A Pope In Mallorca

On 31 October 1982 at just before four in the afternoon, an Alitalia Boeing 727 entered Spanish airspace coming from the east. The Boeing was greeted by three Mirage fighter planes based in Palma. They escorted the Boeing along an air route that had started in Alguero in Sardinia and which crossed Mallorca from Manacor to Palma and continued to Valencia on the mainland. At two minutes past four on that afternoon, the plane was 10,000 metres above Palma and at precisely that moment, the great bell of the cathedral, N'Aloy, rang out. Bells of all churches across the island also rang, while boats in ports blasted out their sirens and one hundred doves of peace were released.

This was the occasion of the first papal visit to Spain in modern times. Pope John Paul II came to Spain ostensibly for the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of Teresa of Ávila (Saint Teresa of Jesus). He was to visit Spain on four more occasions. About the closest he got to Mallorca were those 10,000 metres above Palma, his Boeing accompanied by the three Mirage jets.

Popes of the modern day didn't used to travel. They never left Italy. It was Pope Paul VI, John Paul's predecessor, who got in touch with the modern world by venturing abroad, but unlike John Paul, he didn't get around that much. He never came to Spain, for instance. John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, visited Spain three times, but in all this roughly fifty years of papal travel Mallorca has not been blessed by a papal visit.

The occasionally tempestuous history of the papacy does offer Mallorca some consolation for having been overlooked if only very tenuously. From the time of the so-called Papal Schism of the late fourteenth century, there were different popes, one of whom was a much earlier Benedict (the thirteenth). Known also as the Moon Pope, Benedict was an anti-pope who, at the time of being excommunicated, was calling himself Benedict XIII. He established himself at Peñíscola Castle in Valencia and maintained that he was the one and only pope until the moment he passed away in 1424.

When Benedict died, there were two rival successors, both anti-popes following a previous anti-pope. One was Benedict XIV, while the other was a cardinal named Gil Sánchez Muñoz, who took the name Clement VIII and who, for five years after Benedict's death, clung on to an increasingly absurd idea that he was the pope and no one else; as also did Benedict XIV. Eventually, Clement basically just got sick and tired of all the politics and the pretence, relinquished any claim he had and patched things up with the by then real pope, Martin V.

So, how does this offer some consolation for Mallorca? Well, it was what Clement did next which allows the island to boast that it has had a little bit of popedom in the dim and distant past. Clement, once more Gil, was forgiven by Martin and appointed the Bishop of Mallorca. It wasn't quite the same as there being a pope on the island, even a false one, but Mallorca had a bishop who had been but who hadn't been pope, and that's about as close as you get to a papal presence on the island.

President Bauzá, hoping to bury the news of the provincial court in Palma having ordered a potential criminal investigation of the president related to the lack of tenders for opening new pharmacies (remember that Bauzá owns one), was off in Rome meeting Pope Francis. The president, who might hope, forlornly, that this visit will have diverted attention, while he might also believe, misguidedly one fancies, that it will do him some electoral good, took the opportunity to have a word with Francis about the canonisation of Ramón Llull. He has invited Pope Francis to come to the island to celebrate this.

The invitation might also seem like electioneering. No, not seem: is. However, there are very good reasons why Pope Francis should come for the canonisation and not just because it's about time that the island was granted a papal visit. In many ways, it is surprising that Llull is not canonised. Given what he gave the church, he should have been. Llull, "Doctor Illuminatus", was a contemporary of the Scots religious thinker Duns Scotus, "Doctor Subtilis". These two, who definitely met in Paris and on other occasions, were arguably the pre-eminent Catholic scholars of their time and, crucially, they defended the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. In terms of Catholic philosophy, it doesn't get a lot bigger than this.

Should Pope Francis come to Mallorca? Definitely he should. And think of the publicity and the visitors this would attract. If necessary, they'd lay on special flights. Of that, you can be certain.