On December 19, in the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona will have as archbishop a man who was ordained a priest eleven and a half years earlier. The sequence of Octavi Vilà Mayo fits in a single line: presbyter on May 1, 2015, abbot of Poblet seven months later, bishop of Girona in February 2024, and archbishop-elect since November 11. What public sources record about that trajectory goes beyond the profile of a monk with a late vocation. There is an abbacy marked by a collective dismissal, a community that his successor last year put at 17 monks, and the arrest of a religious for touching a girl, a case for which no sentence is known. There are two statements signed in September and October 2017, at the height of the independence process. And there are two and a half years in Girona that leave the diocese with six archpriestships where there had been thirteen.
Tarragona, December 11, 1961, and the classrooms of La Salle are the starting point. The University of Barcelona awarded him a degree in Geography and History in 1984 and a diploma in Library Science and Documentation in 1987, to which he added two postgraduate degrees, in new information technologies and in cultural management. His working life took place in the newspaper archive of Tarragona, from 1983 to 2005. In those years he accumulated positions in the lay environment of Poblet and Santes Creus: the secretariat and vice-presidency of the Bibliographic Archive of Santes Creus since 1998, the secretariat of the Brotherhood of Poblet since 2000, with Ramon Mullerat as president, and that of the Poblet Board of Trustees since 2003, as well as a seat on the board of the Montserrat Tarradellas i Macià archive, which the monastery holds. When in July 2005 he knocked on the abbey’s door, at the age of 43, he had already spent five years sitting on its lay governing bodies. Diari de Tarragona recalled in October, when reporting on a lecture he gave at the Centre de Lectura in Reus, a little-known family connection: Vilà is the great-grandson of Maria del Carme, sister of Joan Baptista Grau, the bishop of Astorga who commissioned Gaudí to design the episcopal palace.
In Poblet the path was swift. Temporary vows came in January 2007 and solemn profession on August 15, 2010. The Faculty of Theology of Catalonia had him as a student between 2007 and 2015 and granted him a licentiate in Systematic Theology. The biography of the Episcopal Conference lists him as superior in May 2014. On May 1, 2015 he received priestly ordination and on December 3 the community elected him abbot; the abbatial blessing took place on February 27, 2016. From that ceremony remains one of his phrases: “I am abbot for you, I am a monk with you.” On December 2, 2021 came the community’s confirmation, extending his crozier until the canonical age. As abbot he presided over the Cistercian Congregation of the Crown of Aragon, sat on the General Chapter and the Synod of the Order, and headed the board of the Tarradellas archive.
His abbacy coincided with the central years of the independence process. Crónica Global places the abbot at the inauguration of Carles Puigdemont as president of the Generalitat and reproduces the dialogue of that day: “Poblet is my house,” the president told him upon learning which monastery he came from, and the abbot left the door open. The invitation had its effect: the president returned on a private visit, prayed and ate with the community, and stayed almost the entire day. At the end of March 2017 the visitor was the Hispanist John H. Elliott. A chronicle by Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo in El Mundo, then cited by the blog Germinans Germinabit, records that the abbot asked him about the parallel between 1640 and the situation at that moment and about the heirs of the Count-Duke of Olivares. Crónica Global reads in that second question an allusion to the government of Mariano Rajoy.
On September 21, 2017, ten days before the illegal referendum, his signature and that of the abbot of Montserrat, Josep Maria Soler, closed a joint statement. Two ideas structured the text: a call for prudence and responsibility on the part of the Catalan and Spanish governments, with dialogue as the way out, and the obligation to serve the common good by listening to the voice of the majority. On October 3, two days after the vote, a second statement appeared with eight signatures: those of Soler and Vilà, those of five abbesses and prioresses, and that of the prior of Solius. Four assertions summarize it: a Catalan political and social movement that has been “immensely and overwhelmingly peaceful” from the beginning, the condemnation of violence in all its forms, the rejection of unnecessary force, whether from a group or from public authority, and the demand for negotiated solutions.
Then came the visits to the imprisoned independence leaders. Ara, Catalunya Religió and Hispanidad take them for granted, although none of the three specifies dates, prisons or names. Nació Digital attributes to him, without dating it, a statement of sorrow for “the exiles and the imprisoned.” Ara summarizes his position in those years as support for the so-called right to decide and for a dialogue that would not override the will of the Catalans. The nationalist label does not fit him, in the view of Hispanidad. Puigdemont publicly celebrated his appointment to Girona in 2024. Crónica Global also attributes to him dealings with Oriol Junqueras.
