There was a time — dark and golden — when the men of the Church, when they wanted to get rid of an enemy, resorted to poison, the dagger or, failing that, a well-drafted bull.
They were the Borgias, of course.
They had style.
They had craft.
They had, above all, the elegance of not pretending they were acting for the good of the victims.
Mons. Jordi Bertomeu is no Borgia.
He lacks the Renaissance, he has too much microphone and, above all, he is undone by something no cardinal of five centuries ago would have allowed himself: the face of circumstances.
A Borgia who poisoned smiled afterwards.
Bertomeu, when he excommunicates, does so with a contrite expression, like someone lamenting another’s misfortune.
Because we are talking about the priest who in 2024 managed to slip onto the table of an elderly and exhausted Pope a penal precept against two Peruvian laymen, Caccia and Blanco.
Their crime?
Having denounced him.
That the denounced should obtain the excommunication of the denouncer is a literary genre that not even Stendhal would have attempted.
Too implausible.
Francis, when he learned what they had made him sign, revoked the decree in his own hand.
A Borgian detail, this one: the Pope correcting the courtier.
Pity the courtier.
There is something profoundly commedia dell’arte about this character.
The liquidator who confesses he does not know what he is liquidating.
The repairer who gathers twelve victims to sign a communiqué in his own defense, written in canon-lawyer Spanish and speaking about people absolutely foreign to them.
The instructor who complains about the media echo he himself provokes with every call to the newsroom.
The commissioner who if you criticize him he excommunicates you or pulls a false complaint out of the drawer.
The anti-corruption crusader who, while reading these lines — he will not even have finished the article, will be telephoning Religión Digital or El País (depending on the budget) to urgently commission a laudatory column with flattering photographs.
Something shameful.
Something, above all, tacky: because the Borgias were many things, but tacky they were not.
And here is something that needs clarifying, because it disconcerts even the person signing these lines.
We are not Sodalites.
We have nothing to do with the Sodalicio, nor with Figari, nor with its false charisma, nor with the network of complicities that for decades protected that disaster.
In fact, from within the Sodalicio itself we have been asked on more than one occasion to stop pointing at Bertomeu, as if criticizing the commissioner were doing the intervened body a favor.
It is not.
That the liquidator is an inept and negligent ecclesiastical official does not turn the liquidated into an innocent victim.
They are two different things.
That the Church has chosen for this mission a man whose main proven competence is self-promotion does not exonerate the Sodalicio of anything.
It only shows that the Holy See, at times, has a very peculiar sense of humor when choosing its instruments.
The Borgias, at least, were sharp instruments.
Bertomeu is an instrument that looks at itself in the mirror.
And while it looks, it leaves as precedent a canonical botch that for decades will weaken the Law of the Church.
That, yes, is a poison.
Slow, effective, irreversible.
He has merit: he has found the way to harm the institution from within and get applauded for it.
Borgia would have been too much flattery. Let us settle for what he is: Jordi the Excommunicator.
A minor character of an age without greatness.
And, like all minor characters with a vocation for protagonist, profoundly, irredeemably, ridiculous.