This year, TV3's program Signes dels temps celebrates forty years on air. It airs on Sunday mornings and delves into the social and pastoral current affairs of the Catholic Church. The title refers to an expression from the Second Vatican Council about the Church's duty to be attentive to the changes and evolutions of society. Perhaps it would be good for TV3 to also be attentive to the evolution of its schedule, because, ironically, this slot has been somewhat neglected. It must be said that Signes dels temps is formally correct with Montserrat Esteve at the helm. There is a certain effort to give it a veneer of connection with social reality. The content aligns with the program's objective, and it is made with care and professionalism. The post-production work should be highlighted to give it a relative visual modernity. It will surely satisfy the expectations of the Episcopal Conference, but this centrality of Catholicism and an approach with such a typical catechism style do not quite align with the function of a public television.

Just a few days ago, a friend gave me two booklets published in the early 1930s by the Foment de Pietat Catalana, founded in 1909 by Eudald Serra i Buixó. And this wasn't just any year: it was the year of the Tragic Week. The two volumes I'm referring to contain the encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) of Leo XIII and Fortieth Year –better known as Restoration of social order– of Pius XI (1931). The translation is done in a standardized but at the same time archaic Catalan; that of Rerum Novarum It's from 1933, and the one from Fortieth Year From 1931. In the 1930s, amidst the global economic crisis and the rise of totalitarianism, these encyclicals gained prominence in the European social and political debate. They could be interpreted as a kind of third way between liberal capitalism, which the 1929 crisis had profoundly discredited, and communism, which was advancing as a radical alternative and which the Church considered incompatible with its principles. In this turbulent context, the reception of Catholic social doctrine was diverse and often contradictory.

In this week's article Ferran Sáez was taking advantage of Rosalía's new album to warn us against the temptation to interpret the popularity of a certain type of spirituality as if it were "the drift of a search for meaning in an ultra-fragmented world." The mysticism with which the singer from Sant Esteve Sesrovires works in her new project is what Sáez would call a "postmodern spirituality," which, due to its imbrication with market logic, would be directly incompatible with the transformation of consciousness that the album itself invokes. I agree with the diagnosis, but I would like to take advantage of it to talk about the world toward which this artistic endeavor is directed, because we can be sure that the great pop divas are very attentive readers of the times in which they live, and that Rosalía wants to make art and business out of a certain return to spirituality means that this certain return has not been properly shaped and capitalized upon.

1It turns out that all this religion stuff no longer interests us at all; but it also turns out that we can't stop talking about it, even if it's bad. So what's the point? The death of Pope Francis has brought this and other picturesque contradictions to the surface (again). The "spiritual supermarket," in Peter Berger's felicitous phrase, is overflowing. It's likely that, in all of human history, no generation has visited as many and as varied temples as it does today. These forays, however, are merely excursions: they are almost never related to a real spiritual feeling but rather to more or less touristy circuits that may include—sometimes in one and the same pack- Gothic cathedrals, Buddhist pagodas, remnants of pagan antiquity, and Catholic cemeteries filled with decaying celebrities. Is spirituality at a low ebb? Yes and no. Never has this notion been so invoked as it is now, but neither has its profound meaning been so eroded. There is no other time in Western history when so many religious cantatas, oratorios, and motets have been heard. In the mid-1990s, the austere monks of Silos competed with Madonna and Prince in top tenDo these forms of spirituality really have any transcendent dimension? Probably not. To argue this, I needed to write an essay that was published in February, which I don't think I can summarize here.

Mar Griera (Sabadell, 1978) is a professor of sociology and director of the ISOR research group on the sociology of religion.

"God is dead," Nietzsche said in the 19th century. Many years later, the phrase seems truer than ever. Many people have replaced God with activities that have a spiritual foundation but no religion. While we see churches emptying, we witness the success of meditation classes, yoga classes, or weekend retreats. For many young people, the new way to pray is manifesting, making wishes when a mirror hour appears on their phone screen (10:22 p.m., for example), or watching the tarot reader reading your cards in a TikTok video.

I recently asked Ferran Sáez about his relationship with spirituality, and he pointed to an inconspicuous window located high above the room we were in. It was a gray day, natural light weakening against the artificial, and on the windowsill was a sparrow taking advantage of the building's shapes to shelter from the rain. "I could put a barrier between what we're doing here and that sparrow, between me and the world, but I choose not to," he said. We were in an auditorium at the Casa de Convalescencia, a jewel of Catalan Baroque civil architecture that serves as the headquarters for the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, at the end of a symposium dedicated to celebrating Sáez as a "contemporary classic" and deepening our understanding of his work. After four hours of academic presentations, on the periphery of a bubble of human achievement, the rest of the world continued to spin with a labored and calm indifference. It's one of those images that makes you look at yourself from the outside, and in that shift in perspective, you consider the possibility that there's something genuinely important beyond yourself.