Bad people are all very similar. Good people, on the other hand, are each good in their own way. Years ago, I met two friends who practiced kindness as an ethical imperative and as a desire for understanding. Both were Christians, both were short, and both sometimes smoked those terrifying twisted cigars called Tuscans, but that's where the similarities ended. One was the journalist Josep Martí Gómez, who died in 2022. The other was the priest (and journalist) Josep Bigordà, who died this week at the age of 97. Meeting people like that brightens life a little. When I started working in The Catalan PostBy 1977, Martí and Bigordà were already prestigious figures. Martí Gómez had gained fame as an interviewer, alongside Josep Ramoneda, in the pages of Pleaseand wrote legal chronicles that extracted diamonds of humanity and beauty from every personal misery. In 1968, Bigordà had hosted the founding assembly of the Catalan Workers' Commissions in his modest parish of Sant Medir.

After a full life marked by religiosity and social and Catalan nationalist activism, the emblematic progressive priest Josep Bigordà has died in Barcelona at the age of 97. His funeral is today, Thursday, at 11:00 a.m. in the parish of Sant Medir, where he became a leading figure in the anti-Franco movement and a proponent of a more open and accessible church, a spirit he would later replicate at the church of Santa Maria del Pi, in the heart of the Gothic Quarter. Born in 1927 in Ullastrell, Josep Bigordà i Montmany was ordained a priest in 1952 during the Eucharistic Congress of Barcelona, ​​a landmark event that internationally legitimized the Franco regime, which, paradoxically, he would later contribute so much to combating from the margins of the Church. Possessing a solid intellectual background, he had earned degrees in theology and canon law from Comillas Pontifical University. She always had a knack for communication, with a natural ease and love for words and writing, skills that led her to journalism. For many years she wrote for the religion pages ofThe Catalan PostThe historic conservative Carlist newspaper, which in the final years of the dictatorship shifted towards progressive positions.