This week’s Sunday Bulletin from the Archdiocese of Barcelona does not limit itself to informing. It points out. And it points out with a loaded, thick, morally infamous word: xenophobes. This is how it labels—without nuances—those who opposed the presence of illegal immigrants housed in the B9, in Badalona.
Not criminals. Not traffickers. Not mafias. Not administrations that look the other way.
No. Xenophobes, the neighbors.
The scene is already known: a popular neighborhood, an occupied or enabled facility without consensus, a disorderly arrival of people in an irregular situation, coexistence problems, fear, tension. And in response to that, citizens who protest. Some rightly. Others perhaps clumsily. But citizens, after all.
From the episcopal palace, far from the doorway that opens at dawn and the elevator that stops working, the response is simple: moral reproach. The seal. The label. Xenophobia.
This is not the Church’s social doctrine. It is ideological rhetoric.
Because opposing illegal and uncontrolled immigration is not hating the foreigner. It is stating a fact: without law there is no charity, and without order there is no possible welcome. The Church has always taught this. Always. With borders, with legitimate authority, with primacy of the common good.
And opposing occupation—yes, even when occupation is disguised as “social emergency”—is not a lack of solidarity: it is basic defense of justice. Property is not a bourgeois whim; it is a natural right recognized by Catholic doctrine itself.
But Omella prefers the shortcut. The same as always. The one from exhausted ecclesial progressivism: if you don’t agree, you are morally suspect.
Thus, the bishop does not confront the real problem—the political irresponsibility, the collapse of services, the abandonment of neighborhoods—but blames the neighbor. The one who lives there. The one who pays. The one who suffers the consequences.
Talking about welcome is easy when it doesn’t affect your street.
Preaching openness is comfortable when you don’t share the staircase.
Calling “xenophobe” is simple when it’s not you who loses.
This is not pastoral care. It is propaganda in a cassock.
And yes, all this depends on Cardinal Omella. Not on a distracted editor or a misunderstood phrase. On a sustained, reiterated line, and increasingly detached from the social reality of Catalonia.
The Church cannot afford to insult its own people while absolving those who have generated the chaos. Because when the shepherd despises the real sheep to look good with the official discourse, he stops shepherding. And starts pontificating from the air.