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Spain

Pilgrimage standoff: Assisi v. Santiago de Compostela, which comes out on top?

February 18, 2024

Can one commit pilgrimage “adultery”? In the months of planning leading up to taking a group of Catholic Herald pilgrims along a portion of La Via di Francesco—the Way of Saint Francis—to Assisi in Italy, I felt a strange sense of unease about how I might be engaged in a form of betrayal. For my peregrino pilgrim

Unexpected Santander Angelus amid echoes of Covid mania

January 16, 2024

In the bottom-left corner of the cathedral’s nave an old priest sat on a wooden chair with a shawl wrapped around his shoulders against the cold stones surrounding him. It indeed felt rather bracing inside the Cathedral of Santander that Saturday morning to say the least. Spain’s northern Cantabria region had been enjoying milder temperatures

A splash of Spanish sun at the Royal Academy

January 18, 2023

For better or worse, the Catholicism of Spain and her Empire runs through this exhibition like gold – both metaphorically and literally. The show is full of many beautiful, precious and luminous things, and – although it sounds daft – they are all so Spanish. You can almost hear the deafening flourishes of Iberian batalhas breaking out overhead, played on bombastic horizontal silver organ pipes: wondrous, almost but not-quite vulgar, and ever-so-slightly out of tune.

Diary: by William Stirling James

December 30, 2022

William Stirling James reflects on his familial contact with sainthood and Spanish catholicism

Seeing Spain’s history through art

August 12, 2022

Incomparable Realms: Spain during the Golden Age, 1500-1700 Jeremy Robbins Reaktion Books, £25, 464 pages Spain’s Golden Age spanned the reigns of five monarchs which form-ed a “lineage of piety”: Charles I (Charles V when Holy Roman Emperor), Philip II, Philip III, Philip IV, ending with the death in 1700 of Charles II, the “Bewitched”,

Spanish bill that would criminalize prayer near abortion clinics called a ‘danger to democracy’

November 12, 2021

Madrid, Spain, Nov 11, 2021 / 16:00 pm An international 40 Days for Life director has said a bill proposed by the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party that would criminalize “harassment” of women entering abortion clinics is a “threat to democracy.” Tomislav Cunovic, director of 40 Days for Life for International Affairs, told ACI Prensa,

Spanish medical body: Threat to conscientious objection on abortion ‘unacceptable, illegal, and unjust’

July 15, 2021

Madrid, Spain, Jul 14, 2021 / 05:30 am. A body representing Spain’s medical colleges said on Monday that a government minister’s threat to conscientious objection on abortion is “unacceptable, illegal, and unjust.” The General Council of Official Medical Colleges (CGCOM) was responding to proposed changes to the country’s abortion law announced by Spain’s Equality Minister Irene

Seville’s ancient alchemy of agony and ecstasy

July 01, 2021

The pain and joy that attend the human condition overflow in the Andalusian capital, finds James Jeffrey