Will the Cathedral of Cordoba Soon Become a Mosque?

For the past twenty years, the diocese of Cordoba has been faced with, what at first glance, seems like an unnatural alliance: one between several socialist and Muslim associations. Their goal is to take back from the Church the mosque that was turned back into a cathedral during the Reconquista.

This 8th century jewel, included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, does indeed have a turbulent history. On the site where the sanctuary stands today were found the remains of a temple to Janus built when Cordoba belonged to the Roman province of Baetica.

The Visigoths – Arian heretics who conquered the Iberian Peninsula – replaced it in 584 with a church consecrated to St. Vincent of Saragossa, a 4th century martyr. It became the city’s principal church and the bishop’s residence.

When the successors of Muhammad invaded, the new conquerors built a mosque in its place and systematically destroyed all the other churches in the city. The mosque was enlarged several times, until it became the second-largest mosque after Mecca. When Cordoba was taken back from the Muslims by St. Ferdinand III of Castile, in 1236, it once again became a church, and later the cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. Catholic worship has been exclusively and uninterruptedly celebrated in it ever since.

The Regional Government of Andalusia, in the hands of the Socialist Spanish Workers’ Party, recently voiced its desire to take this place of worship from the Catholic Church of Spain and transform it into an ecumenical site. The initiative received an approving echo from some Muslim associations – possibly connected with Wahhabi Qatar – and some of them even tried to come pray provokingly in the Catholic sanctuary.

The bishop of Cordoba, Bishop Demetrio Fernández González, has denounced this unlikely coalition and taken the initiative of seeking support in the United States, taking advantage in June of an invitation from the Hudson Institute of Washington – a think-tank founded in 1961 by the RAND Corporation, a sort of laboratory of ideas whose values have little in common with those defended by the Catholic Church.

In his speech, the Spanish prelate maintained that despoiling the Church of the cathedral of Cordoba would be an attack on religious freedom. This was doubtless a speech the Hudson Institute was eager to listen to, considering how attached the United States is to the First Amendment's freedom of worship, and how sensitive they are to the persecutions of Christians throughout the world.

We must recall, however, that Pandora’s box which was opened forty years ago, and what is more – somewhat ironically – by the cathedral chapter itself. Indeed, in 1974, for the first time, Saddam Hussein was authorized to pray privately in the cathedral.

More astonishing yet, in 1979, in the name of the religious freedom promoted by Vatican II, a day of community prayer was organized by the ecclesiastical authorities, nearly five centuries after the victory of the Catholic Kings over the last Muslim kingdom of Spain and their triumphant entry into Granada.

Since then, this public prayer has been repeated three times, in 1982, in 1985, and in 1999, always with the approval of the cathedral chapter presided over by the bishop.

It remains to be seen whether their recourse to the mirage of religious freedom will be a solid enough foundation to lastingly maintain the Catholic identity of a cathedral that is the symbol of an entire people’s Reconquista.