Portrait of Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón in the Cabildo of La Gomera, work of the Canarian painter José Aguiar.FRAN VILLALBA
A tourist with a questioning face pokes his nose into the hallway of a house located on a main street in San Sebastián de La Gomera.
It is a two-story building whose patio has a paradise tree and mangoes.
The upper floor has the typical Canarian gallery, made of pine wood, in chocolate brown.
The tourist leaves without realizing that there is a plaque on the façade: “In this house, Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón, an enlightened priest, liberal politician and companion of [Benjamin] Franklin, was born on November 9, 1757.”
Yes, Franklin, the inventor of the lightning rod or bifocal lenses and one of the founding fathers of the United States.
He continues the text: “He was a deputy of the Cortes of Cádiz in 1812, where he contributed decisively to the abolition of the Inquisition.”
Nothing less.
A man of firm convictions and a fictional life, barely known to the general public, whose figure has claimed his native island with several acts coinciding with the bicentennial of his death.
Ruiz de Padrón's La Gomera was an underdeveloped society, although his family belonged to the middle class.
He had a brother who was also religious and a sister who was a nun.
Since he was a child he stood out for his aptitudes, so the parish priest of San Sebastián recommended that his family send him to train at the Franciscan convent of La Laguna (Tenerife).
“He left San Sebastián very young, although his father was not convinced that he would leave,” says the mayor of this town, Angélica Padilla, to the EL PAÍS journalist, who visited the town on a trip organized by the City Council.
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“In La Laguna they saw that I had a lot of intellectual curiosity;
"He learned Latin," says Ciprián Rivas in front of his birthplace, who directed a seminar in San Sebastián in September on the occasion of the bicentennial of the death of this figure.
“It has been one of the activities with which we want to make it more known,” adds the mayor.
Padilla points out that they are in talks with the family that owns the house so that a small attached premises can open “as a space to disseminate his career.”
On the left, the house where Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón was born, in San Sebastián de La Gomera.Miguel Velasco Almendral
Ordained a priest in 1781, “he participated in the Economic Society of the Country of Tenerife, a group of enlightened people,” says José Ignacio Algueró Cuervo, doctor in Geography and History from the UNED and author of a recent biography of the Gomero priest,
In the bicentenary of the death of Ruiz de Padrón.
An opportunity to recognize and perpetuate his legacy.
“He knew cenacles in which the Inquisition was harshly criticized,” adds Rivas.
However, he draws attention to the fact that the Franciscan entered the Holy Office in 1787. He himself would say in a letter that he went to “know and destroy forever” what he described as a “work of darkness.”
“There is no signature of his in Inquisition files,” Algueró points out.
As his application for admission was granted during his stay in America, he did not have time to act as an inquisitor.
In any case, he had outgrown the archipelago and, tempted by a friar uncle who lived in a convent in Havana and sent money to the family, he decided to leave in 1785 to join him.
“However, a storm diverted the ship and it ended up reaching the coast of Pennsylvania,” adds the historian.
One of the misty chapters of his life is how he appears in the gatherings that Benjamin Franklin organized in Philadelphia (“an immortal man because of his philosophy and diplomatic science,” he will say of him).
“Someone must have presented it and introduced it into that environment,” says Manuel Hernández González, professor of American History at the University of La Laguna.
He was also a companion of George Washington, who would soon become the first president of the United States.
Both characters “raised objections to their beliefs, including the Inquisition, although we know this only from their own testimony,” Algueró points out.
The canary, encouraged by Franklin, delivered a sermon in a Philadelphia church.
It is a key episode in his career because he defended that it should be the bishops who ensured the purity of Catholicism and not a court that used violence.
What is undoubtable is that those liberal companies influenced his thinking about the Holy Office.
“He defended religious tolerance and coexistence with non-Catholics,” adds Hernández.
That sermon, translated into English, “also helped expand the Catholic membership in the area.”
Gallery and interior patio of the birthplace of Antonio José Ruiz de Padrón.
Miguel Velasco Almendral
After four years in Philadelphia, Ruiz de Padrón arrived in Cuba, at a time of slave revolts.
“Apparently, he participated in the production of pamphlets calling for the abolition of slavery,” Algueró emphasizes.
He must not have felt very safe, so he decided to return to Spain.
In Madrid he became disillusioned because he saw how far the Church was from what he thought.
He achieved, of course, among a hundred applicants, the position of abbot in the Orense town of Vilamartín de Valdeorras.
There he remembers it as a monolith, among other reasons, for building a canal to improve irrigation, which can still be seen today.
It was the year 1808, the year of the French invasion, of which he condemned the “infamous vandalism.”
Algueró highlights that in Vilamartín “he became a leader of the opposition [to the French], but maintained his religious principles.”
