OUR LADY OF MONTSERRAT

Day 349: April 27

Our Lady of Montserrat, Catalan region of Bages, Barcelona, Spain

Our Lady of Montserrat, known as La Moreneta, refers to the wooden image depicting the Mother of Christ, carved by St Luke in Jerusalem, then it was entrusted to St Peter who in his long journey left it in Barcelona and following the Muslim invasion for security reasons it would have been taken to the mountain of Montserrat where it remained hidden in the Holy Cova until the year 880.

It is also said that in this year, on a Saturday afternoon, some children who were looking after a flock saw a strong light descend from the sky accompanied by a melody. This was repeated several times. They looked for the place struck by the light, they found in a cave the statue of Our Lady that they called the Black Virgin, "La MORENETA."

When the bishop heard of the discovery, he tried to have the small statue transported to Manresa, but it was not possible because the statue became too heavy. The bishop interpreted this sign as the Virgin's desire to remain near the place of the discovery and therefore ordered the construction of a sanctuary.

With the exception of the faces and hands, the image is painted gold. A copy of it is venerated in Sassari and is the patron saint of the tailors' guild (under this title the Virgin Mary is still venerated throughout Sardinia). On September 11, 1881, the anniversary of the National Day of Catalonia, Pope Leo XIII officially declared Our Lady of Montserrat patron saint of Catalonia, as well as benefiting her from being able to hold her own feast in the calendar, on April 27.

Our Lady of Montserrat was then placed in a chapel and a series of miracles began to be talked about until, in the year 1025, Abat Oliba, son of Oliba Cabreta, Count of Besalú and Cerdanya, great-grandson of Wifred the Hairy was chosen as abbot of Ripoll, who sent the Benedictine monks from San Pedro de les Puelles, a Benedictine monastery in Barcelona, to found the Monastery of Montserrat there.

However, entering from the square of Our Lady, on the left we find beyond the statue of St Benedict, a sculpture that represents the discovery in 880, the time in which Giufré el Pilos or Wifredo el Velloso lived, to whom the reconquest and repopulation that took place during the Arab domination is attributed.

The analysis of the wood with which the sacred image was made, seems to really come from the places of Palestine, this fact could have occurred during trade with the holy land, the fact that it is black depends on the smoke of the candles that over time have caused the statue to become black.

The accounts of graces received and miraculous healings made many people go on pilgrimage to the monastery of Montserrat. There are many donations that believers left for the benefit of the monastery so that the simple chapel in the twelfth century was converted into a Romanesque church. The prosperous growth of Catalonia meant that the monastery and the devotion to the Virgin of Montserrat spread throughout Europe.

The Monastery was transformed into the Abbey of Montserrat thanks to the historical facts related to Benedicto XIII – Pedro Martínez de Luna known as the Moon Pope. The period known as the Western Schism (1378 – 1417), saw a struggle at the top of the church which consequently led the bishops to side with two different factions: Popes and Antipopes.

The King of the Crown of Aragon, Martin the Human, Martí I l'Humá (1356-1410) (tenth king of the Crown of Aragon and last descendant of Count Guifré el Pilós) arranged for the Monastery of Montserrat to support the antipope Benedict XIII who promoted the monastery to an Abbey by appointing Marc de Vilalba as Abbot of Montserrat (1409). Subsequent tensions led to the Catalan Civil War in 1462.

The Abbot of Montserrat Antoni Pere Ferrer, in this period, was appointed President of the Generalities of Catalonia whose policy was to support influential people who guaranteed autonomy to the Principality of Catalonia, among them, was Charles of Viana. For what has been said, the Abbey sided against the King.

On the death of the King Juan el Grand, succeeded on the throne of Aragon by his son, Fernando II de Aragón, who at the behest of his father had married his cousin Isabella of Castile, daughter of Juan's uncle and brother. Ferdinand II and Isabella the Catholic, (called the Catholic Monarchs), for the above facts, annexed the monastery of Montserrat to the Benedictine congregation of Valladolid. Then Montserrat lost its autonomy which it regained in 1858 when Miguel Muntandes was appointed abbot.

With the discovery of the Americas, a hermit friar from Montserrat named Bernat Boïl with 12 monks went with Christopher Columbus (on his second voyage) to evangelize the Americas. Even today in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea there is a small island with the name of Montserrat.

In the Abbey of Montserrat a library of great value is preserved both in terms of quantity and quality. Among the approximately 300 thousand volumes, texts and manuscripts in Catalan dating back to the twelfth century are preserved, although the subsequent devastation due to the war of the French or the law of the dead hand has deprived us of real treasures. And some legendary data would affirm that the Holy Grail was housed in the Monastery of Monteserrat.

The Holy Grail is the cup with which Jesus celebrated the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood from the side of the crucified Christ.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, courtier of the kingdom of Castile, practicing a dissolute life within the court, could not refrain from participating in the Battle of Pamplona (May 20, 1521) in which he was wounded. During his convalescence he visited the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat (March 25, 1522), and after a military vigil probably right in front of the image of Our Lady of Monteserrat he renounced military life by hanging his clothes right in front of the image of Our Lady. He later entered the Monastery of Manresa in Catalonia, where he practiced an ascetic and penitent life. In Manresa you can visit the cave (La Cava de San Ignacio) where St Ignatius lived for ten months, laying the foundations of the book of the "Spiritual Exercises." On the path that leads to the Shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, you will encounter the copy of the sword of St Ignatius of Loyola.

Subsequently, in 1560 the abbot Bartolomeo Garrica built a new monastery with the funds of donations and pilgrims, but with the war of the French (1811-1812) in which the sacred mountain of Montserrat was conquered and the subsequent decree of the "dead hand" of 1835, with which the Spanish state auctioned the land properties belonging to the various ecclesiastical congregations, the monastery was deprived of many of its goods and treasures.

With the Spanish War of Independence, Montserrat was fortified twice but despite this it was not saved from destruction. The reason why Napoleon's troops conquered this place of strategic importance is unknown.

In 1881 Leo XIII made the Monastery a Basilica and the main façade was built in 1901. Many architects and sculptors from Barcelona participated in the reconstruction; Josep Llimona, Antoni Gaudí, Venanci and Agapit Vallmitjana, Subirachs himself and many others described on the Monastery Description page.

The Montserrat Mountain with its Virgin is a place of pilgrimage for many believers and is a must-see tourist visit where you can admire the immense beauty of nature not to mention that it is the symbol of the Catalan country, since on September 11, 1884, Pope Leo XIII declared the Virgin of Montserrat Co-patron Saint of Catalunya. The co-patron saint is San Jorge or Sant Jordi or Saint George of Capadocia.

Curiously, on the same day, there is also the feast of the Diada, National Day of Catalunya, which celebrates the loss of the autonomy and institutions of the Principality of Catalunya during the War of Succession fought against the troops of Philip V in 1714, thus closing a historical cycle that began about a thousand years earlier.

St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"From your divine maternity of Jesus, the God-Man, springs incessantly your universal maternity of the souls in the life of grace, of holiness and of glory."

(Justin Russolillo, Devotional, Vocationist Editions, Pianura, 2009, p. 196)