A monumental cross towers above the Valley of the Fallen complex. / Credit: Wikimedia Commons
ACI Prensa Staff, Mar 28, 2024 / 10:30 am (CNA).
The Association for Reconciliation and Historical Truth has garnered more than 130,000 signatures on a petition calling for the Madrid regional government to protect the Valley of the Fallen as an asset of cultural interest (BIC, by its Spanish acronym) in opposition to the socialist government’s plans to desacralize and reconfigure the area’s historical significance.
In the petition, which is posted in Spanish on HazteOir’s web portal, the petition’s promoters explain that “the social-communist government has put the machinery in motion to destroy the Valley of the Fallen and transform it into a “museum” of horrors by rewriting history with falsehoods, blaming one side for all the evils [of the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War] and hiding the crimes of the other.”
Two years ago, the Madrid regional government, headed by President Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the People’s Party, refused to declare the area as a BIC on the basis that the regional Heritage Law prevented it. “After updating the Heritage Law and running out of excuses, she’s still not keeping her word,” the association charges.
The Valley of the Fallen is a monumental complex that has previously been designated as a national heritage site. It was built in the Madrid mountains after the Spanish Civil War with the intention of serving as a center for reconciliation and for the interment of combatants from both sides of the conflict.
The complex has an underground basilica in which thousands of combatants from both sides are buried. Above it stands the largest cross in the world certified by the Guinness Book of Records at 500 feet tall. In the surroundings, a monumental Way of the Cross was built, almost three miles long with about 2,300 steps that ends at the basilica.
Next to it, a community of Benedictine monks from the Monastery of St. Dominic of Silos was established.
Pope Pius XII erected the monastery as an abbey in 1958, the only one in the 20th century to not have been previously designated a priory. In 1960, Pope John XXIII raised the abbey’s church to a minor basilica.
Initially, a social studies center was established on the grounds, which functioned from 1958 to 1982. The abbey runs a hostel and the Holy Cross Choral School, where about 30 boys are educated.
Currently, the Valley of the Fallen is in disrepair due to inadequate maintenance by the government’s national heritage agency. Since 2019, the government has announced plans to eliminate the Holy Cross Valley of the Fallen Foundation, an institution created at the time of the monument’s construction, and create in its place a new legal framework.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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Rome, Italy, Jun 6, 2018 / 12:52 am (CNA).- A new ad in the Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine has given the global #MeToo movement another dimension, shining a spotlight on women who have suffered persecution, rape and violence due to their faith.
Three of these women – Rebecca Bitrus, a Christian woman from Nigeria; Dalal, a Yazidi woman from Iraq, and Sr. Meena, a nun from India – are featured in the ad, sharing just a glimpse of horrors they have endured.
“They raped me, they kept me as a prisoner for two years, they killed one of my sons and they sold me as a slave.” These are the words of Rebecca, who in the ad holds a sign bearing the famous #MeToo hashtag.
“At 17 years old I was kidnapped and sold as a sexual slave to nine different men in nine months. ISIS still has my mother and my sister as prisoners.” This is what happened to 21-year-old Dalal, who is pictured holding a sign that says #NotJustYou.
“They raped me and beat me, they forced me to walk naked for five kilometers while the crowd continued to hit me.” This is the story of Sr. Meena, an Indian nun raped by Hindu extremists, who is shown holding a sign saying #StopIndifference.
Sponsored by the international pontifical aid organization Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), the ad was published June 6 in the weekly Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine, which is one of the most successful women’s magazines in Italy and which has been heavily involved in covering the #MeToo movement.
In comments to CNA June 5, Alessandro Monteduro, director of ACN Italy, said the goal of the ad is to raise awareness about “the sufferings of women persecuted for their faith.”
“We have thousands and thousands of women who are raped, tortured and forced to marry only in the name of faith,” he said, noting that until recently, there was not a true awareness of the atrocities these women have faced.
Monteduro praised the efforts of the many women who have spoken out about sexual violence through the “#MeToo” movement, which was born after the New York Times in October 2017 published an investigative report on Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who this week pled “ not guilty” to charges of rape and other criminal sexual acts.
