There are moments in the life of the Church, and this is one of them, when one wonders whether prudence consists in remaining silent or in speaking out. And one quickly discovers that silence would be complicity with deception. For attempting to canonize Isabel the Catholic precisely at the historical moment in which the hierarchy itself seems ashamed of the title Catholic is an exercise in such intense involuntary humor that it deserves to be studied by sociologists before theologians.
This is not about questioning the personal sanctity of a queen who lived the Faith with a seriousness that today will be called rigidity—and which yesterday was called virtue—but about examining what kind of canonization can be fabricated in an ecclesial environment that has unashamedly chosen to abandon the Social Kingship of Christ, embracing instead, with sentimental gestures, a universal brotherhood so gaseous that it could not even support the weight of a morning prayer.
It is not that Isabel is unworthy of the altars, but that the altars—as they are being redecorated in these times of liquid liturgy and biodegradable theology—are no longer worthy of her. And not because they have been destroyed by declared enemies, but because their own guardians have replaced the marble with recycled cardboard and the incense with nebulous clouds of sociological concepts. To canonize Isabel today would be like dressing her in progressive tulle, she who never played at disguising herself as anything other than Truth.
Thus, there is a certain irony in the fact that a hierarchy so eager for interreligious embraces, even if such embraces leave them entangled without knowing who is holding whom, would seek to elevate as a model a queen who never confused the commandment of charity with the obligation to renounce the truth. Isabel did not practice dialogue with error, but rather the defense of the Faith; she did not regard heresy as a respectable opinion, but as a betrayal of the Gospel; she did not imagine Islam as a pleasant interlocutor for conferences on alternative spiritualities, but as the force that for centuries kept Spain under the sword and the Church under threat. Nor did she entertain the notion that the State should be religiously neutral, for she knew—as all of Europe once knew before becoming lukewarm—that religious neutrality of the State is a fantasy designed to favor the hegemony of error.
And for all this, Pope Leo X, upon witnessing the completed religious unity of Spain, decided that Isabel and Fernando would not be remembered as just any monarchs, but as the Catholic Monarchs. They were not granted this title because they were likable, nor because they promoted anachronistic human rights, but because they built a political order explicitly at the service of Christ, not of opinion polls. And that is precisely why their memory is so uncomfortable for those who today proclaim, with beatific smiles, that mission is proselytism and that truth is divisive.
For therein lies the deeper irony: they intend to canonize someone who built a confessional kingdom at the very moment when the ecclesial majority hastens to demolish every vestige of confessionalism, replacing Quas Primas of Pius XI—‘Christ must reign in society’—with a catalog of horizontal good intentions in which Christ appears as a community facilitator, elevated to an inspiring figure but stripped of His Kingship.
And so, how can one take seriously the canonization of Isabel when those promoting it cannot even pronounce the word Kingship without trembling, lest some progressive theologian accuse them of medieval nostalgia and count them among those who still believe that Christ is Lord not only of souls, but also of laws, governments, and nations?
Nonetheless, this same Church that fears to say that Christ must reign dares to consider saintly the very woman who lived and fought for that reign—using the legal, political, and spiritual sword proper to a Christian State. To canonize her, then, would be to recognize as virtue what they today denounce as sin: the supremacy of Catholic truth over error, mission as a duty, and religious unity as the foundation of the Common Good.
And here it is fitting to recall, to complete the picture, that Isabel and Fernando received the title of Catholic Monarchs because they achieved what no other European monarch had accomplished in centuries: the restoration of the unity of the Faith in their territory, the reform of a clergy in need of discipline and holiness, the consolidation of the Reconquista, the securing of Christianity’s presence in all public life, and, moreover, the opening of the New World not to markets, but to missionaries.
Yes, missionaries, that word which now provokes hives in those who prefer to speak of intercultural accompaniment so as to avoid mentioning conversion. For them, evangelization is a gesture of ecological tenderness, and mission a poetic proposal. But for Isabel, and for the Church of her time, evangelization was what it has always been: obedience to Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations. What they now call imperialism, she called obedience. What they now call cultural error, she called paganism—paganism that must be illuminated by grace.
Therefore, to canonize her now would be an exercise in symbolic prestidigitation whose true intent would not be to honor the queen, but to reinvent her, domesticate her, blunt her sharpness, transform her into a multicultural icon she never was, and present her as a forerunner of what she would have detested. To make her canonizable in the current climate would require stripping away everything that made her who she was: her defense of the Christian order, her conviction that Christ must reign in society, her certainty that truth has no legitimate competitors, and her decision to govern not by fashions or sensitivities, but according to Divine Law.
So perhaps the most pious thing one can do for Queen Isabel is precisely to prevent those who have renounced Christ the King from using her to give a patina of tradition to a theology that no longer believes in tradition. The final irony is that Isabel deserves the altars for being Catholic in every sense, and those who now propose her canonization could only do so by betraying that Catholicity, turning the queen into a hologram of her own shadow, and the Church into a propaganda office for political correctness.
And before such a spectacle, one can only conclude: it is not Isabel who is not ready for canonization, but the Church, which, having lost the sense of the Kingship of Christ, no longer knows what to do with a queen who bore that title not because she was likable, but because she was faithful.
Roberto Gómez Bastida, Círculo Tradicionalista de Baeza
Translated by Daniel Alejandro Rodríguez Guerra
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