The consolation of holy wisdom

It must be a combination of the decline of the summer (which has been splendid and convivial and mostly temperate in New York City); another birthday in involuntary American exile (Barbara sends me videos of the Toronto house that has been my address for 60 years); and my approaching victory lap of seven-and-one-half months imprisonment with the corrupt justice system of the United States, that incites me to write about Pope Benedict XVI. He begins prayers of the faithful in every service he celebrates, every day, with an invocation for mercy for those in prison, everywhere in the world.

An occasional correspondent sent me his address to a large group of Spanish schoolteachers following the World Youth observations last week, at the immense and historic Augustinian monastery of Escorial, 30 miles northwest of Madrid. I visited Escorial once, in 1963. It was built as a monument to the Spanish kings starting with the Great Emperor Charles V, rival to Henry VIII, Francis I and Suleiman the Magnificent at the founding of the modern nation state, who died in a lesser monastery in 1558, two years after freely abdicating his many thrones for the contemplative life. The construction of Escorial began the following year and its immense cost somewhat foreshadowed the back-breaking expense of St. Peter's Basilica and the Palace of Versailles. It was not as magnificent as those colossal structures, and did not help produce such upheavals as the Reformation and the French Revolution, but it strained the Spanish monarchy and Church. And 400 years later, many thousands of Republican prisoners of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, in which a million people perished, constructed nearby the huge underground basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, surmounted by a stone cross, 700 feet tall. These are book-ends of the 400-year decline of Spain from great power to European pariah, from which it has revived.

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