After the report ran in the New York Times, other celebrities and women throughout the world spoke up and began to share their own stories of sexual assault on social media, using the now world famous hashtag #MeToo.
“It’s good, it’s wonderful to create the awareness for actresses and women in the Western world who are in any way victims of violence,” Monteduro said, but stressed that at the same time, “all over the world there are women who are suffering the same, but maybe more aggressive violence in the name of faith.”
The ad begins by addressing some of the actresses who have spoken out as part of the #MeToo initiative, saying that their efforts have helped to raise awareness about sexual violence in western nations.
“Your faces, known by everyone, have been associated with the denunciation of a practice that seriously damages women, their sexuality and their dignity,” the ad says, noting that ACN for more than 70 years has sought to help persecuted Christians throughout the world, including many women who have suffered rape and sexual harassment.
“The faces of these women are invisible,” it says, and, introducing Rebecca, Dalal and Sr. Meena, notes that there are thousands of women like them who are both “persecuted and outraged without receiving any solidarity or visibility on social media.”
These women “need you,” the ad says, and asks the celebrities who have already spoken out on the #MeToo movement to join in condemning “the intolerable hypocrisy of those who are outraged only by what happens in the yard of their own home and who are stingy in their thoughts, words and help for those who suffer far away due to the silence of so many.”
“The solidarity of famous actresses such as yourselves would break the indifference.”
Mary Rose and Ryan Verret. / Credit: Courtesy image via Be Light
CNA Staff, Jan 26, 2024 / 10:40 am (CNA).
Pope Francis recently nominated two U.S.-based Catholic advocates of marriage and family life to a key Vatican dicastery, an honor that … […]
Jack Traynor (next to child on first row) as a pilgrim to Lourdes in 1925, two years after his healing. / Credit: Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales
In the book he recounts how, during a 10-hour train ride to Lourdes on Friday, Sept. 10, 1937, Royal Navy seaman Jack Traynor told him firsthand how he was healed in 1923 at the Lourdes Shrine from the crippling wounds he had suffered from his participation in World War I.
Over a century later, on Dec. 8 of this year, the archbishop of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, Malcolm McMahon, announced that Traynor’s healing has been recognized as the 71st miracle attributed to the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.
O’Connor described Traynor as a “heavy-set man, 5’5”, with a strong, ruddy face” who, according to his biography, “should have been, if he were alive, paralyzed, epileptic, covered in sores, shrunken, with a wrinkled and useless right arm and a gaping hole in his skull.”
Traynor was, in the missionary’s view, a man “with his manly faith and piety,” unassuming, “but obviously a fearless, militant Catholic.” Despite having received only a primary education, he had “a clear mind enriched by faith and preserved by great honesty of life.”
This enabled him to tell “with simplicity, sobriety, exactness” how he was healed at the place where the Immaculate Conception appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.
O’Connor wrote down the account and sent it to Traynor, who revised it and added new details. He read the official report of the doctors who examined him and searched the newspaper archives of the time to corroborate the account.
Front page of the December 1926 Journal de la Grotte, reporting on the miraculous cure of Jack Traynor. Credit: Lourdes Shrine
How Traynor came to be considered incurable
Traynor was born in Liverpool, according to some sources, in 1883. His mother was an Irish Catholic who died when Traynor was still young. “But his faith, his devotion to the Mass and holy Communion — he went daily when very few others did — and his trust in the Virgin remained with him as a fruitful memory and example,” O’Connor recalled.
Mobilized at the outbreak of World War I, he was hit by shrapnel, which left him unconscious for five weeks. Sent in 1915 to the expeditionary force to Egypt and the Dardanelles Strait, between Turkey and Greece, he took part in the landing at Gallipoli.
Jack Traynor. Credit: Courtesy of Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes
During a bayonet charge on May 8, he was hit with 14 machine gun bullets in the head, chest, and arm. Sent to Alexandria, Egypt, he was operated on three times in the following months to try to stitch together the nerves in his right arm. They offered him amputation, but he refused. The epileptic seizures began, and there was a fourth operation, also unsuccessful, in 1916.
He was discharged with a 100% pension “for permanent and total disability,” the missionary priest related, and in 1920 he underwent surgery on his skull to try to cure the epilepsy. From that operation he was left with an open hole “about two centimeters wide” that was covered with a silver plate.
