Barbastro No. 1

"The old baptismal font from the cathedral of Barbastro in which the founder of Opus Dei was baptised" is the one described in the 'Liber de Gestis' of the Cabildo Catedralicio (1635: fol. 38v), and that this font "was broken up in 1936 and thrown in the river". According to this same source [cf. infra], "the fragments were later [no date given] recovered and were donated in 1957 by the Bishop and the Cabildo Catedralicio to Escrivá; the latter ordered them sent to Rome to be reconstructed and given a decorous home. The fragments arrived in Rome in 1959 and, after the necessary reconstruction- the font was placed in the ante-chapel of Santa María de la Paz", a church belonging today to Opus Dei. [our translation from an e-mail letter in Spanish to BSI by José Pascual Martínez [jpmartinez@atenet.edu], who quotes Andrés Vázquez Prada, "El Fundador del Opus Dei", t. I, p. 14, as source]. This same source reiterates that the object is a baptismal font and not a holy-water stoup [="su forma atestigua que es una pila bautismal, no benditera"], and that it is not a copy but the restored original [="La pila que reside ahora en Roma es la original destruida en la Guerra y restaurada"]. If this object, whether stoup or font, is indeed the original one from the cathedral church of Barbastro it should be dated to the 16th century. Ynfante (2002: 235) writes that "the holy-water stoup of the cathedral church of Barbastro, in which Escrivá [i.e., José María Escrivá de Balaguer, later, in 2002, canonised as San Josemaria] was baptised had been totally destroyed during the civil war [i.e., the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939], although Escrivá's followers managed to reconstruct a copy based on the drawings of the original and took it to the central see of the Opus Dei in Rome" [our translation]. [NB: a photograph of the baptismal font, now in Rome as stated above, shows a font or stoup -the style of the object and the ornamentation allows for it to be either- consistent with the description and dating given by the first source, and the restoration is clearly visible on the object itself. -- We are grateful to J.P. Martínez for the image of this font and for the documentation submitted, and to the Centro de Documentación y Estudios Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, of the Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) for the copy of "La iniciación cristiana de Josemaría Escrivá: bautismo, confirmación y primera comunión", in Cuadernos del Centro [...], vol. XI - separata of the Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, no. 6 (2002: 75-101)]. It is in this last document , in footnote 5, p. 3, in which details of the recovery and restoration can be found. The stone of the font is described in it as a limestone from Zaidín [this village is located on the northern bank of the Cinca river, to the NW of Fraga, near the Lérida/Lleida border], therefore not a local stone from Barbastro.