CÓRDOBA, Spain  “In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

With this blessing, the chairman once opened board meetings of CajaSur, a Spanish savings bank controlled by the Roman Catholic Church that was one of the country’s better-known lenders. But last month, CajaSur was taken over by Spain’s central bank, which replaced the banker priests.

“There was no need to say more or go further, since we already spend plenty of our time praying,” joked Fernando Cruz Conde, who was CajaSur’s third-most senior director until it was seized. (He remains vicar general of Córdoba, second to the bishop of this historical Andalusian city.)

Prayer, however, did not protect CajaSur from the consequences of its reckless lending to the real estate companies whose excesses have been at the heart of a Spanish financial crisis that now reverberates across Europe and around the world.

Many of Spain’s savings banks, known as cajas, were originally pawnshops started by Catholic charities. The clergy gradually ceded control of most cajas to regional politicians, who were eager to use them to finance city projects. But the priests of Córdoba fought hard to maintain the banking powers they had held since 1864, even after a merger with a secular competitor created the current CajaSur 15 years ago.