By then he was suffering three seizures a day and his legs were partially paralyzed. Back in Liverpool he was given a wheelchair and had to be helped out of bed.
Eight years had passed since the landing at Gallipoli. Traynor was treated by 10 doctors who could only attest “that he was completely and incurably incapacitated.”
Unable to walk, with epileptic seizures, a useless arm, three open wounds, “he was truly a human wreck. Someone arranged for him to be admitted to the Mossley Hill Hospital for Incurables on July 24, 1923. But by that date Jack Traynor was already in Lourdes,” O’Connor recounted.
Traynor tells about his pilgrimage to Lourdes
According to the first-person account originally written by O’Connor and corrected and adapted by Traynor, the veteran sailor had always felt great devotion to Mary that he got from his mother.
“I felt that if the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes were in England, I would go there often. But it seemed to me a distant place that I could never reach,” Traynor said.
When he heard that a pilgrimage was being organized to the shrine, he decided to do everything he could to go. He used money set aside “for some special emergency” and they even sold belongings. “My wife even pawned her own jewelry.”
The Lourdes Grotto in France. Credit: Courtney Mares/CNA
When they learned of his determination, many tried to dissuade him: “You’ll die on the way, you’ll be a problem and a pain for everyone,” a priest told him.
“Everyone, except my wife and one or two relatives, told me I was crazy,” he recalled.
The experience of the trip was “very hard,” confessed Traynor, who felt very ill on the way. So much so that they tried to get him off three times to take him to a hospital in France, but at the place where they stopped there was no hospital.
On arrival at Lourdes, there was ‘no hope’ for Traynor
On Sunday, July 22, 1923, they arrived at the Lourdes Shrine in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. There he was cared for by two Protestant sisters who knew him from Liverpool and who happened to be there providentially.
The pilgrimage of more than 1,200 people was led by the archbishop of Liverpool, Frederick William Keating.
On arrival, Traynor felt “desperately ill,” to the point that “a woman took it upon herself to write to my wife telling her that there was no hope for me and that I would be buried at Lourdes.”
Despite this, “I managed to get lowered into the baths nine times in the water from the spring in the grotto and they took me to the different devotions that the sick could join in.”
On the second day, he suffered a strong epileptic seizure. The volunteers refused to put him in the pools in this state, but his insistence could not be overcome. “Since then I have not had another epileptic seizure,” he recalled.
Paralyzed legs healed
On Tuesday, July 24, Traynor was examined for the first time by doctors at the shrine, who testified to what had happened during the trip to Lourdes and detailed his ailments.
On Wednesday, July 25, “he seemed to be as bad as ever” and, thinking about the return trip planned for Friday, July 27, he bought some religious souvenirs for his wife and children with the last shillings he had left.
He returned to the baths. “When I was in the bath, my paralyzed legs shook violently,” he related, causing alarm among the volunteers who attended to the pilgrims at the shrine, believing it was another epileptic seizure. “I struggled to stand up, feeling that I could do so easily,” he explained.
Arm healed as Blessed Sacrament passes by
He was again placed in his wheelchair and taken to the procession of the Blessed Sacrament. The archbishop of Reims, Cardinal Louis Henri Joseph Luçon, carried the monstrance.
“He blessed the two who were in front of me, came up to me, made the sign of the cross with the monstrance, and moved on to the next one. He just passed when I realized that a great change had taken place in me. My right arm, which had been dead since 1915, shook violently. I tore off its bandages and crossed myself, for the first time in years,” Traynor himself testified.
“As far as I can remember, I felt no sudden pain and certainly I did not have a vision. I simply realized that something momentous had happened,” Traynor recounted.
Back at the asylum, the former hospital that today houses the offices of the Hospitality of Our Lady of Lourdes, he proved that he could walk seven steps. The doctors examined him again and concluded in their report that “he had recovered the voluntary use of his legs” and that “the patient can walk with difficulty.”
