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If I wasn’t born Polish, I would like to be Spanish!

Culture - October 18, 2022

With these words Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki initiated his speech in Madrid, during VOX’s event “Viva 22”, dedicated to Spanish history.

And indeed both Spain and Poland’s history represent the two ancient wings of a single European Christian eagle, the Western wing and the Eastern wing, as Mr. Morawiecki persuasively proclaimed in front of 15,000 attendees.

With regards to Spain, at the beginning of the fourth century there were already Christian councils held in Seville.  In 589, during the third Council of Toledo, king Reccared converted from the Arian heresy to Christendom.

It took the Spaniards eight centuries to expel the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, which they had invaded in 711.  Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, called the “Reyes Católicos”, the Catholic Monarchs, culminated the work of their forefathers reconquering Granada in January 1492.

1492 also marked the beginning of the evangelisation by Spain of the whole American continent, as well as many other territories in the world.  Spain’s empire has been described not as an example of colonisation, but rather as the founding of great sister nations with same rights for their people as those in the metropolis (this has been termed as “las Españas”, in plural, united under the hispanic Catholic crown).

In 1813 Spain defeated Bonaparte’s army, one year before the downfall of the freemason emperor.  However, the liberal revolution taking place along the nineteenth century precipitated the great Spanish nation into mediocrity within the international scene.

On 1 April 1939, Spain’s national army demonstrated that crushing communism in a war took great efforts, albeit was not impossible, despite the previous experience of Russia (and the later cases of China, Korea, Vietnam or Cuba).

As for Poland, it was baptized in 966, granting a national bond to the people which had inhabited the land for many centuries before.  Prince Saint Casimir forever symbolised during the fifteenth century the nation’s character.

King John III Sobieski saved Europe in 1683, when as commander in chief of the Holy League he defeated a Turkish army in Vienna more than double the size of Christians.  The portrait of Our Lady accompanied the European troops, assuring their final victory.

In 1791, Poland passed its first written Constitution, proclaimed in the name of God, One in the Holy Trinity.

The Second World War witnessed the parting of Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, casting lots of the nation as before Our Lord’s crucifixion did the Roman soldiers.  Martyrdom of Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, Edith Stein and many others was the seed of what would come in our time (semen est sanguis Christianorum).

During the Cold War, Russian communism could not suppress the Catholic faith in Poland, which by the end of the former century resurged with outstanding strength together with the charismatic leadership of pope John Paul II and that of trade union Solidarity’s Lech Walesa.

Now, under Mr. Morawiecki’s PiS government, Poland is on the rise in Europe and a recent Eurostat’s statistic places the country as the eighth having achieved more equality for its population – well ahead of the average and particularly well ahead of Spain, fourth before last among the 27 nations in the Union, according to the same public data.

Source of the picture:  Dorczeczy.pl