The Barcelona Temple Ceremony Was Livestreamed in Catalan

The Church News story about Saturday's ceremony in Spain says the ceremony was livestreamed in four languages, and it lists them in this order: Spanish, Catalan, French and English. Most people will read that as a logistics note and keep going. I stopped on the second word. Somebody planning that broadcast decided that Catalan needed its own feed, and I think that decision tells a child more about the Church than the shovels do.

Ground was broken Saturday in Sant Cugat del Vallès, a town just north of Barcelona, with about 500 people there. Elder James W. McConkie III of the Europe Central Area presidency presided. Caleb and Lily saw the photos last night, with Ben on my lap trying to eat the corner of my phone, and they had more questions than I had answers, which has been true of most of the questions this fall.

Why does a country that already has a temple need another one?

Caleb asked it first, and he asked it the way he asks about baseball trades, like he suspected a bad deal. Spain has had one temple, in Madrid, since 1999. Barcelona is a long day's drive from Madrid, and there are about 72,000 Latter-day Saints in the country according to the Church's own figures. Caleb did the division on his own and decided that one temple for that many people seemed like a lot to ask of Madrid. He's eleven and he's usually right about arithmetic that involves waiting in line.

Lily wanted to know if there would be kids at the temple when it's done, and whether she could be one of them. I said yes, and that she'd be a grown woman before I could tell her which kids. The Church announced this temple in April 2022, which is four and a half years of waiting before anybody picked up a shovel, and nobody has given a dedication date. She took that in with the face she uses for vegetables.

Caleb said four years was nothing, they were still building his school gym.

What I didn't know how to answer

Caleb's other question was why Catalan, since don't they all speak Spanish there? I know Barcelona is in Catalonia and that Catalan is spoken there. Past that I'd be inventing things to sound sure, so I told him I didn't know. That's the rule from my post about "I don't know" being a fine answer for a week, and I'm one day into the week. We said we'd look it up on the family map. We haven't.

What I could tell him is that a language offered on purpose says something, and then I thought of Marta and didn't say anything else.

Marta and the page numbers

When David and I lived in that basement apartment in Provo, the woman in the unit above us was a graduate student named Marta, from Barcelona. She was small and quick and she thumped across her floor in the morning like she was late for something, which she usually was. We weren't close. We borrowed each other's ladders and traded zucchini.

Her mother called on Sunday afternoons and I could hear Marta through the ceiling, laughing, in a language that wasn't the Spanish I'd heard on the street. I never asked her what it was. I assumed it was Spanish with an accent, and I'd bet most of the people I knew then would have assumed the same.

One Sunday in the laundry room she showed me her scriptures. They were in Spanish, soft at the corners, with her mother's handwriting in the margins in blue pen. I had my own Book of Mormon in my bag, English, and she said, "Give me a chapter." I said Alma 37. She turned right to it without flipping, then we each put a finger on verse 6 and read it in our own languages. Hers said what mine said, "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass," only in words I had to take her word for. Our fingers were on the same line.

Marta told me her parents had gone to Switzerland to be sealed, a long trip by train, because that was the closest temple when they were married. She said it flatly, the way you'd say your parents went to the grocery store.

Heaven and earth, and a Kirtland sentence in Spain

The Church News quotes Elder McConkie at the ceremony saying, "I hope that you can see and feel in the temple heaven and earth intersect." He also quoted a line from the Kirtland Temple dedicatory prayer in Doctrine and Covenants 109, about giving "of our substance to build a house to thy name, that the Son of Man might have a place to manifest himself to his people." That was 1836, in Ohio, by people who said themselves they'd built it out of their poverty. A hundred and ninety years later somebody in Catalonia is saying the same sentence over a 5.4-acre lot, and I can't get past that.

Paul's words to a mixed congregation are close to what I'd like my children to hear when they look at a picture of a stranger with a shovel.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.

Ephesians 2:19

Read the chapter around it and you find out who was a stranger to whom. Gentiles had been "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel" and Paul says Christ broke down the wall between them and the Jews who believed. Two verses after that he says they are all being built together into a holy temple, "for an habitation of God through the Spirit." It's an odd thing for him to say to people who didn't yet have a temple of their own.

Lily could believe "they're just like us" without any help from me, and Caleb would believe it until he found the first thing that wasn't true. So what I told them was that the people in Sant Cugat have their own food and holidays and a language that was second on the livestream list, and that Paul's word for them is still household.

Frequently Asked Questions

When will the Barcelona Spain Temple be dedicated?

Nobody has said. Breaking ground marks the start of construction, and the Church has not announced a dedication date as far as I can find. I'd tell kids "years," not a number I made up.

Is there already a temple in Spain?

Yes, Madrid, dedicated in 1999. Barcelona would be the second. It's a long way from one to the other, which is most of the answer to why a second one makes sense.

What happens when ground is broken for a temple?

Pretty much what you'd picture, with a prayer and remarks and shovels. Saturday's had about 500 people and the livestream went out in four languages. It's a start and not an opening, so nobody goes inside.

Can my kids go in the temple?

Not yet in the way they're hoping, and it's no insult to ask. Young people can do baptisms for the dead beginning at twelve, so Caleb's turn comes in January of the year he turns twelve and he's already counting. I don't push the rest of it on children who are eight. Lily gets "when you're older," and she hates it every time.

with love, Melissa