Traynor makes it to the grotto
That night, he could hardly sleep. As there was already a certain commotion around him, several volunteers stood guard at his door. Early in the morning, it seemed that he would fall asleep again, but “with a last breath, I opened my eyes and jumped out of bed. First I knelt on the floor to finish the rosary I had been saying, then I ran to the door.”
Making his way, he arrived barefoot and in his pajamas at the grotto of Massabielle, where the volunteers followed him: “When they reached the grotto, I was on my knees, still in my nightclothes, praying to the Virgin and thanking her. I only knew that I had to thank her and that the grotto was the right place to do so.”
He prayed for 20 minutes. When he got up, a crowd surrounded him, and they made way to let him return to the asylum.
A sacrifice made for the Virgin in gratitude
“At the end of the Rosary Square stands the statue of Our Lady Crowned. My mother had always taught me that when you ask the Virgin for a favor or want to show her some special veneration, you have to make a sacrifice. I had no money to offer, having spent my last shillings on rosaries and medals for my wife and children, but kneeling there before the Virgin, I made the only sacrifice I could think of. I decided to give up smoking,” Traynor explained with tremendous simplicity.
“During all this time, although I knew I had received a great favor from Our Lady, I didn’t clearly remember all the illness I previously had,” he noted in his account.
As he finished getting himself ready, a priest, Father Gray, who knew nothing of his cure, asked for someone to serve Mass for him, which Traynor did: “I didn’t think it strange that I could do it, after eight years of not being able to get up or walk,” he said.
Traynor received word that the priest who had strongly opposed his joining the pilgrimage wanted to see him at his hotel, located in the town of Lourdes, outside the shrine. He asked him if he was well. “I told him I was well, thank you, and that I hoped he was too. He burst into tears.”
Early on Friday, July 27, the doctors examined Traynor again. They found that he was able to walk perfectly, that his right arm and legs had fully recovered. The opening in his skull resulting from the operation had been considerably reduced, and he had not suffered any further epileptic seizures. His sores had also healed by the time he returned from the grotto, when he had removed his bandages the previous day.
Weeping ‘like two children’ with Archbishop Keating
At nine o’clock in the morning the train back to Liverpool was ready to leave the Lourdes station, situated in the upper part of the town. He had been given a seat in first class, which, despite his protests, he had to accept.
Halfway through the journey, Keating came to see him in his passenger car. “I knelt down for his blessing. He raised me up saying, ‘Jack, I think I should have your blessing.’ I didn’t understand why he was saying that. Then he raised me up and we both sat on the bed. Looking at me, he said, ‘Jack, do you realize how ill you have been and that you have been miraculously cured by the Blessed Virgin?’”
“Then,” Traynor continued, “it all came back to me, the memory of my years of illness and the sufferings on the trip to Lourdes and how ill I had been at Lourdes. I began to cry, and so did the archbishop, and we both sat there crying like two children. After talking to him for a while, I calmed down. I now fully understood what had happened.”
A telegram to his wife: ‘I am better’
Since news of the events had already reached Liverpool, Traynor was advised to write a telegram to his wife. “I didn’t want to make a fuss with a telegram, so I sent her this message: ‘I am better — Jack,’” he explained.
This message and the letter announcing that her husband was going to die in Lourdes were all the information his wife had, as she had not seen the newspapers. She assumed that he had recovered from his serious condition but that he was still in his “ruinous” state.
The reception in Liverpool was the culmination. The archbishop had to address the crowd to disperse at the mere sight of Traynor getting off the train. “But when I appeared on the platform, there was a stampede” and the police had to intervene. “We returned home and I cannot describe the joy of my wife and children,” he said in his account.
A daughter named Bernadette
Taynor concluded his account by explaining that in the following years he worked transporting coal, lifting 200-pound sacks without difficulty. Thanks to providence, he was able to provide well for his family.
Three of his children were born after his cure in 1923. A girl was named Bernadette, in honor of the visionary of Lourdes.
He also related the conversion of the two Protestant sisters who cared for him, along with his family and the Anglican pastor of his community.
From then on, Jack volunteered to go to Lourdes on a regular basis until he died in 1943, on the eve of the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.
Paradoxically, and despite the factual evidence of his recovery, the Ministry of War Pensions never revoked the disability pension that was granted to him for life.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
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