A platform asks the Government to cancel the registration of the Cathedral of Seville

General view of the Cathedral of Seville.PACO PUENTES

The Platform for the Defense of the Heritage of Seville has sent a letter to the First Vice President of the Government, Carmen Calvo, in which it urges the Executive to adopt the necessary measures to cancel the registration of the cathedral of the Andalusian capital and the Patio de los Naranjos that the Catholic Church registered in his name in 2010. This is the first request for the central Administration to reverse the records made with a simple ecclesiastical certification, thanks to the reform of the mortgage law approved by José María Aznar in 1996, since the publication last February of the report on the assets unregistered by the Church between 1998 and 2015, which only left the judicial process open to claim them.

In the letter, the platform recalls that the registration of the Cathedral of Seville "with its annexes" - the Giralda and the Patio de los Naranjos - was among the list of 30,335 properties "unregistered by the Catholic Church in an unorthodox and doubtfully constitutional ”.

The platform asks the vice president to tell them "what measures she plans to implement to annul said ecclesiastical registration and return that heritage to the area from which it should never have left, that of the common or public domain."

The platform recalls that the Cathedral of Seville, along with the Giralda and the Patio de los Naranjos, the Archivo de Indias and the Alcázar, were declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1987 and that the State is responsible for monitoring and guarding those spaces.

A guardianship that, they denounce, is not being exercised due to the lack of registration that "gives the Catholic hierarchy freedom and absolute availability of unregistered assets."

In the letter, Calvo is also urged, as Prime Vice President and Minister of the Presidency, to promote "legislative modifications that end appropriation, improper, indecent and medieval resonances" and to "restore the subverted legal order."

• "It is a registry amnesty, the Government has washed its hands"

• The Government counts 20,014 temples and 14,947 estates legally registered by the Church thanks to the Aznar reform

“With the publication of the list of assets registered in the name of the Church, the only way to claim is private, but it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a private individual or an association to make a legal claim against the Church.

What we ask of the vice president is that the Government reverse this situation, which is unconstitutional, because there is no other way, ”says Eduardo López Amodeo, spokesman for the Platform for the Defense of the Heritage of Seville.

The association is especially critical of the fact that the Patio de los Naranjos, which was always a public space until 1992 when the Archdiocese of Seville closed permanently, has been privatized and this is evident in the letter.

The Sevillian platform is part of Recuperando, the State Coordinator for the Recovery of the Heritage Immatriculated by the Church that brings together all the associations that in recent decades have led the claim of the assets registered by the Church, and is the only one that has opted by way of asking the Government to modify the regulations to annul the registrations.

"When the Platform in Defense of the Heritage of Seville demands the cancellation of the inscriptions of the Cathedral of Seville and the Patio de los Naranjos, it does so in the name of all and for all property", points out Antonio Manuel Rodríguez Ramos, professor of Law Civil of the University of Córdoba and one of the spokespersons for Recuperando.

"What really matters is not who owns the assets, but what those assets are," emphasizes Rodríguez.

“From the moment the Church recognizes that it is the owner of an asset but that that asset cannot be sold, it enters an oxymoron, because one cannot own something that cannot be alienated, what cannot be alienated is a good in the public domain.

To consider the opposite is to recognize that the Church is a public Administration ”, he explains.

View of the Patio de los Naranjos of the Cathedral of Seville.PACO PUENTES

The publication of the list of unregistered assets in the name of the Catholic Church - among which, in addition to temples, registered with no other title than an ecclesiastical certification, there are flats, garages or vineyards - was received in a bittersweet way by the associations that make up Recovering.

"The list is incomplete, since the goods registered before 1998 are not included, there are no simple notes ...", warns Juanjo Picó, spokesman for Europa Laica and Recuperando.

The coordinator has met on several occasions with the PSOE and United We Can to try to promote a new regulation that allows "reversing irregular records" and "recovering them for the public domain," says Rodríguez, who insists that "the fact that the ownership is public is not incompatible with possession by the Church ”.

In the letter sent to Calvo, López recalls that the statements of Pedro Sánchez have been included in his inauguration speech in which he announced that he would promote "timely legislative modifications to reverse the irregular registrations practiced by the bishops."

Picó maintains that right now the possibility of being able to reverse the current situation "is blocked", but applauds the sending of the letter to the vice president.

"Something will have to do or say and in the meantime we have managed to mobilize citizens," he says.

This Friday the Platform in Defense of the Heritage of Seville has called a rally at 12.00 in the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes to claim the cancellation of the registration of the Church in Seville under the slogan "Let's recover the Patio de los Naranjos".