The visit of the King and Queen of Spain to Montserrat was disappointing. You can't spend an hour and a half glossing over it. The spirit of Peace and Truce of Abbot Oliba Not to mention Catalonia and Spain and their poor fit. Statements like "dialogue begins with listening" cannot be made if they are not put into practice. To say that "dialogue is a process, it is work," and that it is not possible to hold a sincere dialogue before the king, is to use words in vain. The event ended up being a performance of fake normality. The truth was lacking.
Montserrat cannot invite the king and pretend he never existed in 2017. The then president of the Generalitat is still in exile, and there are still politicians disqualified because the amnesty is blocked in the Supreme Court. The absence of references to the Catalan nation, of which Montserrat is a fundamental element, was deafening. Furthermore, the only thing that referred to the elephant in the room was the king when he allowed himself to speak of "exclusionary identities" and "claims of moral superiority." Words like these must have been spoken by the abbot, certain that they were steeped in historical reason.
Montserrat cannot pretend not to engage in politics, unless it renounces its symbolic deposit. To consider that politics is no longer necessary because we are not in the 1960s is, at the very least, naive. Accepting the king's visit was already engaging in politics, and, above all, it meant risking the king coming to engage in politics, as indeed he did. There needed to be at least a counterweight, which did not appear, as had so often appeared in the past at Montserrat, because it was not just another event. If Montserrat is celebrating a thousand years, it is because it has been more than a monastery.
