<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Mass]]> 10 <![CDATA[Believe and practice]]> The CIS figures say that the percentage of people who attend mass in Spain as a whole does not even reach twenty percent of the total population. In Catalonia, the percentage drops to less than half. The number of believers is higher, as we know, than those who actually practice. If we are talking about Roman Catholicism, this must oblige us to do something; the simple rhetorical manifestation of faith should not be enough. Almost half of the population defines themselves as atheist, agnostic, or indifferent. And perhaps the most noteworthy thing would be to know if it is more in the common good's interest for us to be Christians or not, or if things would collectively go better for us if there were an agreement, of Christian roots, among all of us. The visit of Pope Leo XIV to our country serves to make us ask many questions, especially seeing once again the fervor that a Holy Father arouses, far above what a pop star or any other civilian figure can motivate. All this passion has a point of stridency and comedy, even ugliness and posturing, and it forces us to ask ourselves why, while seemingly so devout and good people, we live in a society so unequal, unnecessarily violent, selfish, intolerant, and dismissive of differences. And it reminds us that the Church has been a den of criminals and pedophiles, protected by the curia, still an authority that seeks more to protect than to collaborate with justice and side with the victims. It is absolutely abominable. Because faith and morality must be one thing, and deeds another, and sympathizing with a pedophilia mafia (and art collecting and real estate speculation) must be yet another. I tried to listen to the pope's speech to politicians, but the first thing I thought was that it should not have happened, or not in the seat of popular sovereignty. A religious leader should not give political speeches in a parliamentary chamber, because we are not in an Islamic regime but in a liberal democracy that has separated the state from the Church. Obviously, he did politics there, or expressed his ideas in defense of 'human life', understood as a criticism of abortion and euthanasia. But nevertheless, not even the pope himself must believe what he preaches; he is well aware that neither here nor anywhere else will abortion be prohibited again, and the right to die with dignity is being implemented everywhere, because our life is ours, and not God's or the vicar's. All in all, it gives a rather pathetic whiff of intellectual and political decadence, or of a faith that is not authentic, but rather a faith in faith itself, or a belief in when beliefs used to work. Meaning is the longing for meaning. Even the Pope knows that God is dead and that deep down he lives on nostalgia. Paolo Sorrentino, with his series about popes, has understood all of this in an admirable way: everything is sustained by aestheticism and the will to believe that belief still has a strength that can no longer be drawn from anywhere, because we all know that it only has the entity of comedy or guilty hypocrisy. 

]]> <![CDATA[Does God speak Catalan?]]>

Does God speak Catalan? Undoubtedly, for believers, since He is omnipotent. However, for centuries, the Catholic Church expressed itself in its ceremonies in Latin—the language of the Roman Empire, which threw the first Christians to the beasts of the circus: such are the paradoxes of life. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Second Vatican Council established that Masses would be celebrated in the vernacular: six decades ago, the Church in the Balearic Islands was embroiled in a heated debate about which language that should be. That the vernacular was Catalan had been perfectly clear to the Catholic Church in the Balearic Islands practically since the medieval conquest. Not even the growing centralism of the State made them change their position. The very liberal Bishop of Mallorca, Bernat Nadal, had the catechism published in Catalan in 1801. Bishop Pere Joan Campins created a chair of Mallorcan Language and Literature at the seminary. Bishop Josep Miralles, despite his support for the 1936 coup, had already stood firm against Primo de Rivera's Castilianizing ambitions and, during the early Franco regime, defended preaching in Catalan and published a final edition of the catechism in that language in 1937. Twenty-five years of Franco's dictatorship—a period of peace, as the regime proclaimed; yes, the peace of the cemeteries—and a segment of the Church in the Balearic Islands, as well as a segment of society, understood Castilian as the language of prestige and culture. Not all, of course: in Lluc, as if it were Asterix's village, the priest Pere Riutort promoted textbooks in standard Catalan and distributed copies of the magazine Strong Horse From Barcelona, ​​and upon moving to the Valencian Country, he would continue his work in favor of the presence of Catalan in the ecclesiastical sphere.

]]> <![CDATA[Mass sung by Gatamoix]]>

We humans are the sum of the stories we have inherited and those we have lived. We are also the stories of others. Today we want to share a special, different story: that of people who lived and died in the agricultural colony of Gatamoix at the end of the 19th century. We also want to tell you the odyssey of the La Trobe-Bateman family, English people who came from Northern Europe, who built, furnished, and maintained the colony until, in December 1893, they had to return to London and leave the houses and land they had built in the hands of others. So much life and death have been given to us throughout time.

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