God's 'Whatsapp' in Rosalía and Montserrat
The creature writing this must confess that she is left-wing and arrhythmic. An atypical variant of those of us who use our left hand like an existential mouse. We have no sense of rhythm. And this makes it difficult for us to dance, to follow feet, fingers, and even neurons. It's okay: it's not contagious. I can listen to music, although it doesn't make me get up from my chair. Right now I'm listening to Rosalía's latest album and I've sent her a WhatsApp To God.
As everyone knows, God is Catalan. Although far away, there has always been a very good relationship. So much so, that the philosopher Francesc Pujols created the Catalan religion: "If having your own system is like having your own car, having your own religion is like having your own house." It's a very local religion, like the slogan of a shopkeepers' guild: "Everything is sold here." It's a supermarket religion: we have everything that exists. Because Catalans are "the compatriots of truth," and Catalonia's mission is to offer the truth to the world. It's a religion that sticks, that hooks you: "Catalonia will bind the two paths, material and spiritual, of humanity on a cross, not of death, but of life, not of war, but of peace and moral progress." But, of course, war came. And the Catalan religion, Catalonia, found itself "between the flames and streams of blood of the Civil War unleashed by the supporters of Castilian Spain against the supporters of Catalan Spain."
In July 1937, the cardinal of "the war," Isidre Gomà, authored the letter signed by most Spanish bishops accepting the military uprising and Franco. All of them? Not all. There was the cardinal of peace, there was the Catalan Church: Francesc Vidal i Barraquer refused to sign it. Exile and punished in hell. Carles Cardó, former canon of Barcelona and exile of peace, explains it brilliantly. The religious history of the bull-skin fraud is also the history of the great rejection: the Spanish Church's refusal to recognize the reality of Catalonia. No: we are not children of their God. That's why Cardó prays to the real God: "Make me speak the truth more than ever when it is implausible or scandalous." Why does he say this?
Before, they had roasted Jaume Balmes. They transformed one of the great European theologians and philosophers into a reactionary Spanish nationalist. He who wrote, "I have no desire to return to Castilian." More hell: they branded Father Antoni Maria Claret as the confessor of Isabella II. He who only preached in Catalan: "Go on preaching in Castilian, for they blaspheme in Catalan and will be condemned in Catalan." He was a rock & roll starFrom his book The straight and safe path to heaven (1843) More than 300,000 copies were sold. That's why catechism couldn't be taught in Catalan. That's why being Catholic and speaking Catalan to God was synonymous with sin. Repeat: God doesn't speak or understand Catalan. God speaks and understands you only in Spanish. Pray a hundred times: a lie repeated often enough will make it true in the name of the God-Devil-national-Catholic-fraternal-republican-democratic-and-whatever-it-takes, but always in Spanish.
The new album (LuxRosalía's search for God is to reiterate that the discovery of God can only be in Spanish. The song, in Spanish, that she performs with the Montserrat Choir, blesses it. The oldest active music school in Europe, dating back to the 12th century, and with Montserrat serving as a panopticon for the country and the world for a thousand years, asks forgiveness for these thousand years of language. Ah! I've already received the answer by WhatsApp God said: "He will not make me speak Spanish." Amen.
