The Vatican and Catalanism

Although the controversial three days of mourning decreed by the Generalitat (Catalan government) for the death of Francis disguise the situation, the relationship between the Vatican and Catalan nationalism has always been complex. The Vatican's mistrust began at the end of the 19th century with Josep Torres i Bages, the bishop who declared that "Catalonia will be Christian or it will not be." In the 1920s, the apostolic nuncio to Spain, Federico Tedeschini, warned Rome that Catalonia wanted to secede. The origins of this mistrust have been recounted by the priest Ramon Corts in his work based on the archives of the Holy See.

In the 1930s, with the arrival of the Second Republic, Cardinal Francesc d'Assís Vidal i Barraquer was instrumental in mediating between the Generalitat of Francesc Macià and Pius XI's prevention of autonomy that could have implied a separation of religious powers. At the beginning of the Civil War, the government of Lluís Companys saved Vidal from death at the hands of anarchists.

The Vatican's distrust began at the end of the 19th century with Torres i Bages

Until the early 1960s, Pius XII allowed the Catalan Church to be subordinated to Franco's National Catholicism and looked the other way when language and culture were repressed. It wasn't until the rise of John XXIII and Paul VI with the Second Vatican Council, which opened the Church to cultural and linguistic pluralism in the liturgy, that some ecclesiastical circles were able to embrace anti-Franco Catalanism.

Josep Tarradellas closely followed this process, recalling the aforementioned periods. The president, who drew from the secular tradition of the French Republic, did not want to mix politics and religion. In 1977, he interceded with the archbishopric of Tarragona to prevent the bishops from attending his return. Despite his affection for Vidal i Barraquer, he also did not want his government to attend the return of the cardinal's remains from Switzerland to Tarragona in May 1978. He paid tribute to him a few days later.

When Jordi Pujol became president, there was a regression in this approach. The religiosity of his nationalism led him to make his first trip abroad to the Vatican in January 1981. Despite his audience with John Paul II, the Holy See was one of the governments that least responded to the president's efforts, as his communications chief, Ramon Pedrós, recounted in Jordi Pujol, Cara y Cruz de una leyenda (2004).

Since then, Catalan nationalism has been content to try to read between the lines in the speeches or applaud every time Benedict XVI and Francis uttered a few sentences in Catalan. A mood well reflected in Oriol Junqueras's recent article in this newspaper. When, in 1988, thousands of pilgrims led by Pujol flocked to the Vatican to commemorate the millennium of Catalonia, in an effort to reach out, they ended up hissing at John Paul II for addressing them barely three sentences in Catalan during his welcome. Bishop Pere Tena admonished them. "What the Pope does is proportionate to what we are in the universal Church." Heavenly harshness for earthly autonomy.