One learns quickly, in the Church as in any office, that rewards do not always follow merit, but rarely is the lesson laid out with the clarity of this Friday. At noon, the Holy See announced that Leo XIV has appointed Fernando Murga Gómez and Andrés Martínez Esteban as auxiliary bishops of Madrid, giving Cardinal José Cobo four once again. That same day, Juan José Omella was approaching six months since turning eighty and five and a half years since submitting his resignation, and Barcelona still did not know who its archbishop would be. Both dioceses received the Pope the same week in June. One received him with Gaudí, with Latin, and with a host who knew how to make himself small. The other received him with its archbishop. Rome has rewarded the second.
Barcelona’s case deserves to be recalled with precision, because ecclesiastical memory is short when it suits. On June 10, the centenary of Gaudí’s death, the Pope celebrated Mass at the Sagrada Família in Spanish, Catalan, and Latin, and afterward blessed from the esplanade the tower of Jesus Christ, the one hundred seventy-two and a half meters that have made the basilica the tallest church in the world, crowned by a cross that Leo XIV himself compared in the homily to a beacon open to the Mediterranean. The liturgy was sober and vertical, suited to the mystery it celebrated, and the stone did what Gaudí’s stone always does: preach without a microphone. The host understood the matter. Omella had dispatched the welcome at the cathedral in a couple of minutes, in both languages and without pretensions; at the Sagrada Família he limited himself to a few final words of thanks in which he also had the elegance to recognize his predecessor, Cardinal Martínez Sistach, for the merit of having brought the temple to completion. Throughout his part of the trip, according to the count published at the time by this outlet, he spoke for a total of ten to twelve minutes. The man who had the most photographed stage of the week chose not to appear in the photo. Eugeni d’Ors once wrote that everything that is not tradition is plagiarism; in Barcelona, for two days, tradition was celebrated and no one plagiarized anything.
In Madrid the opposite occurred, and it happened six times. Cobo at the CEDIA center in Carabanchel. Cobo at the vigil in Plaza de Lima. Cobo at the Corpus Christi Mass in Cibeles. Cobo at the Movistar Arena. Cobo before the Virgin of Almudena. Cobo at the Bernabéu. Six interventions in three days, between twenty and twenty-five minutes of accumulated speech before the Pope and the cameras, greetings that were in fact homilies of four, five, and even six minutes with their own thesis, always placed in the instant just before the Pontiff’s words, when the audience is at its peak and patience at its lowest. He climbed into the popemobile, handed out gifts, barely left his side. One came to suspect that the apostolic journey had two protagonists and that one of them had come from Rome to listen to the other. In Carabanchel he spoke to us of invisible cities, and one thought of Calvino, of Marco Polo describing to Kublai Khan cities no one has seen while the emperor listens in silence; with the difference that the Khan, at least, had asked. In Cibeles he proclaimed that the Church is not called to raise walls but to open doors. At the Movistar Arena, to whose meeting the archdiocese had invited the Crismhom collective, he discoursed on the threats undermining the civilization of human rights and democracy, with a lexicon that any international organization could have signed and that, precisely for that reason, did not need a Pope present to be pronounced.
To the overacting of the word was added that of the scene. The Madrid events were wrapped in that aesthetic of pastel colors, animator dynamics, and scripted testimonies that seems designed so that no one is frightened of anything, not even of the real presence of God, and that reduces the visit of the Vicar of Christ to a day of activities at a private school, to put it mildly and charitably. It was a simultaneous assault on intelligence and on aesthetics, and the two charges should not be separated, because in worship ugliness is never innocent. Lex orandi, lex credendi, sums up the old formula that goes back to Prosper of Aquitaine, and admits a domestic version: what is seen teaches what is believed. What was seen in Madrid taught that what mattered was the host.
