In September 2025, it will be four hundred and fifty years since the founding of the Carmelite Monastery of Ontinyent. With the authorizations granted by the Archbishop of Valencia, Patriarch Juan de Ribera, King Philip II, and with the approval of the juries of Villa Real, Carmelite nuns arrived in Ontinyent from the Monastery of the Holy Encarnación del Verbo de Valence. found a Carmel, the historical name for the monasteries of this order.
The group of houses in which they settled quickly proved insufficient to house a community which was growing day by day. So much so that the order and the authorities of Ontinyentin from the 16th century agreed on the need to build a new convent. This is what they did, after being awarded the hermitage of the Holy Blood by the Jurors, with the prior consent of their brotherhood, which would maintain and maintain privileges over their church. It is the same convent which has survived to this day and which saw this Saturday October 5 the solemn profession of Sister María Esperanza of the Most Holy Trinity Sánchez Gutiérrez.
That a young woman makes a profession, committing for life to withdrawing from the world to live within the walls of a convent, may seem in our time, even to many ABC readers, an outdated decision, typical of another time, not so far away. since the founding of this convent. And it will be even more incomprehensible to so many skeptics that someone signs for life his faithful fulfillment of the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience and, moreover, does it with the joy with which I saw her and her sisters doing it Carmelites.
Since I was a child, I have known the convent that in Ontinyent we affectionately call “de les monks tancaes”. I went there with my older brothers, hand in hand with our maternal grandfather, to visit, a few days a year, a distant cousin, who had been imprisoned there since the 1930s. He saved his life, despite the assault and burning of the monastery by the crowd which, in 1936, with so much effort, dedicated itself to destroying and burning all religious property within its reach. He returned after the Civil War. She was always seen with her face covered by a veil, behind a double fence which represented something other than the charisma of her voluntary confinement.
I returned last Saturday to the Carmel of Ontinyent, motivated both by journalistic curiosity and by sharing the same convictions. I stayed admired by the strength of the celebrationby the songs of the sisters, by a tenor and a choir which gave solemnity to the ceremony, with time which seemed to have stopped at the door of the temple so as not to disturb its haste.
When it came time for the liturgy of the word, I was moved to hear the readings from the relatives of Sister María Esperanza, arriving from her native state of Apure, in suffering Venezuela, today kidnapped by the usurper Maduro and his criminal gang. A moment that made me lose the thread of solemnity to focus my reflection on the historical fact – hysterical for the previous president of Mexico, the one who succeeds him, and other Podemite idiots of the same kind – what was this sensational feat made by the Kingdom of Spain and the Spaniards who, in the 15th and 16th centuries, brought to this continent, among other precious gifts, the same language and the same Christian faithwho were present at the celebration of the solemn vows of Sister María Esperanza.
This same religion of ours, which the preachers and missionaries brought to the new lands that were incorporated into the Kingdom of Spain, is what in recent years has become a blessed return, since from there they returned in our country –more and more incredulous and less and less practicing– priests and nuns who have largely mitigated the notable loss of ecclesiastical and monastic vocations that we are experiencing here.
The Ontinyent convent, which in the middle of the last century was made up of a community of forty-two sisters, currently has nine, five of whom come from Venezuela and Colombia. Laus Deo. Incorporations which have rejuvenated their average age, which has given new impetus to a community which is already impatiently preparing the commemoration of the four hundred and fifty years since the founding of the monastery of the Carmelite Mothers Calzadas de la Purísima Sangre, celebration which will be possible, in large part, thanks to the young sap which has returned to us from these sister nations, in which we speak and pray in Spanish.
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