Listening to the Pope in Catalonia

On Tuesday the Pope lands in our country. After having talked about him so much, now it's his turn to speak. And both those who are eagerly awaiting him and those who are bothered by this deployment of public resources to receive a religious leader in a non-confessional country, it would be good for them to listen carefully, to see what he says and how he says it. That we all keep quiet for a moment, to listen first and then applaud or criticize what he has to say to the world from Catalonia, and what he has to say to us, the Catalans. What idea does he have, or what idea have they built for him between some and others (more the former than the latter, of course) of this post-Process Catalonia, more mixed than ever.

The genius of Antoni Gaudí has brought Leo XIV to Barcelona, as it previously brought Benedict XVI. There is no temple in the world that can compare to the Sagrada Família, and this fact alone should give us the security and self-esteem that we do not always have. Of course, a good part of this unresolved tension, which erupts every time the world looks at us, has to do with the need for recognition of a nation that does not have its own state and rightly distrusts the state where it pays its taxes. If a papal visit to Catalonia is more delicate to organize and everyone pulls the rope, it is because for centuries we have known what we are dealing with. The difference is that our zeal has no choice but to be explicit and becomes tiresome and, on the other hand, the zeal of a state proceeds stealthily through a series of internal circuits and interests that give an appearance of naturalness to what is also nationalism. But now that everything has been said, let's listen to Leo XIV in Catalonia.