In defense of privacy

I understand everything but comprehend nothing. In the world of permanent exhibition, religious experience these days becomes a kind of mass spectacle televised by the minute. Spiritual experience is sublimated in stadiums and grand performances, massive avenues and a lot of paraphernalia. Peter's representative arrives in Madrid and will pass through Barcelona and the Canary Islands with an excess of solemnity.

There is no doubt that he is not only the head of the Catholic Church; he is also a head of state, a global spiritual figure and, in this case, a pontiff who wants to put migrants, peripheries and social wounds at the center of his agenda. Precisely for this reason, the excess of apparatus, expense and previous grandiloquence is even more surprising.

The problem is not that the Pope is received with respect. The problem is that a Church that preaches poverty, humility and care for the last presents itself wrapped in a scenography of power and excess. The Gospel does not need red carpets but coherence. And coherence, in times of inequality, racism, crisis of public confidence and citizen fatigue, also involves austerity.

Religion, when it gets too close to power or establishes itself as power, ceases to be an experience of consciousness and becomes an architecture of authority. In other words: faith can be intimate, compassionate and liberating, but religious institutions, when they adopt the forms of earthly power, must be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other power.

This is the fundamental issue. Not whether there should be a papal visit. Not whether millions of believers have the right to celebrate it. Of course they do. The question is whether a visit that wants to talk about the poor, migrants and the disinherited can afford a staging that conveys an image of excess. When the message is closeness to the vulnerable, symbols matter as much as homilies.

There is yet another pending austerity, deeper than the budgetary one: that of male power within the Church. An institution that speaks of human dignity, care, and fraternity continues to reserve for men the main forms of sacramental and governmental authority. Women sustain parishes, schools, hospitals, communities, and charitable networks, but too often they continue to appear in the ecclesial scenography as servants, not as decision-makers. The Pope's visit to Spain will also be read from this question: what place will women occupy in the official narrative? Will they be only devout presence and invisible organizers, or will there be some gesture that acknowledges that without them the real Church simply would not function?

In Catalonia, the symbol of the language will not be minor: if the Pope speaks enough Catalan in the Sagrada Família, he will recognize not only a language, but a specific cultural and spiritual community. That of its architect. If Catalan is diluted, a message as strong as that of the great homilies will be given.

The Church itself should be the first interested party in avoiding this contradiction. In a Spain where religious practice has fallen steadily and where a significant part of society observes the Church with distance, moral authority is not recovered with crowds or exceptional measures, but with truth, reparation, and sobriety. This reality should invite more humility.

There is also a shadow that cannot be hidden by the festivities: the management of sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Spanish Church. What institution has the right to celebrate itself before having given all explanations to the victims?

The Pope can preach a poor Church for the poor. But this idea requires a public grammar: less state solemnity and more evangelical language. Less exhibition and more listening to those who have been hurt by the institution itself.

All authority that claims reverence must be examined with special severity. Religious authority too. Especially when it speaks in the name of the weak. Because poverty cannot be just a topic of discourse; it must also be a form of presence.

The Pope's visit can leave necessary words on migration, peace, and human dignity. Hopefully, it will be so. But it should also leave another lesson: in a time of institutional discredit, moral greatness is expressed with austerity, responsibility, and a certain renunciation of decoration. Faith can fill squares. Credibility, on the other hand, is gained by emptying the stage a little.