Gold Medal of the University of Barcelona to the Monk and Historian Hilari Raguer
On Friday September 23, the University of Barcelona will award the Gold Medal to the Montserrat Monk and Historian Hilari Raguer. The event will take place in the Aula Magna at 12h and will be chaired by the Rector, Dídac Ramírez, with the participation of the General-Secretary Isabel Miralles, the President of the Board of Trustees, Joan Corominas, and Professor of Contemporary History of the University of Barcelona Joan Villarroya, who will comment on Raguer.
On Friday September 23, the University of Barcelona will award the Gold Medal to the Montserrat Monk and Historian Hilari Raguer. The event will take place in the Aula Magna at 12h and will be chaired by the Rector, Dídac Ramírez, with the participation of the General-Secretary Isabel Miralles, the President of the Board of Trustees, Joan Corominas, and Professor of Contemporary History of the University of Barcelona Joan Villarroya, who will comment on Raguer.
Hilari Raguer i Suñer (Madrid, 1928) graduated in law at the University of Barcelona in 1950 and got his doctorate in 1975 with a thesis supervised by Manuel Jiménez de Parga on the political party Unió Democràtica de Catalunya. He graduated in Biblical Theology, as well as in Social Psychology and Political Sciences in the Sorbonne. In 1954 he joined the Montserrat monastery and in 1960 he was appointed priest. He has worked on biblical and liturgical dissemination and has published studies on the history of Catalonia in the 20th Century. In 1999, together with Professor Agustí Colomines from the University of Barcelona, was in charge of the assessment of the archive of the Catalan Government in exile, put in the Archive of Nationalism of the Sabino Arana Foundation and returned to the National Archive of Catalonia. He received the St. Georgeʼs Cross in 2014, for the studies dedicated to Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, the General Domènec Batet and Unió Democràtica de Catalunya during the Republican period.
Among his contemporary history books there are La Unió Democràtica de Catalunya i el seu temps (1931-39) (1975), Divendres de passió. Vida i mort de Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera (1984), El general Batet (1994), Gaudeamus Gitur. Notes per a una història del Grup Torras i Bages (1999), Carrasco i Formiguera. Un cristiano nacionalista (1890-1938) (2002), La pólvora y el incienso (La Iglesia y la Guerra civil) (2001) and Ser independentista no és cap pecat (Claret, 2012). He also collaborated in the history of the Second Vatican Council, directed by Giuseppe Alerigo. Regarding the fields of liturgical and biblical spirituality he published the works Para comprender los salmos (1996, with four Spanish editions and translated into Italian, Portuguese and Brazilian), and Llegir avui lʼApocalipsi (1997).
The last Gold Medal given by the University of Barcelona was to the Philosopher Emilio Lledó, last September. Previous to that one, gold medals were awarded to the expert on comparative psychology Nicholas J. Mackintosh (2015), Professor of Geology Carmina Virgili (2011), and to the Primatologist and Ethologist Jordi Sabater Pi and the Writer, Journalist and Literary Critic Baltasar Porcel in 2009. The prestigious Doctor and Catalan pacifist Moisès Broggi and the President of the publishing house Vicens Vives Roser Rahola were also awarded the Gold Medal in 2008. The Gold Medal honours natural or juridical people who have been distinguished by their services given to the University of Barcelona, or have given eminent and extraordinary services to society in the political, social, economic, cultural or scientific fields.