On November 1st, 1775, a true social tragedy took place in Lisbon. A huge earthquake, followed by a tsunami and a fire levelled the Lisbon capital and caused its complete destruction and the deaths of tens of thousands of people. On this day the people of Lisbon devotedly fulfilled their religious obligations and this provoked in the middle of the desolation and paralysed by fear that in the great majority they turned their eyes towards the Church asking why such a brutal punishment.
Was this the price that those who devotedly completed the designs of the Holy Mother Church deserved? What God was capable of submitting them to such brutality? The only response they obtained was from the mouth of the Italian Jesuit Javier Malagrida; their sins were the origin of that misfortune, the only alternative continued to be prayer and submission to God and to the Church. Facing this thesis the Marques of Pombal, an ILLUSTRATED man, who took advantage of that crisis to rebuild Lisbon with the beauty that we still observe converting it into a cultured city, open to the citizens and closed to the intolerant and the intransigent.
Today I ask myself with a certain diligence if we are capable of taking advantage of the current crisis of civilization that we are living in (economic, ecological, energy-wise) to be able to ask ourselves, why? Maybe we are not good consumers? There are also those who point out to us the cause of our ills specifying that our modern sins have brought us here (“you’ve lived above your possibilities”, they tell us).
Facing them and like the Portuguese Marques, it is up to us however to return to rebuild a city and a State open to the citizens, to the culture, to tolerance, to equality… And closed to those who are only capable of sustaining their great economic benefits at the cost of causing economic earthquakes and tsunamis and devastating social fires. This is the work of the Left in general and of the Basque pro-independence left in particular.
Gora Maiatzeran lehena!
Arnaldo Otegi