Day 090e: Buying out the Benedictines … (July 13, 2019)
It wasn’t long after I exited town that I came across the Benedictine Monastery of San Zoilo, a tenth century construction that served for many centuries as the spiritual hub of Palencia (first for the Benedictines, then for the Clunians, then for the Jesuits, and finally as a Minor Seminary). It was declared a national historic/artistic monument in 1931 and then named a site of national cultural heritage in 2012, and the church still technically owns the compound proper, and yet it now serves as a four-star hotel for the financially well-endowed. I remember walking past its magnificent walls back in 2008 during my first Camino pilgrimage and hearing that large swaths of its original surrounding lands it had been sold by the monks who still lived there at the time, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that the monastery itself was sold out from under its inhabitants and made into a profit-making residence for the wealthy in the years since.
“The oligarchs who ran the country – and indeed the world – have no principals, no morals, and no Code of Honor. Their indentured servants – the politicians and, for the most part, the priests – pretended to have solid ethics, and yet their actual skills were to appear to have a moral purpose; to thinly veil their designs for self-empowerment & self-enrichment underneath a paper-thin veneer of hollow promises, passionate rhetoric, and faux-integrity – just enough to get them through the next election; just enough to keep them lodged behind the pulpit.” ~ via Kenneth Eade
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