On July 20, 2020 the visitors were the King and Queen, with the abbot and the prior, Rafel Barruè, waiting for them at the monastery door. The entourage included Minister Salvador Illa and the Government Delegate, Teresa Cunillera, and no representative of the Catalan Executive. The protest, called by Òmnium, the ANC and the CDR, gathered about five hundred people and ended with some police charges and one detainee. From February 2025, already in Girona, comes his assessment in Ara: a lower political tension than in 2017 and a Church that then wanted to build bridges and found it hard to find common ground.
That same year 2017 left another encounter in Poblet. From June 9 to 11, as this medium reported on November 12, the Catalan bodies of the Supreme Council of the 33rd Degree met in the monastery, with the then Síndic de Greuges as speaker. Neither of the two sources documenting that meeting mentions the abbot or specifies in which premises it was held. The news archive of the Supreme Council itself now allows an additional detail to be added: of the Catalan meetings it records between 2017 and 2025, the one in Poblet is the only one held in a monastery. For the others it gives the city or the county and, in a single case, the venue: a hotel in Granollers.
Poblet also preserves the memory of the Duke of Wharton, founder in Madrid of the first Spanish lodge, buried in 1731 in the church atrium. In 1952 the slab lost its place in the temple, and outside the wall the Spanish Wikipedia places it. The local historian Josep Maria Vallès i Martí maintains something else. In an article published in February 2023 in the journal Cultura i Paisatge he dates to December 13, 2017, following dampness in the chapel of Saint Benedict, the return of the slab and the remains to their original location, and places them since then in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, in the galilee, which is the church atrium. Vilà had then been abbot for two years. The information rests on that single source and arrives without documentary support.
Behind the external guesthouse, opened in 2010, was the Fundació Populus Alba, the private entity that runs the monastery’s economy. Its presidency fell in 2021 to the abbot himself. The closure came on May 21, 2021. Nine days later Diari de Tarragona reported that the foundation had notified the workers, after thirteen months of a temporary lay-off scheme, of a collective dismissal affecting 15 of the 22 employees of the complex. The staff recalled that the 7.6 million euros for the building had come from public funds. Losses in accommodation was the foundation’s argument; “bad management,” the reproach of those dismissed. The building’s second life began on July 1, 2022 and bears the signature of Petits Hotels, the company that operates it. The reopening chronicle published by Catalunya Religió attributed to Vilà a conviction: without clients of all kinds the accounts would not balance. Business tourism, congresses and weddings: that was the market it was aiming for. The horizon of financial recovery that his successor, Rafel Barruè, gave in April 2025 to the Agència Catalana de Notícies is 2032, after years of losses.
From that same conversation comes the state of the community. There were 17 monks, four of them in the infirmary. Barruè counts himself as the 33rd monk on the day he entered; roughly half have been lost along the way. The last two solemn professions date from January 2020. The novitiate of the pandemic, seven aspirants, ended without a single perseverance. Between that January and Vilà’s departure to Girona, four years passed without the abbey adding a single solemnly professed monk. In 2024, after the election of the new abbot, Diari de Tarragona put the community at around twenty.
In the summer of 2021 the abbey faced the arrest of one of its monks. The arrest, carried out by the Mossos d’Esquadra on August 25, fell on a 68-year-old religious to whom touching a five-year-old girl was attributed. The reported facts took place ten days earlier, on August 15, in the monastery square, in daylight, after Mass and with the parents present. The complaint was signed by a German tourist and included a photograph. The following day two different messages left the monastery. The first, official, bore the abbot’s signature: the community’s consternation, solidarity with the girl and her family, and three precautionary measures for the monk—outside all pastoral activity, without leaving the enclosure and without capitular rights—plus a canonical investigation. The second was reported by TV3 from an unidentified monastery spokesperson: a “witch hunt” and an abuse that, at that hour and in that place, did not seem credible. The same expression is put by VilaWeb in the mouth of Tòfol Trepat, whom it presents as president of the Poblet board of trustees and for whom those were not sexual touches but a possible misunderstanding by the tourist.
