A THOUSAND YEARS OF MONTSERRAT
1. The Monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia, has undertaken a great and magnificent project: to celebrate the millennium of its foundation in 1025.
2. The monastery became an abbey in 1409. In 1493, with Abbot García Jiménez de Cisneros, it passed to the Congregation of Saint Benedict of Valladolid, until 1835 with the confiscation of Mendizábal.
3. In 1844 it was reopened in a curious form of life of an apparent diocesan clergy. In 1862, Abbot Miquel Muntadas united the Benedictine community to the Congregation of Subiaco.
4. However, it was the abbot Antonio María Marcet (1913-1946) who connected Montserrat with the great Benedictine restorationist movement in Europe and gave it the great personality that the Monastery of Montserrat had, before and after the Civil War.
5. In 1946, it was the abbot Aureli M. Escarré who, first thanks to his personal friendship with Francisco Franco and, especially later, to his clear anti-Franco position, gave Montserrat the great title of welcoming and protecting everything peculiar and proper to Catalonia, when the majority of the Catholic hierarchy there had ignored it, if not fought it.
6. The intelligence and monastic spirit of Gabriel M. Brassó (1961-1966) attempted a good transition. He failed and was elected abbot president of the Congregation of Subiaco.
7. Cassià M. Just (1966-1989) went from being a very traditional and fundamentalist monk to being the great abbot of Montserrat who, for 23 years, seemed to be the clear incarnation of Vatican II, real or invented, in total harmony with progressive Catholic and secular movements.
8. Abbot Sebastià Bardolet (1989-2000) was a great attempt to restore a good monastic life, but he encountered difficult internal problems.
9. Abbot Josep M. Soler (2000-2021), who came from the Claretians, represented a new and modern presentation of a Montserrat faithful to certain political and social options and with the will to be faithful to the Roman, Spanish and Catalan hierarchy of Catholicism. His close collaborator, now the abbot president of the Congregation of Subiaco-Montecatino, was the embodiment of the idea.
10. In 2921, the monks of Montserrat elected a good administrator and an adult Barcelonan as abbot of Montserrat. He and the new prior have had a clear and explicit monastic vocation for three years. Without giving up anything from the past thousand years, but keeping their eyes open for the new millennium of the monastery. The Catalans have understood this. The Catholics, including a good part of the hierarchy, are grateful. The man and woman on the street, believer or agnostic, are really interested in this new Montserrat of its second millennium.
Mgr. Jaume González-Agàpito