Lourdes: Mary's visit, source of graceThe history of the monastery Montserrat has not been without its difficulties. At the beginning of the 19th century French troops destroyed it when they tried to invade Spain. However, finally the sanctuary was rebuilt and today is one of the most visited in the region.
The history
About 40 kilometers from Barcelona is one of the most visited places in Catalonia. An abrupt elevation of the terrain that gives rise to a mountain range with a unique morphology. The collective imagination has seen a mountain sawed by someone big who wanted to give it a unique shape. There began the history of Santa Maria de Montserrat.
Where does this image come from?
Sardà i Salvany, in his "Montserrat. Noticias históricas" of 1881, what tradition had passed down about the discovery of the image: "In the year 880, on one of the delightful evenings in April, Saturday the 25th [sic] to be precise, at the hour when the star of the day gives way to the melancholy light of the queen of the night, some shepherds from the nearby village of Olesa were keeping their flocks at the foot of Montserrat, quite unaware of the great happiness that Providence was about to bestow on them. When they were most distracted, they saw some shining stars coming down from the sky at one end of the mountain, and they came to hide in the eastern corner of the same, in the part that falls on the Llobregat. Confused and frightened, much more when several consecutive Saturdays at the same hour they were surprised by the same vision, and in the last ones it was offered to them accompanied by very soft chants.
They communicated the event to their masters, by whom it was also observed and immediately communicated to the parish priest of Olesa, as the place was under his jurisdiction". According to this same tradition, the image that the sky then pointed out, had been hidden at the beginning of the VIII century, in 717, before the nearby Saracen invasion of Barcelona. It was an image -of Jerosolimitan origin- that was already venerated in Barcelona, in the church of San Justo and San Pastor... although we are moving here in the field of non-historical tradition.
The story continues in a very similar way to that of other virgins found. The bishop comes with a retinue to move the image that a few meters from the cave becomes immovable. This is taken as a sign of the Virgin's predilection for this place and the image remains there. The first documentary mention of Montserrat dates from 888: Wilfredo the Hairy donates the hermitage of Santa Maria to the monastery of Ripoll; and that is no longer a legend.
The first wayside shrines
After the discovery of the image of the Virgin Mary in the cave, the first hermits began to settle in the area. These pious men lived in small cells or caves scattered throughout the mountains, leading an austere life dedicated to prayer and penance.
Over time, the fame of the Virgin of Montserrat grew and, as the number of hermits increased, new hermitages and cells were established at different points on the mountain of Montserrat. These hermitages were connected by paths and roads, which allowed the hermits to share moments of prayer and community.
We know that at the end of the 9th century there were four hermitages: those of Santa María, San Acisclo, San Pedro and San Martín.
Devotion to the Virgin of Montserrat grew and the need for a more structured religious community became evident, which led to the official foundation of the Monastery of Montserrat in the 11th century, in the year 1025, in the hermitage of Santa Maria. Some fifty years later the Monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat had its own abbot. Of the original hermitages, the hermitage of San Acisclo still stands in the garden of the monastery.
Consolidation
In the XII-XIII century a Romanesque church was built and the carving of the current Virgin dates from that date. The monastery and the miracles granted by the Virgin are taking name and appear in some books, among them, in the Cantigas de Santa Maria de Alfonso X, which makes the monastery very popular and becomes a known place of pilgrimage, with the corresponding increase of donations and income that make it grow. Throughout the 15th century the monastery became an independent abbey, a Gothic cloister was built and a printing press was installed.
At the end of the 16th century, in 1592, the present church was consecrated, larger to accommodate a greater number of pilgrims.
Decadence and destruction
The abbey of Montserrat suffered a series of calamities in the 19th century. The monastery was sacked and destroyed in 1811 by the French troops that had invaded Spain. Xavier Altés - a monk who was librarian for many years - explained that the French were furious with the abbey because it had become a symbol that God would help the peasants of the area, who had already won the first two French attacks. The third time, however, the French won and they burned everything: the library, the archives and the church, the altarpieces, the paintings... It was a way of saying: do you see how that which you thought would save you has ended?
