Those who know Octavi Vilà agree on three things: he is a simple man, he truly prays, and he does not avoid dealing with anyone. Doubts arise when someone from Girona is asked if he knows how to govern. The new archbishop of Barcelona arrives at the most powerful see in Catalonia with a singular résumé: an archive scholar who became a monk at 43, an abbot at 53, and a bishop at 62, with barely eleven years of priesthood.
A Tarragona man of the library
Vilà was born in Tarragona on 11 December 1961, the youngest of four siblings in a middle-class Christian family. His father worked at the Caja de Ahorros de Tarragona; his mother devoted herself to the children. He studied at La Salle school, graduated in Geography and History in 1984, and earned a diploma in Library Science in 1987, with later postgraduate studies in information technologies and cultural management, according to his official profile on the Episcopal Conference website. Between 1983 and 2005 he worked in the newspaper archive of Tarragona and served as secretary of the Bibliographic Archive of Santes Creus. He is the great-grandson of a sister of Bishop Joan Baptista Grau, the prelate from Reus who commissioned Gaudí to design the episcopal palace of Astorga, a figure to whom he has dedicated lectures.
He is an avid reader and has left traces of his formation. Asked by the weekly Catalunya Cristiana in 2024 about the books that marked him, he cited The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco; Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity; and a commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict written by a Benedictine nun, Aquinata Böckmann.
A monk at 43
He entered Poblet in July 2005, received the habit in January 2006, and made solemn profession in 2010. Meanwhile, he studied Philosophy and Theology at the Faculty of Theology of Catalonia. His rise within the community was swift: sub-prior in 2014, deacon the same year, priest on 1 May 2015, and abbot on 3 December of that year. The Abbot General of the Cistercians, Mauro Giuseppe Lepori, conferred the abbatial blessing in February 2016.
At Poblet he is remembered as an abbot of intellectual profile, conciliatory and attentive to social reality. He opened the monastery to Ukrainian refugees in 2022 and governed an aging community of some thirty monks in times of scarce vocations.
The abbot of the process
His abbacy coincided with the most tense moment in Catalonia’s recent history, and Vilà did not remain on the sidelines. Shortly after being elected abbot, he told a radio station in Reus that Puigdemont had said he felt at home in Poblet, to which he replied by inviting him to return “whenever he wished.” The former president, who spent summers at the monastery in his youth, visited in 2016.
On 21 September 2017 he signed, together with the abbot of Montserrat, a statement calling on the governments of Barcelona and Madrid for “maximum prudence and responsibility,” defending that the right to political participation must be guaranteed in a democratic state, and reminding rulers of their duty to listen to the majority while respecting the minority. Later he visited the imprisoned pro-independence leaders, both in Madrid and in Catalonia. In 2024 Puigdemont celebrated his appointment as bishop of Girona, the city of which he had been mayor. Vilà, for his part, maintains that the Church then tried to build bridges and that it is advisable for tensions to continue to ease.
Catalan nationalism has not left him with the mitre. In June, on the occasion of Leo XIV’s visit to Barcelona, he joined the bishops who lamented the scant presence of Catalan in the blessing of the tower of Jesus at the Sagrada Família.
What he thinks
Vilà frequently speaks of the Council and cites it as a key to governance. When asked whether a monk could rule a diocese, he replied that those who doubt it have an overly bishop-centered view, adding that the Church, according to Lumen gentium, “goes from the bottom up.” In the same interview he lamented ecclesial polarization and harshly reproved insults against Francis, without a word for the faithful who felt mistreated by that pontificate. He also wrote that the Church must make its voice heard on the right to life, human dignity, and genetic manipulation, following Benedict XVI’s formula of proposing without imposing. In the interviews he has given, however, the defense of life occupies a far more modest place than the welcome of immigrants or lay co-responsibility.
Regarding relations with civil power, his ideal is the French model, each in its own sphere, and he repeats that a bishop must never engage directly in politics, a maxim that his own biography qualifies. On abuses, he acknowledges that the Church handled them poorly for decades, transferring culprits from parish to parish, school to school, or country to country. In 2021, when a monk of Poblet was arrested for touching a five-year-old girl, he proclaimed in the homily that if a brother of the community commits a fault, “the whole community sins,” and offered full cooperation with the justice system.
In a 2025 interview he aimed a dart at Opus Dei, urging it to address abuses of power and conscience, and warned that immigration is easily exploited by populism. There he also described the Church toward which he believes we are moving: less numerous, more convinced and militant, “à la française.” He announced that there would be women leading celebrations of the Word and funeral services in mortuaries, and he has delivered: in Girona he appointed the first woman judge of the ecclesiastical tribunal and entrusted the chancellery and the general secretariat to women. In 2024 he came to Francis’s defense when the Pope’s blunt remark about admitting homosexuals to seminaries came to light, arguing that the Pope had always spoken with respect toward everyone.
Girona, the test of governance
The most demanding Catalan Catholic criticism has followed his time in Girona with attention and an eloquent evolution. When his appointment was announced in March 2024, the signed analyses dripped with distrust: they highlighted his scant pastoral experience outside the walls of Poblet, reproached him for his nationalism, and considered it naïve to entrust the laity with resolving a crisis that, in their view, strikes priests and faithful alike.
A year later the tone softened on a personal level. Narcís Feliu acknowledged his virtues, among them his habit of personally replacing sick parish priests, but portrayed him as a man too timid to stand up to the clergy that, in the columnist’s judgment, has led the diocese to ruin. His thesis was simple: being a good monk and a good person is not enough to govern a diocese. An opinion piece published in InfoVaticana pointed in the same direction: a bishop of little character facing a veteran clerical pressure group, the Fòrum Alsina, and a young community asking for the Traditional Mass and finding no church.
In March 2026 came the disappointment. Oriol Trillas admitted that Vilà had brought serenity, that he was seen throughout the diocese, and that he had avoided nationalist controversies. Immediately afterward he reproached him for his handling of two conflicts in Arenys de Mar: the closure of the Capuchins’ soup kitchen and the loss of two parishes by a priest after a controversy over the presence on the parish council of a man married to another man. Trillas attributed both decisions to yielding to pressure, an interpretation that belongs to the columnist. His conclusion was scathing: “He is beginning to resemble Bishop Planellas. What a disappointment!”
Barcelona, another rung
The portrait left by these voices is coherent and somewhat melancholic. Vilà is respected as a religious: his unostentatious poverty, his wooden cross, his daily prayer, and his closeness to priests and faithful are acknowledged even by his harshest critics. He is questioned as a governor, because humility, a virtue of the monk, can become in a bishop a lack of energy to correct, decide, and confront whoever is necessary.
Girona was a small, aging, and impoverished diocese, with barely two seminarians. Barcelona is the second see of Spain, with a complex curia, a divided clergy, and a society rapidly de-Christianizing. The monk of Poblet will have to prove there that meekness can be accompanied by firmness. Otherwise, Barcelona will have a good and pious archbishop who will administer, with exquisite courtesy, the decline of the Catalan Church.