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| The World's Most Interesting Man |
With the death of Don Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo y Gayarre, a reporter, a promoter of culture and tireless adventurer, not only a charismatic personality, but also a true friend of the traditional rite is gone from this world.
As Pope Benedict XVI. issued the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum Quadra-Salcedo confessed in an interview that there was little that moved and pleased him in his exciting life inwardly more than strengthening and revitalization of the traditional form of the Roman Rite for the world Church.
Born in Madrid, Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo felt himself as a Basque by descent. In his life he was an engineer, athlete, botanist, reporter and adventurer. In the Congo, he was even sentenced to death. All his life he traveled the world, but he was at home in the mountains of Navarre.
De la Quadra-Salcedo, born in 1932, studied at the University of Agriculture. In 1960 he represented Spain as a discus thrower at the Summer Olympics in Rome. In the same year he began his work for Spanish television after a trip to Colombia as a reporter. He reported on the war in Vietnam and the coup of Pinochet in Chile. In the Congo, he would have even been shot against a the wall, because he reported on the execution of 300 prisoners in Congo. Like many other dangerous situations, he also survived this.
Of particular interest, really more of a fascination, is the history of the discovery of America. He dealt with the actors like Bartolomé de las Casas, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Pedro Arias de Avila or Núñez de Balboa and events associated with the discovery and the Spanish presence in America. Above all, he strove for a correction of historical representation. De la Quadra-Salcedo lamented the distorted image of the Spanish colonial history by the Protestant states of England and the Netherlands. Their early-onset historical propaganda had led to the idea prevalent today, but mistakenly believed by many, that Britain's penetration in North America was a (positive) colonization, while Spain's penetration in Latin America was considered a conquest (negative). The exact opposite was historically the case, said the Spanish globetrotter. The Latin American Mestizentum is the evidence of the respect that the Spaniards accommodated the Indian population, and argued that on the other hand, they were wiped out in the Anglo-Saxon north almost entirely.
Text: Giuseppe Nardi
Image: Accion Liturgica
Image: Accion Liturgica
Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com
AMDG
