The missal that the Holy See made public this Monday for the visit of Leo XIV to Barcelona has sparked indignation among both ecclesiastical and civil Catalan nationalists for a reason that should be stated from the very first line: the indignation is aimed at the wrong language. The protest claims that Spanish sidelines Catalan in the Mass of June 10 at the Sagrada Família. What the liturgical script actually documents, however, is that the language displaced from the celebration is not Catalan but Latin—that is, the only language that belongs to neither of the two homelands in dispute and the only one the Church calls its own.
The facts, first. Gaudí’s temple was consecrated in 2010 with Benedict XVI, and that Mass distributed the languages with a recognizable architecture: Catalan in much of the homily and in gestures of the dedication rite, Spanish in another portion, and Latin at the eucharistic heart—the Roman Canon, the sung Our Father, the final Angelus that closed the day. Sixteen years later, the celebration is shorter, there is no longer a dedication rite because the temple is already dedicated, and the balance has shifted. According to the tally published by the portal Catalunya Religió—Catalanist and therefore in no way suspect of minimizing the grievance—Catalan accounts for around twenty percent, Spanish exceeds seventy, and Latin becomes anecdotal. The blessing of the Tower of Jesus Christ, the culminating moment of the Mass and the confessed reason for the trip, will be entirely in Spanish. Where sixteen years ago the Angelus was heard in Latin, this June 10 a blessing will be heard in the language of Cervantes.
Up to this point, the narrative that has taken hold. The nuance that almost no one has wanted to highlight is supplied by Catalunya Religió itself and dismantles the thesis of dispossession: the great prayers of 2010 were not recited in Catalan but in Latin, in accordance with the Roman Canon. The current missal provides that the vast majority of those texts will pass into Spanish. And the Our Father, which in 2010 was sung in Latin, in 2026 will be sung in Catalan. Read slowly, because the consequence is uncomfortable for both sides: Catalan has not lost ground to Spanish at the core of the Mass; it has gained it. What has been expelled from the center of the liturgy, without any entity, foundation, or commentator lamenting it, is Latin. The proper language of the universal Church, the one that precisely does not take sides in the Catalan identity dispute, has been left without a defending advocate in a country where all other languages have their own.
It is worth, in any case, paying attention to who is protesting, because the census of indignation is illustrative. The first reproach is internal and has documentary basis: the organization of the visit had sold the opposite of what the missal records. Father Enric Puig, coordinator of the apostolic visit in Catalonia, had assured that the language question was “resolved” and even stated that the Holy Father would speak in Catalan. The text published by Rome contradicts that expectation: Leo XIV will pronounce in Catalan the initial words of the rite—the sign of the cross and the greeting—and from there will express himself in Spanish. The distance between what was promised in the press conference and what is printed in the missal is the most solid piece of data in the episode, and the one that most justifiably irritates the Catalan signatories of the project.
From there onward, the chorus of complaints is ordered by families. The ecclesiastical-Catalanist one, largely grouped in the Network of Christian Entities, speaks of regression and uprooting. Carles Armengol, director of the Joan Carrera Foundation, describes it as surprising that the result does not correspond to the messages of the Barcelona organization and concludes that we are moving backward. Joan Maluquer, of the Spiritual League of the Mother of God of Montserrat, laments the inability of the Archdiocese of Barcelona to defend the language and diagnoses a Church uprooted in the capital. Father Cinto Busquet, parish priest of the Maresme, puts it with revealing resignation: the Pope will do what the organization has laid out for him, and it would have cost him nothing to give the blessing in Catalan. The second family is the secular one, which joins in with predictable enthusiasm: Pilar Rahola sums up the tone with “they slight our language in our own country.” And the third, symmetrical, is that of Spanish nationalism of the opposite sign, which celebrates the missal as a victory and describes the complainants as a coalition of separatists, Freemasons, and the radical left bent on boycotting the Pope.
The complete picture has something of a comedy of errors. Three distinct tribes read the same liturgical document as if it were a ballot paper, and each proclaims having won or lost according to the count of words in its language. No one disputes the theological substance of the Mass; they dispute its linguistic distribution as one distributes parliamentary seats. The liturgy, which by definition is the place where the Church speaks with God and not with itself, has been turned into a record of linguistic sovereignty that each side signs or challenges.
The director of Catalunya Religió, Jordi Llisterri, offers the soberest and probably most accurate explanation: the shift is due to the fact that in 2010 the distribution was worked out between the Archdiocese of Barcelona and the Holy See, whereas now the organization largely passes through commissions in Madrid. His verdict—that someone has been far from precise—applies as much to Catalan as to Latin. The bureaucracy of a papal visit that will travel through the Canary Islands, Madrid, and Catalonia between June 6 and 12 has homogenized the language toward Spanish through administrative channels, not through a doctrinal decision about Catalan. It is the laziness of the forms, not the design of the bishops, that best explains the missal.
There remains the historical irony, which in this case is not rhetorical but factual. The Mass of June 10 coincides with the centenary of Gaudí’s death, a confessed Catalanist whom Primo de Rivera’s police detained in 1924 for refusing to speak Spanish on his way to Mass. Leo XIV will proclaim him “architect of God” in a celebration in which his language will occupy one-fifth of the time. The paradox is real and will generate headlines. But it should not overshadow the other, more serious one for anyone who looks at the liturgy as liturgy: in the tallest temple of Christendom, built stone by stone as a vertical catechesis, the language that the Church chose centuries ago to understand itself above borders and flags has been left with no one to claim it. Catalan has platforms; Spanish has a State; Latin only had the Church, and the Church, busy arbitrating between the two homelands, has left it at the door of the temple.