The Gospel has foreseen this case with an exactness that should unsettle more than one prelate. When you give alms, the Lord warns in the sixth chapter of Saint Matthew, noli tuba canere ante te, do not sound a trumpet before you to be praised by men: amen dico vobis, receperunt mercedem suam, truly I tell you, they have received their reward. Until this Friday one read the verse in an eschatological key; Leo XIV has turned it into a chronicle. The reward has come in the form of two miters, and both come from home. Murga, a Bilbao native born in 1965, an architect before a priest, is moderator of the Madrid Curia, a post he himself described in July as a kind of personnel chief, and was the technical coordinator of the Madrid leg of the trip; it would be unfair to blame him for the pastel color, but the technical coordination of those days was his. Martínez Esteban, a Madrid native born in 1971, doctor in Church History from the Gregorian and former director of the Diocesan Archive, is vicar general of the Ordinariate for the Eastern faithful, whose ordinary is, of course, Cobo himself. Canon 377 entrusts the diocesan bishop who needs an auxiliary to propose to the Holy See a list of at least three priests, and Cobo has also sat since 2023 on the Dicastery for Bishops. The appointments were signed, according to what has been published, before the Pope entered the Gemelli on the 13th. On June 15 he had already written to Cobo to thank him for the welcome. Now he has answered with facts.
It will be said, rightly, that Madrid needed auxiliaries. Jesús Vidal left for Segovia in December 2024 and José Antonio Álvarez died a little over a year ago, so Cobo had been governing for some time with half the bishops he had had. That is true. Barcelona has been waiting for a successor since April 2021, which is a somewhat older need, and the lack of an auxiliary is made up for by sharing the agenda, while the lack of a successor is made up for by no one.
Barcelona is left with the rest of the passage: et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi, and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. Omella turned eighty on April 21 and that same day, by the norm Paul VI set in 1970 for cardinals, lost his vote in a possible conclave and ceased to belong to the Dicastery for Bishops, of which he had been a member since 2014. He remained outside the Sistine and outside the body that must propose his successor, but inside the episcopal palace and with all his faculties. No canon prevents it: 401 requests resignation at seventy-five and leaves it to the Pope to decide when to accept it. Francis, as Omella himself recounted, had announced his retirement at eighty, and accepted Schönborn’s on the exact day he turned eighty. Leo XIV, a canonist by training, has let April, the visit, the summer, and the feast of Our Lady of Mercy pass. The reward of what is hidden is being in Barcelona so hidden that even the interested party does not seem to have seen it arrive, or he has seen it and keeps silent: when on October 8 he was asked about the secret of his replacement, he joked that that is what being a bishop and cardinal is for.
There are explanations, and it is only fair to give them. No one was going to replace the host before the visit he himself had gone to ask for in Rome, and according to Catalunya Religió the process did not officially begin until June, when Nuncio Piero Pioppo made the final consultations to close the terna. At the end of September Ara reported that the three months of courtesy after the visit had been exhausted and the succession was a done deal; since early October, Catalunya Religió and El Nacional have pointed to the bishop of Girona, the Cistercian Octavi Vilà, former abbot of Poblet, as the best-placed name, and place the announcement before the end of the month, not before Omella returns from giving spiritual exercises to priests in Marseille. All that explains Barcelona’s calendar. It does not explain why Madrid has gone ahead, nor does it answer the question one ends up asking: what does Barcelona have that deserves to be postponed. It is not a minor see nor a quiet one, and perhaps that is the answer. In Barcelona every ecclesial sensibility has its candidate, the circle of the outgoing archbishop, Catalanism, those hoping for a turn, those counting on backers in the Roman dicasteries, and none has a majority, so any name leaves the other three wounded. Plucking the daisy of a see like that is not a formality: each petal pulled is someone who must be told no, and in Rome it has always been cheaper not to decide than to say no. If in the end it is Vilà, the Curia will have found the most curial formula imaginable, a Catalan monk, a bridge man, as the Catalan press calls him, whom no one can present as anyone’s defeat. Finding him will have taken six months. In Madrid there was no daisy. It was enough to say yes to whoever asked, and Cobo, if he has shown anything this year, is that he knows how to ask out loud.
It is a pity that it is precisely Barcelona that receives this treatment. The diocese that best understood that when Peter comes the local bishop makes himself small, the one that gave the pontificate its most beautiful image, a cross lit over the city at one hundred seventy meters high, receives in return four months of silence and an archbishop whom the law has removed from the conclave and from the Curia, but not from his see. Madrid, which offered pastel and six speeches, debuts four auxiliaries. The lesson that the Spanish episcopate will draw from this autumn does not appear in any document of the Episcopal Conference, but it will be learned better than all of them: the trumpet works. One believes, because the Gospel says so, that the Father who sees in secret will eventually reward Barcelona. The Gospel does not specify the deadline, and the Curia, as usual, has decided to interpret the silence of the text with generosity. Receperunt mercedem suam. In Madrid, Cobo has already collected. In Barcelona, we shall see.
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