It must be acknowledged that the Church is improving its facilities, and that today's confessionals are, at first glance, considerably more comfortable than those of the past. In the past, confessionals were usually rather precarious wooden booths, sometimes thickened, within which the priest had to squeeze himself as best he could. For their part, the parishioners almost always had to kneel to one side of the booth, often in full view of everyone, and therefore with their privacy and confidentiality compromised. They chatted quietly through the barred shutter, yes, but the result could hardly be said to be a triumph of discretion: everyone knew whether So-and-so had gone to confession, and then it was all conjecture and rumor. Even spectacular cases could occur, such as that of the confessional at the end of The Regent, which almost literally blew up in the air due to the pressure of the illicit desire that the masterful Fermín de Paso felt for Ana, the protagonist of the novel (The Regent It was a novel that was usually read in high school in the subject of Spanish Language and Literature, I don't know if it is still used).

In these days of tourist and mental saturation, with strikes and canceled flights slowing down the infernal machinery of airports like Palma, a piece of news takes on the status of an explanatory metaphor for who we are and what happens to us: Palma airport now has the largest McDonald's in Europe.