The archbishop of Barcelona and president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Joan Josep Omella, has expressed surprise at the controversy raised on social networks after he told Pope Francis that the blessing of the participants in the pilgrimage to Rome of the brotherhood of The Virgin of Montserrat for its 800th anniversary of its foundation was in Spanish. “There has been a mess that left me astonished and surprised,” he said in an interview on RAC1.
During the event, which took place on October 7, the Pope asked the archbishop “Shouldn’t it be in Catalan?” “No,” Omella responded. This Tuesday, the president of the EEC gave his version of what happened in El món to RAC1.
“The Pope comes in and asks me if it was in Catalan or Spanish. I looked and saw that the paper was in Spanish and I told him “in Spanish.” I saw the title in Catalan—Deu de misericòrdia—, but the text in Spanish,” he clarified. Furthermore, he points out that nothing written comes from the Vatican. “This was prepared by the monks of Montserrat, they sent it to the Vatican Secretariat of State—the texts and the ideas—and they sent the prayer.”
Omella also points out that “the Pope does not know how to speak Catalan and had not prepared himself.” And, despite that, the archbishop himself, who does know how to speak it, prepared a greeting for him in Catalan. “I told him ‘the greeting and reflection are in Spanish. At least say ‘bon dia a tots’. I helped him say hello in Catalan. And people liked this.”
Sources from the Archbishopric have already pointed out that these types of events are very planned and everything is scheduled, and they remember that the Pope usually uses Italian and Spanish. In addition, they noted that at the beginning of the audience, the Pope greeted in Catalan. The dialogue about the language of the text that the pope was to read occurs precisely while the last notes of a song in Catalan were finishing. The video in which you can see this sequence is posted on the Facebook of the Montserrat Abbey.
