On Monday, August 23rd, when it became known that Pope Francis had accepted the resignation of Xavier Novell as bishop of the diocese of Solsona, for personal reasons, all sorts of theories and rumours went around about what had happened to the clergyman who was once known - and made a name - as the youngest bishop in Spain, at only 41 years of age.
Today it seems that the enigma of his personal motives has been revealed and behind his decision to cease being a pastor of the Catholic Church there is a tender love story. I admit that on Sunday I tried to find out more, while criticism was pouring down on Novell from obstinate sectors set on confusing the way he has left the cloth with his political positioning. Many do not forgive Novell for the fact that, as a bishop, he did not hide the level of sympathy he had with the independence movement and that in 2017 he asked parishioners to participate in the referendum on the independence of Catalonia. When the pro-independence leaders were imprisoned he did not hesitate to visit them in jail.
What the media has explained this weekend is that the former bishop - based a few kilometres from Solsona, in the city of Berga - has a love story with Sílvia, a psychologist with two children from a previous marriage in Morocco, that he has taken sexology courses and is writing an erotic novel. Xavier Novell has decided to start a new life, to which he is entitled, and he deserves the privacy of any citizen, although, in his case, there is a natural interest in his transition from clergyman to layman.
How has the religious hierarchy taken it? Can he return to normal life in the civilian world, in his case in the engineering profession, after being at the head of a bishopric? He also owes an explanation to his parishioners in Solsona, with whom he has been in contact for more than ten years, and whom he left without a farewell, if they did not know about his love story.
They say Novell told those closest to him that he had fallen in love and wanted to do things right. Be that as it may, the truth is that he has tried to face his new life squarely and avoid controversies of the 'yellow press' type. He has not degraded himself like the 69-year-old bishop of Palma de Mallorca, Javier Salinas Viñals, who received the Spanish monarchs at the gates of the city's cathedral every summer, but clung to his post after an intense controversy which featured his secretary, an aristocratic woman from Seville, an offended husband, a wealthy landowner who accused him of adultery and the PP of the Balearic Islands. Novell's departure has been as discreet as a young bishop's resignation allows. He has the right, then, to be given respect and understanding and to live his life as he decides. It is a pity that in his own story as a bishop there are statements in which he has lacked just this respect and understanding of the right which everyone has to choose the way they want to live their lives.