? Maria Victòria Molins, Viqui, has just turned 88 splendid years. Nobody would say it. If she weren’t because she is a nun, although sometimes she doesn’t seem like it, we would think she had a pact with the devil. But perhaps the reason for this vitality and inexhaustible energy is something else. Viqui has always gone the other way. For her, the words prosper, promote or improve do not have the same meaning as they do for most people. Viqui’s life path is not what most mortals want. She has never wanted to go from the bottom up, she has done it the other way around. From wealth to poverty, from comfort to discomfort, from the ease and placidity of the first world to the difficulties and convulsions generated by misery. From upper to down.
He was born in ’36, into a wealthy family, with service. He lived on Bonanova and later on Rambla Catalunya. He studied at Teresianas, played at Turó Park and enjoyed peaceful summers. He lived a happy childhood, oblivious to the harshest consequences of the war. But her curiosity, or perhaps a certain rebellion on her part, led her to look down. At 19 she became a nun, like many sons and daughters of rich and religious families, but her destiny would be different. The contemplative and cloistered life did not fill her. She experienced the third world in Latin America and Africa but decided that she didn’t have to go that far to lend a hand.
? She descended into a city unknown to her. First with a round trip ticket, she crossed Barcelona every day, from Bonanova to Raval, until she stayed permanently. Living there like another neighbor because only then, she believes, can she be close to the invisible. Only then can they be understood and known by her name. Viqui has ended up living with everything that would have been forbidden to a girl from a good home. Crime and prison, poverty, prostitution, HIV patients when they had no way out and she and another nun, Genoveva Massip, visited them on the ninth floor of the Hospital del Mar. This has been Viqui’s world. She has not been a biological mother or grandmother, but she has ended up being one through adoption by those who no longer had anyone left. She has believed in the mysticism of the street and perhaps that is why she has managed to break many prejudices against the church.
One of the things she is most proud of is having turned the parish of Santa Anna, a few meters from Plaza Catalunya, into a field hospital open to those who have nothing. Perhaps because she once belonged to the world of the rich, or because she is a fighter who sees nothing impossible, she has managed to mobilize, now through the foundation that bears her name, economic resources and efforts in the right direction, from top to bottom. . The same journey that she has taken and that has made her happy, because Viqui is one of the few people who has known happiness in the midst of poverty, perhaps because she has had the privilege and courage to choose it.