The monk’s judicial statement, that same August 26, contained the admission of a single touch, according to monastery sources cited by the Agència Catalana de Notícies. The release on charges decided by the duty court of Valls was accompanied by periodic appearances, withdrawal of the passport, prohibition to leave Spain and an order not to approach the girl or communicate with her. The investigation corresponded to the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 3 of Valls. The homily at the conventual Mass on Sunday the 29th was the abbot’s personal response: a community ashamed and repentant, turned into “a stumbling block for believers and non-believers,” and the idea that a brother’s fault is the sin of all. What came afterward is known through his successor. Barruè’s account to the same agency, in April 2025, has four parts. The first, an out-of-court agreement with the family, still unsigned, with financial compensation and a 200-meter distance, which would not be final until there was a trial date. The second, a complaint: justice is moving “excessively slowly.” The third, the monk’s absence from the church liturgy, which the family frequented. The fourth, a protocol for the protection of minors drawn up with the Fundació Vicki Bernadet, in application but still without the monks’ signature. Since then no resolution, judicial or canonical, has been recorded.
The next destination was Girona, by appointment of Francis on February 29, 2024. The see had been vacant since the death of Francesc Pardo on March 31, 2022, and Ara highlighted the historical leap: 593 years without a monk in it. The episcopal ordination took place on April 21 in the cathedral. From the interview he gave those days to La Vanguardia two ideas remained: abuses, handled “incorrectly” for many years, and parishes, which he did not intend to close although he did plan to group their faithful in the larger ones for Sunday Mass. Catalunya Cristiana, which interviewed him as bishop-elect, then put the diocese at around 380 parishes spread across thirteen archpriestships, 110 incardinated priests and two seminarians. From that conversation comes an idea he attributed to the conciliar constitution Lumen gentium: “the Church goes from the bottom up,” and its starting point is the people, not the episcopate.
The balance of his first two years appeared in Diari de Girona. Agència Flama summarized that May 2026 interview with an admission by the bishop, that the organization of the territory called for a review, and with the figures that explain it: 381 parishes, four seminarians and a clergy with an average age of over 73. The headline was his: “Now Catholics are so by conviction, not by inertia.” The review came on July 28 with three decrees. The main one reduced the thirteen archpriestships to six and gave them names of Marian shrines; another opened a consultation to designate the new archpriests, already appointed this autumn. In matters of abuse his management leaves three facts: a diocesan commission based outside the bishopric, the closure of two cases that remained open with the accused already deceased, and a face-to-face request for forgiveness from the person who had suffered the abuse. The data come from his February 2025 interview with Ara, the same one in which abuse of power and of conscience merited a phrase with a recipient: “the Opus Dei must work on this aspect, evidently.”
In that same interview immigration appears as easy material for populism, and the Church as a place where integration also occurs through language. The papal blessing of the tower of Jesus of the Sagrada Familia, in June 2026, gave him occasion to apply it: he had to speak in Catalan, he came to say, while from the archdiocese of Barcelona came a categorical denial of any agreement in that sense. Catalan did end up entering the ceremony, as this medium then reported. Arenys de Munt and Sant Iscle de Vallalta lost in February, by decision signed by the bishop, the rector they had received five months earlier, who provisionally retained Arenys de Mar. The official explanation was the care of some relatives; the municipal radio station’s included possible disagreements in the parish. An opinion piece published in this medium in September stated that the community requesting the traditional Mass in the diocese remains without a church. Hispanidad summarizes his Girona period in three words: “he went unnoticed.” The most resounding praise comes from the mayor of Girona, Lluc Salellas, of the CUP, who sees almost no one better for Barcelona.
The succession to Omella was prepared for months. Catalunya Religió dates the formal start of the process to June, around the papal visit, and attributes the final consultations to Nuncio Piero Pioppo. The same medium said the cardinal was satisfied and brought up his friendship with Josep Alegre, the abbot who preceded Vilà. Religión Confidencial maintains that his candidacy had behind it high officials of the Generalitat, that the Catalan Government moved intensely in Rome and Madrid, and that the archbishop of Tarragona, Joan Planellas, was one of the main backers of a Catalan-born archbishop. Hispanidad states, on the contrary, that Omella would have preferred Florencio Roselló, archbishop of Pamplona. Crónica Global reports the satisfaction of sources in the Govern and the reservations of anonymous ecclesiastical sources about the intellectual and theological formation of the chosen candidate. Against those reservations stand the licentiate in Systematic Theology in his official biography and the public judgment of Omella, who has described him as a man “intellectually prepared.”
He learned of the appointment on October 27, from the nuncio, and gave his consent. Girona occupied the first place in what he conveyed: that the diocese should not again go long without a bishop. From his appearance on the day of the announcement also remains this phrase: “They have come as they have come; I have never sought these responsibilities.” The following day he was in Girona, concelebrating with Planellas. Several questions remain without public answer: where Wharton’s slab is today and who decided to move it, how the monk’s case has ended, by what criterion the guesthouse admitted meetings such as the one in June 2017, and what accounts were left by the foundation the abbot presided over.
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