The Montserrat schism

El cisma de Montserrat
The Catholic Church has always been anti-Catalan. The Catholic Church likes empires, likes authoritarian regimes, likes commonality and Catalonia does not offer any of them. Do not think that the aversion to Catalonia by the Catholic Church is something new. It’s a millennium old.
In 1301, Pope Boniface VIII fell ill. His Roman doctors were not able to heal him. Pope Boniface hated Catalans, he had done everything possible to stop their expansion in the Mediterranean and he also denied the rights of the House of Barcelona to the Crown of Sicily. However, as a last resort, they brought the famous Catalan doctor, Arnau de Vilanova, to see the Pope. Arnau had been put in prison upon arrival in Rome some time before.
Arnau was able to relieve Boniface’s suffering. After that, Pope Boniface exclaimed: “at last I have found a Catalan who does good”.
In the XV and XVI century, the situation got even worst. The fact that Catalans did not support the implementation of the Inquisition was the main reason for that. They even assassinated some of the Castilian lead Inquisitors who were sent to the kingdom of Aragon to implement the Spanish Inquisition. In my opinion that’s the main reason why Catalans were forbidden by Isabel Queen of Castile to go to America till the end of the XVIII century.
Recently, we have seen similar moves by the Catholic church establishment to weaken the Catalan identity. A few years ago, the Vatican determined that the Western Strip (La Franja), the Catalan speaking counties located in the Aragon region would not longer belong to the Lleida archdiocese (Catalonia), but it would become part of the Aragonian archdiocese of Barbastro. La Franja had been part of the Lleida archdiocese for more than one thousand years. The motivation behind the decision was to reduce the influence of Catalonia on this Aragonian region with more of 90% Catalan native speakers (the highest percentage of Catalan native speakers in any region in the world).
The last straw has been the approval last week by the Spanish archbishop conference of a documents declaring that the unity of Spain is a “moral good”, trying to quell any separatist desire in Catalonia or the Basque country. What does the unity of Spain have to do with religion or morality? Why don’t the Spanish bishops spend their time doing the real moral good, as for instance, helping the poor, putting in prison the pedophilic priests or giving support to the use of condoms to curve the growth of AIDS?
I am a catholic, I always went to catholic school and I like Jesus and his teachings, but I really cannot stand the Roman Catholic apparatus. Pope, bishops and archbishops are not a moral good, they are basically a waste. They also proclaimed that the Roman empire and the old Spanish empire were a moral good. Both are long gone. That’s the only thing that gives me hope.
Hopefully one day, pretty soon, the abbot of the Montserrat monastery will secede from the Vatican and declare the Montserrat Schism (“el cisma de Montserrat”), with the basic good teachings of Jesus, but with divorce, non abortive contraception and female priesthood.
I include a videoclip showing the entry of the Franco dictator troops in Barcelona in 1939. My grandfather was by then a P.O.W. My grandmother and my 4 year old father had nothing to eat. The rest of my Catalan relatives were crossing into France, where they have remained since.