The Virgin was saved because she was naked. A copy was placed in the dressing room, which was smashed to pieces. The original was hidden in one of the hermitages. The French found it, but as it was without the clothes with which the carvings were adorned then, they did not recognize it and, after desecrating it, they left it there. Altés concludes that the press of the time said that it was necessary to put a sign where it was written: "Here was Montserrat".
And as if that were not enough, in 1835 the disentailment laws made the State confiscate the little of value that remained and ordered the monks to vacate the complex, which was left deserted and half in ruins. So much so, that the bishop offered the monks a plot of land in Collbató, giving up the monastery, but they did not accept; they wanted to continue in Montserrat, even if it was in those painful conditions.
Reborn
Montserrat is a symbol of the strength and fidelity of the Virgin. When many of the Catholics themselves did not believe in the possible restoration of the sanctuary, Saint Mary was faithful and performed the miracle. In October 1879 there was a meeting in Montserrat: Abbot Muntades with Jaume Collell, Jacint Verdaguer and Sardà i Salvany. They would take advantage of the millennium of the finding of the image to revive the fervor and help for the reconstruction.
For the millennium, Verdaguer composed the Virolai. The following year, continuing the momentum of the millennium, the canonical coronation of Our Lady of Montserrat was organized.
A century and a half later, that monastery in ruins is a beautiful place; one of the most visited monuments in Catalonia that welcomes almost three million visitors a year. The place where a "here was Montserrat" sign should have been put up is now advertised in all the tourist and religious guides of Catalonia. Santa Maria never fails.
The image
The focus, the origin and the engine of everything that happens in Montserrat is Santa Maria. The image that was found and was in the hermitage of Santa Maria is not preserved today.
The relay to that devotion was taken by the current image, which has survived all the vicissitudes of which we have mentioned in the brief history outlined above. It is a Romanesque carving from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, about 95 centimeters high and made of poplar wood, which presides over the dressing room of the Sanctuary.
The image is known as "La Moreneta" and there is evidence of this appellative since the fifteenth century, so all the iconography and literature about her made us think of a black Virgin. In 2001 -explains Abbot Solé in an interview- a study was made to detect the layers in the polychrome of the image and try to elucidate if it was black from the origin.
The study revealed three levels of color. The oldest level was a layer that was originally white: it is the pigment that was used at that time to imitate the color of the skin, and to prepare it was made with a mixture that included lead, which over time, smoke and oxidation was blackening; but it did so irregularly.
Thus, in the 15th century it was given a pigment to make it brown by making the dark areas uniform.
During the War of Independence, the image, which had been hidden in a hermitage, was found by soldiers. It was not identified as the original, but it was desecrated. It is said that it was left hanging from an oak tree during a very rainy few months. When the monks found it, they saw that the Child Jesus had been torn off and had disappeared. From that period is the current Infant Jesus -more baroque than Romanesque- and the last layer of pigment -darker- that was applied to restore the damage that the color had suffered.
The image, says Abbot Solé, evokes two biblical figures. St. Mary's dress is golden, recalling the bride of Psalm 44 (45): "Standing at your right hand is the queen, jeweled with gold from Ophir. [...] Clothed in pearls and brocade". It speaks to us of the intense love - almost spousal - of God for Mary when he entrusted her with the mission of being the Mother of his Son. The second figure is that of the bride in the Song of Songs, who says: "I am dark but fair, O ye daughters of Jerusalem". A text applied to a multitude of images of black virgins.
Mary is represented holding a ball in her right hand, which is the one venerated by the faithful, as it protrudes through a hole in the protective glass. Some have said that it represents the earth... but this is too much to say for the 13th century, when the planet was still seen as flat. The sphere represents the cosmos; all of creation, which Mary holds in her hands and protects, and, in turn, presents Christ.
The child is dressed in gold and crowned, which reminds us of his royalty. In his left hand he holds a pine cone. The pine cone is the sign of the life that Jesus offers to those who let him into their lives. It is also a symbol of the unity that Jesus gives us and in Him is maintained.
With her right hand, she blesses. The Virgin is included in a dressing room in which, in its upper part, two angels hold a crown, thus representing the fifth mystery of glory. The Virgin Queen is seated on her throne, but, like many Romanesque images, she is herself Sedes Sapientiae: throne of wisdom. For she offers her lap to Jesus, the Word, Wisdom.