Thus, when he was appointed director of the hospital to care for the wounded, he defended that the Gauls also had to be welcomed.
He said that they were not murderers, but soldiers who obeyed.
Logically, the people did not like him.”
The historian José Ignacio Algueró Cuervo, author of a recent biography about Ruiz de Padrón, at his home in the province of León.J.
CASARES
When in the midst of the conflict, the Central Board, made up of representatives of the provinces, convened Cortes in Cádiz, which opened in September 1810, Ruiz de Padrón, despite living in Galicia, was elected by the so-called minor Canary Islands (Lanzarote, Fuerteventura , El Hierro and La Gomera).
A recognition of his renown and ancestry.
After the Constitution was approved on March 19, 1812, aware of the historical moment, he wrote to his brother: "Up until now we have not been a nation, but a herd of beasts, governed by despots and tyrants."
As a deputy he defended the abolition of the vote of Santiago, a tax that the peasants of Galicia, León and part of Castile paid in kind to the Compostela archbishopric.
His legislative proposal was approved by 85 votes to 28. “This earned him a lot of resentment and made him considered a traitor in the Church,” says Hernández, author of the study
From the Cortes of Cádiz to the Liberal Triennium,
on the work of the Canary Islander. as a deputy.
The priest wanted to go much further and struck a chord when he wrote an opinion for the abolition of the Holy Office for being contrary to the Constitution: “How different is the spirit of the Inquisition from the evangelical spirit (...)”.
“It is an unbearable yoke.”
Faced with the inveterate persecution of heretics, he advocated that “persuasion, gentleness, preaching (...)” should be used with them.
You can imagine the scandal generated by a religious who asserted: “The Inquisition is entirely useless in the Church of God”;
“He has sponsored superstition, he hates the freedom of the press”;
"As long as this gloomy court subsists, Spain will be condemned to perpetual ignorance."
His proposal sparked one of the most heated debates in the Cortes.
However, after three centuries (it had been created in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs) the Inquisition was abolished on February 22, 1813 by 90 votes to 70. His speech was immediately published and would be translated into English and French. .
The mayor of San Sebastián de La Gomera, Angélica Padilla.Miguel Velasco Almendral
With the end of the war and the return of Ferdinand VII, in May 1814, the constitutional period was decapitated and absolutism and the Inquisition were reinstated, although it will no longer have the strength it had before.
The bishop of Astorga, Manuel Vicente Martínez, “a coward who had fled to Portugal after the Constitution,” Algueró points out, opened ecclesiastical proceedings against Ruiz de Padrón, who had returned to Galicia.
Arrested, he was sent to the seminary of Astorga (León), where he remained incommunicado for several months.
He was stripped of his property.
His situation and his cold weather made him sick.
Everything could get worse: in November 1815 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the convent of Cabeza de Alba, in El Bierzo.
In a process with flagrant irregularities, he was accused "of being liberal, of not having crucifixes at home, of using cultured terms for the people...", Algueró emphasizes.
After a battle of resources, the Chancery of Valladolid ordered that he be released, which happened in October 1816. It was not until February 1818 when a judge from Salamanca revoked the order that had condemned him and described that process as “untimely ( ...), unfair, disorganized and not in accordance with law.”
And he ordered his “full freedom and the enjoyment of his income.”
“Although he never recovered them,” says Professor Hernández.
After a brief period as a deputy in the Cortes of the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823), in which the Constitution of 1812 returned, he was appointed to a position in the cathedral of Malaga, where he could also enjoy the mild climate.
However, his poor health prevented him from taking possession and he returned to Vilamartín.
Portrait of Bishop Manuel Vicente Martínez, who opened proceedings against Ruiz de Padrón, in an image provided by the historian José Ignacio Algueró.
He lived his last months in Galicia, in a distressing economic situation, which he detailed in a letter to his sister full of pathos: “It will be necessary to sell some furniture, if there is someone who will buy it.
We have reached this extreme misery in old age, after a thousand hardships, sufferings (...), persecutions, torments, prisons, exiles, and all kinds of infamies that have made me suffer in the ungrateful homeland.
Ruiz de Padrón died on September 8, 1823, at the age of 65.
Two months before Ferdinand VII, supported by a French army, established absolutism again, for 10 years, although the Inquisition did not function again and disappeared in 1834. That ominous decade, as it has gone down in history, settled scores, among others, with the enlightened priest.
Today neither his remains nor his grave remain.
Algueró remembers that even in 1967, in the newspaper
Abc,
a historian published an article in which he called him a “delirious anti-Spanish.”
For Rivas, “we are facing a forgotten person in the history of Spain because he was uncomfortable for power.”
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