The Spanish Left Yearns for Deconquista Muslims demand to worship in a cathedral that hasn’t been Islamic since 1236. By Charlotte Allen
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-spanish-left-yearns-for-deconquista-1496960885
“The Great Mosque of Cordoba.” That’s what Unesco—the cultural arm of the United Nations—calls the 24,000-square-foot 10th-century structure visited by 1.5 million tourists a year. It was declared a World Heritage site in 1984, and rightfully so: The building’s interior is a stunning example of Moorish architecture.
Yet this “mosque” is actually the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Córdoba. In 1236, King Ferdinand III of Castile captured Córdoba from the Almohad Caliphate. He then had the building consecrated for Christian use. Or reconsecrated, rather, since underneath the mosque lay the demolished remains of a sixth-century church built by Spain’s Visigothic rulers before the Muslim invasion in 711. Today, Mass and confession are celebrated inside. The cathedral has been a Christian house of worship for centuries longer than it was an Islamic one.
The discordance greeting tourists is the result of more than 200 years of antagonism toward the Catholic Church by left-leaning Spanish intellectuals. They have used the cathedral’s unique architecture essentially to de-Christianize it in the name of restoring its historical Islamic roots. This secularist campaign began in the early 19th century but has gained new force in the past 20 years. Recent Islamic immigration to Spain has given the anticlerical leftists new allies—Muslims demanding to worship in their “Great Mosque.”
But that would require taking the building out of the Catholic Church’s hands. In 2013 an organization called the Platform for the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba gathered more than 350,000 signatures on a petition calling for a public takeover. A year later, the Socialist-led coalition government of Spain’s Andalusia region, which includes Córdoba, accused the diocese of “hiding” the building’s history. In March the city council issued a report arguing that the diocese does not legally own the cathedral. “Religious consecration is not the way to acquire property,” it said. The site’s true owners “are each and every citizen of the world from whatever epoch and regardless of people, nation, culture or race.”
The diocese worries that the leftists may be about to get their way. To shore up support among American Catholics, the bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández González, spoke Wednesday at a meeting sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. Outright expropriation by the local government “would be impossible,” Bishop Fernández told me before his speech. But, as a European Union report on the mosque controversy pointed out, Andalusian law would permit expropriation if a court determined the diocese had failed properly to maintain and conserve the property. The bishop added that he already has obtained the pope’s support should a legal battle arise over ownership. CONTINUE AT SITE
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