I am still reeling from the shock of what we have all experienced these days of papal fervor and the passion of those who govern us for this religious leader. The attendance of our representatives at strange rituals and other performances called liturgies is a nauseating ignominy, it has no other name. The right is branded as hypocritical for boasting about being Catholic while defending values supposedly contrary to those promoted by this particular sect on issues like immigration, but the most blatant hypocrisy is that practiced by the left. They embrace the Pope to project an anti-fascist image (forgetting the long history of good relations between the Church and totalitarian regimes) while deliberately ignoring the rest of Catholic principles that are contrary to everything that progressivism represents. They thus demonstrate the extent of the ethical and moral collapse of those who claim to be defenders of individual rights and freedoms. More than hypocrisy, it is, in fact, pure and simple cynicism. And a shameful betrayal of all that has cost centuries of struggles, deaths, and suffering. There are two glaring examples: that of women and that of gay men. Seeing the entire Congress standing and applauding for seven minutes with religious fervor the leader of a particular organization that has used all its power to keep women subjugated and condemned to reproduce against their will is an image that definitively confirms the death of institutional feminism. With Francina Armengol saying “Your Holiness”, socialist deputies, others from Sumar, from ERC, all servile and prostrate before a man who, of course, tells them to their faces what they are doing by having abortions. All of them must be willing to return to forced reproduction. Their applause is the fertilizer that will contribute to the already initiated campaign of rollback in the advances achieved by the struggle for equality. And the gay men who have attended mass and have communed with the millstones of those who have always been their executioners, those who have denied their mere and simple existence, these men also betray the long history of the struggle to decriminalize love and free sex and shamelessly adore the head of a State more than known for its homophobia.