The other day a work colleague told me that "el catalán me suena payés" (Catalan sounds peasant-like to me). I looked at him intently, mentally calculating the effect it would have if I responded that it's more peasant-like to speak only Spanish and not know even a word of English, as is his case. But I already know how he'd have replied, because I know it off by heart: that his is an important language and that mine, on the other hand, is second-rate.
It's clear that the Catalan language's great problem isn't that it has fewer speakers than Spanish, but that Spaniards in general (except for distinguished exceptions like Juan Manuel de Prada, active Catalanophile) consider it to be, in the best case, a relic of the past, and in the worst case, the obsession of four obstinate secretaries. And in any case, they see it as a second-rate language.
I've argued this topic with people from PSOE and Podemos, people who are apolitical, anarchists and free-thinkers (with people from PP or Ciudadanos I now don't even both trying). At heart, (whether they show it openly or subliminally) putting effort into learning Catalan seems a waste of time to them, a nostalgic eccentricity or an anthropological fixation. And calling for Catalan to get a similar status to Spanish is, simply, an idea for the harebrained.
Believing that Spanish is a more important language than Basque, Galician, Catalan, Danish or French, simply because more people speak it is as stupid as saying that Australia is a more important country than Spain because it's bigger. Importance is a qualitative value, not a quantitative one, and all people have a relationship with their mother tongue which is just as genuine and intense. It's no more "important" the link someone from China has with their mother tongue, regardless of it being the most spoken in the world. It's no more important for someone from the US than someone from Andorra, however many differences there are between the two countries.
Because if some language can be considered more important than the others, it's English, which is the only language which today can be considered truly universal. The other languages, all without distinction, are very important for those for whom they are a mother tongue and useless (as regards a universal communication tool) for everyone else. Nonetheless, curiously, I've not heard a single Anglophone scorn other languages as "second-rate" or "oddities of the past".
We Catalan speakers are users of a minoritised language, that is, a language which has suffered centuries of constant, severe erosion, not as the effect of a natural coexistence with another language, but due to the political action of a state which, independently of who is governing (the military or civilians, from the left or the right) and what form of government they use (dictatorship or monarchy, or both at the same time), has tried to make Spanish the sole language in the whole territory.
The Spanish (and here we can indeed speak of a full agreement between governing elites and the public) believe that Catalan is an oddity condemned to disappear and many of them even think that linguistic euthanasia is fully justified. If there's no change of mentality on the subject in Spain as a whole, we Catalan speakers will always be questions for speaking, teaching and wanting to preserve our language. The other solution is that the Catalan language, some day, stops being a Spanish internal affair. As we say in a universal language, it's a "work in progress".