His Eminence Metropolitan Hilarion, the Chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church Department for External Relations, has expressed a heartfelt caveat to people of Spain with regard the impending obliteration of the Valley of the Fallen monument.

The Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) is a monumental memorial near Madrid, Spain, erected as a national act of atonement and reconciliation after the bloody Civil War (1936-1939). A landmark of 20th-century Spanish architecture, it spreads over the territory of nearly 1400 hectares and comprises a Roman Catholic Abbey with Basilica and other edifices. Bodies of more that thirty thousand war victims from both sides are entombed within the monument grounds. 

The most prominent feature of the monument is the cross on a hilltop, a structure nearly 500 feet high, the tallest such cross in the world, visible from nearly 20 miles away. The construction of the monument began upon the end of the Civil War and continued for about twenty years.

Presently there is a legislative project in Spain, drafted under the influence of atheist forces, stipulating the removal of the Abbey from the monument territory and demolition of the cross which dominates the area.

Commenting on these developments, Metropolitan Hilarion has called upon the government of Spain to heed to recent Russian history. "In our land we likewise had churches blown up, crosses destroyed, and monasteries eradicated under the pretense that it was the ‘legacy of the past’… There was Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, and it was exploded by the rulers of the country."

"And now we see exactly the same forces having come to power in Spain, who vouch for the need to blow up the cross in the Valley of the Fallen," said the Metropolitan with much sadness, expressing hope that reason will prevail, that the cross will remain intact, and that the monks will keep their residence in the Abbey.