The end of Catholic culture in Catalonia

Leo XIV is back in the Vatican. In Madrid, they continue with the usual political and media rhythm. In Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia is full of tourists, traffic is as bad as ever, and in El Raval and Brians I, life, complicated and hard, continues on its way, as if nothing had happened. In the Canary Islands, dinghies with immigrants from Africa will continue to arrive; they will be well received by people of good faith, or they will be rejected by the official authorities and the xenophobes and racists embedded everywhere. Life goes on and a long summer awaits us, overwhelming with heat and political, social, and cultural unease, as if Leo XIV had never come.

Beyond the balloon inflated by politicians, commentators of all kinds and conditions, media, public institutions, and ecclesiastical authorities (not all of them; the discreet profile of many Spanish bishops, archbishops, and cardinals has been quite striking), other elements of analysis can still be proposed, less immediate, but which can explain the cultural and mental configuration of our present.

1. The definitive certification that Catalan Catholic culture, so powerful and influential from the late 1950s to the 1980s of the last century (more than thirty years!), disappeared years ago and will not return. For many people and established opinion makers, this is of little importance. For a country with a complex history like ours, it is a notable element. The Catholic generation of the post-war period (also called the generation of '25, formed by religious and lay people), in which from Capuchin friars to Jesuits, Benedictines, and priests and lay people of all kinds excelled, has disappeared. The conditions created or inherited from the wave of secularization at the beginning of the 1970s of the last century (the disappointment with the slowness and hesitations of Paul VI in developing the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, for example) and the long and retrograde pontificate of John Paul II (with direct irreversible effects on Catalonia; just think of the succession of Archbishop Narcís Jubany to this day, including Omella), dismantled this liberal, even progressive, Catalanist Catholic culture, and above all, very open and well connected with the European Catholic world. If we add to this the cultural, economic, political, and social evolutions of the continent (and of the Western world in general), we will understand that there has been no sound Catholic literature that has transcended the walls of its circles to enlighten the world of the laity, and even non-believers, a little, about the visit of Leo XIV.

2. We are a secularized society, in which Catholic culture and its expressions have definitively lost centrality. However, the non-believer response to the visit of Leo XIV (from the country's official atheists to the leader of USTEC) has been demagogic, superficial, simplistic, and ridiculous. The reasons called from the squares were of secondhand embarrassment. In other words, Catholic culture diluted and disappeared, but no one took its place. We have simply moved on, ignoring this heritage, leaving it in a corner, without filling any of the gaps it left. Cultural and intellectual poverty has settled in the country since it was decided (to put it in some way) to throw the received heritage into the trash can.

3. The visit leaves a black mark, a voluntary omission that directly connects two areas: abuses in the ecclesiastical and religious world and the disappointing visit to the abbey of Montserrat. That Leo XIV has not met with any victim, with any representative of some of the groups organized around this issue, is inexcusable and shameful. To what extent religious power (Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Omella, etc.) has played to ensure it was not part of the agenda, we may never know. Not even a meeting was scheduled with the heads of the most prominent religious orders (nor with the bishops of the dioceses where all sorts of episodes of this kind have occurred).

This concealment directly affects the Benedictine community of Montserrat. Given the history that the community carries regarding abuses and questionable conduct within its sphere, one could have expected from the current heads of the abbey a public act of contrition, outward (to the victims) and inward (to those monks who denounced it and were unjustly persecuted and punished), before Leo XIV. Not only have they remained silent, but they offered a reception of a very low religious, civil, and cultural profile, in which the concealment of everything that the monastery has meant in the religious and cultural sphere seemed deliberate. In fact, it was a warning to believers of good faith and people of culture: like the whole of the country's Catholic culture, that Montserrat has disappeared and will not return. These are the signs of the times.