Is The Pope A Mallorquinista?

There was some funny old stuff cracking off last week. Take the visit of Real Mallorca bigwigs to Rome and an apparent attempt to sign up the Pope beyond the transfer window. The Holy Father declined the temptation to decamp to the Son Moix and end Mallorca's goal drought, but instead was delighted to receive a Mallorca shirt to add to the vast range that adorns the bar at the Vatican. Or this, one assumed, was the purpose of the gift. What else would a Pope do with such a shirt? Wear it in bed? There must be such a bar, therefore, to which the visiting priesthood are invited to make use of the Vatican's Sky dish, sample the ample selection of international beers and add football shirts from many nations.

Or was there an alternative purpose to this visit by the Real Mallorca delegation? Was the shirt part of a secret mission on behalf of the island's diocese to seek papal forgiveness for the naughty bishop and to allow him to continue to bless the club's less than spectacular fortunes? Were Monti and Maheta thus despatched in the knowledge, courtesy of the diocese, that the Pope does like his football? He must do. He is Argentinian after all. Alas, the sacrificial offer of the shirt ended in failure. The naughty bishop was defenestrated. Not literally thrown out of the window, but packed off to play with the reserves in Valencia.

While Monti and Maheta were engaged in mission impossible, a performance artist no one had ever heard of was making a statement. The message went something like the Balearics are on the point of sinking into the Med under the sheer weight of accumulated tourist numbers and environmental groups berating tourists at every available opportunity. The stats office needs to start producing figures to show the ratio of environmental organisations/agitators per head of tourist population; it must be edging towards one to one by now. There's saturation for you.

Anyway, whoever this artist chappy was - Hugo was in fact his name - he determined that the performance required the symbolic use of vast beach towels, which didn't look anything like beach towels. More like sheets, of the type some lookies prefer. It was all to do with saturation by tourists, as if anyone was not already aware that there supposedly is such a saturation. We are saturated by saturation statements, so Hugo inadvertently added to the saturation. Such was the power of his message, from what one could divine, that there was no one there to witness his performance apart from the odd press photographer. So much, therefore, for beach saturation: El Molinar beach at any rate. He really should have nipped along the coast to Arenal and spread his sheets out there.

It did occur to me to wonder if he had permission from the Costas Authority to engage in such occupation of a part of the beach in the style of superyacht louts taking over Cabrera. He probably didn't need it, given that the space occupied was no greater than that taken up by a typical Mallorcan extended family which invades a beach on a Sunday. But had he, it would have been very doubtful that any environmentalists would have denounced him.

Ultimately, though, Hugo betrayed a certain lack of appreciation as to what full-on beach saturation by tourists (also known as Mallorcan residents) looks like. Beach towels there are, but they are obscured by the contents of Toys 'R' Us, some of Ikea, the entire crisps section in Eroski and most of the nearest vendor of inflatable dinosaurs. And getting all that lot on to a beach is what one could describe as a real performance.

Biel Day And Tourism Apocalypse

It was one of those intense "debates", the sort where there are invited speakers who do a great deal of speaking and not a lot of actual debating, and the theme was our dear old friend, the holiday let. They've not invited me back. Not since, as a debater, I debated - vocally and in public - which planet the representative from the tourism ministry and indeed the then tourism minister, Jaime Martínez, were on. Never mind, there's another minister now, of whom the same question can be asked. More of him below.

Anyway, the debaters included Javier Blas, a lawyer whose Mastermind subject is holiday lets. He knows everything there is to know on the subject, which is a great deal more, therefore, than most inhabitants of the ministry. To cut to the chase, Javier believes laws on lets - the Balearic tourism law and the national Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos (conveniently referred to in English, for all those English speakers who can't pronounce the law, as the tenancy act) - are both less than adequate, a point on which, one fancies, there is general agreement, except among those who drew up either of the laws: Jaime Martínez, for example.

It was a debate that was useful in reminding us all that nothing has been done by the current Balearic government to alter this unsatisfactory state of affairs. With the mad rush - one that seems to be getting more insanely rapid - to introduce the tourist tax, Jaime's successor, Biel Barceló, appears to have completely forgotten that he said the holiday lets thing would come before the tourist tax thing. Needs must, one supposes. As the Balearics are theoretically bankrupt, the government has to lay its hands on the first thing it can that happens to be lying around untaxed - tourists sprawled on a beach, in this instance.

It was of course all too good to last. We'd heard nothing from Biel on the tax for at least, erm, a week, and then he went and spoilt it all by upsetting everyone by apparently implying that from the start of next summer's season, a family of four on a fortnight's holiday will be handing over in the region of 100 euros. Or maybe it will be less. And maybe it'll be paid when checking in at a hotel. Or maybe not. Or maybe it won't be introduced next year. Or maybe it will. And maybe it'll be spent on tourist infrastructure. Or maybe it won't be. Don't worry though, Biel clearly knows. Just like the ministry sorts know all about laws on holiday lets.

The urgency to introduce adequate legislation to deal with private holiday accommodation has been made all the more urgent by what we must call the collaborative economy, a euphemism, where some are concerned, for renting out accommodation without the slightest intention of paying tax on it. While Biel seems to be neglecting the subject, someone who isn't, of all people, is the Pope.

On Portuguese radio the other day, Pope Francis said that religious congregations which have the odd empty convent or whatever knocking around can't simply turn it into a hotel or hostel and expect not to pay tax on income it generates. The "business" would not be "clean", he suggested, in letting monks know that they can't shove the takings into their back pockets. (Do monks have pockets? Perhaps not.) The Pope, clearly in tune with the new age of the collaborative economy, must be concerned that the odd convent might turn up on Airbnb.

As the collaborative economy seems so determined to take over tourism accommodation, be it convent or other, perhaps next Sunday should be renamed. Rather than World Tourism Day, it should be World Collaborative Economy Day, though in the Balearics it might be more appropriate to name it Biel Day. And as Cala Millor is where they celebrate world tourism more than anywhere else (the resort's tourist fiestas week starts tomorrow), Biel should get himself along. Meet and greet the tourists. Oh, by the way, have I told you that next year you'll be forking out a couple of euros a night for yourself, your good lady wife and the kids? Yep, Biel Day it should be. Tourism apocalypse beckons. There'll be no more tourism fiesta days. Party's over.

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.