation rather than sign what he describes as an “improbable spoliation”: “Rest assured that your shepherd would never sign that improbable spoliation of your dignity. In that case, I would place my office at your disposal out of loyalty to our people.”
The bishop maintains that the removal of the image from the shrine half a century ago is not recorded as “authorized, in accordance with the law” in the archives of the Chapter or the diocese, and has asked Leo XIV to recognize Torreciudad as an international sanctuary directly dependent on the Holy See, which would supervise “its economic and pastoral reality.”
The diocese, he insists, has renounced “any economic compensation” and does not claim governance of the new temple or its accounts: “There is only one thing that this Diocese cannot surrender, that children cannot renounce: their Mother.”
Opus Dei responded last Thursday rejecting that the permanence of the statue in the new temple can be described as “a theft, a usurpation or an illegal retention.”
The Prelature invokes the public deed of September 24, 1962, registered in the Property Registry of Benabarre, by which the beneficial ownership—not the property, which belongs to the diocese—of the old shrine and the image was ceded in perpetuity, and the agreement of September 8, 1966, by which the Board would build and finance the new sanctuary “with the express condition that the image receive worship and veneration in it.”
“A legal difference cannot become an offensive accusation without foundation,” the Work maintains.
Rome remains silent and the calendar tightens
Meanwhile, the opinion of the pontifical commissioner, completed approximately a year ago and communicated to the parties according to various reports, remains unenforced, and neither the Holy See nor Leo XIV have made a move to settle a conflict they inherited from Francis. The late Pontiff even supported the Aragonese bishop in writing with manuscripts such as the famous “¡No cedás!” of July 2023.
The next milestone will come on Saturday, September 12, when Monsignor Arellano will preside for the first time publicly at the sanctuary over the Marian Family Day, which each year brings together thousands of people from all over Spain. It will be the occasion to see whether the commissioner finally breaks his silence on the future of the Virgin of Torreciudad.