Profile Xavier Novell: the personal and nationalist drift of the Bishop of Solsona
Xavier Novell When the bishop of Solsona said that there were "pretty women and in summer they go a little bare
Silvia Caballol Who is the girlfriend of the Bishop of Solsona?
"If you want to go all the way, the epicenter of the issue is
Truth and Freedom
, an organization that I founded together with
Miguel Ángel Sánchez Cordón
, who is not talked about but is the one who put
Xavier Novell in this story
."
This story
, the last chapter of which takes place between Solsona and Manresa with the escape of a bishop in love with an erotic novel writer, Silvia Caballol, begins in 2005,
in a bathroom in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
where a teenager rejects his incipient homosexuality in front of a mirror.
This is
Alberto Pérez
, who was 14 years old when he Googled
"being gay can change
.
"
He did so just after realizing his attraction to men, a revelation that unsettled him. Something that did not fit in a common life where family, friends and grades worked. "My family is Catholic, very normal, but I perceived that being like this was not a good idea. Without telling my parents anything, I got into this kind of thing."
It was the beginning of a parallel life on the Internet with the only obsession to
heal
.
His search culminated in a book and a therapy group to treat homosexuality.
Understanding and healing homosexuality
, by
Richard Cohen
("the international guru of homosexual conversion therapies"), and
Hope is possible
, a pioneering organization in these treatments under the aegis of the
Bishopric of Alcalá de Henares
and whose spiritual guide was a Cantabrian priest,
Santiago Olmeda
. "They were biweekly sessions by Skype, from which I go in and out until I am 18 years old, when the group refers me to the consultation of a psychologist in Madrid,
Aquilino Polaino
, who attended me for
140 euros
per
session
"Alberto shows the receipts of a little talkative professor in Psychopathology who told him" that he was not ill ", but" had a personality disorder, which he would go on for sure. "
The result of those encounters was three pills a day" until he believed that I had been cured, that I had managed to change ".
"A CASE OF SUCCESS", EL PEDIATRA AND CHILE
Xavier Novell was
still wearing the brand new bishop of Solsona, the youngest in Spain, in the
summer of 2012
, when the
World Congress of Families
was held in Madrid
. It was the first public appearance for Alberto, who gave his testimony of heterosexual conversion in one of the informal talks. When the story gets out,
Miguel Ángel Sánchez Cordón
, a
55-year-old pediatrician from Granada
, contacts him
who is suffering from a long crisis of sexual identity. They quickly forge a close friendship. After months, the pediatrician, married and without children, also considers himself
cured
and lavishes his testimony in different
online
media
religious themed.
In a self-interview in
Religión en Libertad
, on December 18, 2012, he explained his conversion and his gratitude to the young Canarian.
By then, together, "a boy and a cunt", they had already founded Truth and Freedom.
Alberto Pérez with Ismini Anastassiou, president of the NGO ISFEM, during an interview for CNN in Chile in October 2012 CNNYOUTUBE
In October of that same year, she also traveled to South America, where she participated in a seminar at the
Catholic University of Chile
organized by the NGO ISFEM [Research, Training and Studies on Women], "a HazteOír-type organization."
"I went there as a success story,"
explains Alberto, who ended up on the
CNN Chile set
describing the conquest of heterosexuality [can be seen on YouTube]. "I was not fooling people,
I
was fooling
myself
. I was desperate, coupled with medication, religious suggestion and group approval," he reflects.
"As a result of this apparition, many people from very activist religious contexts began to write to me:
Opus Dei, Legionaries of Christ, the 'Kikos', Legion of Mary ...
Ultra people who had nothing to do with a Catholic movement from neighborhood dioceses ", explains Alberto. Truth and Freedom, "a civil organization of religious inspiration that developed in
hiding
", carburates and begins to serve people
via Skype or in Miguel Ángel's villa
, located in a private urbanization in
Albolote
, Grenade.
Young boys attend, but also older ones, even married ones.
Alberto gives himself over to an organization that soon becomes his way of life: travel, hours of telematic conversation, voluntary fees.
"In addition to all this, at this time,
Richard Cohen
is
beginning to come to Spain
, who began to give training workshops to prepare
coach
, therapists specialized in helping people with
SMA (Attraction to the Same Sex)
. It is the terminology that they use, "he clarifies.
NOVELL, 'THE BOUNTS' AND THE TRAGEDY
Sánchez Cordón had the spiritual guidance of some priests he knew and who sympathized with the organization until his eagerness to extend
it caused him to "jump into the void and start looking for more important support."
Xavier Novell
appears
, who participates from the beginning although he does not get involved intensely until 2018
.
Alberto does not meet him physically, but Miguel Ángel keeps him informed. "Miguel Ángel Sánchez Cordón takes this man, brainwashes him and takes him to his land.
Xavier is disturbed, but he is an executioner and a victim of this story"
, Alberto ruling, which links Novell's statements about homosexuality linked to the absence of a father figure to the theses held by Sánchez Cordón.
Xavier Novell, disguised as a devil in the Patrum de Berga, in May 2013. "I am a bishop who breaks the mold in too many things," declared the then bishop of Solsona.ACN
Abandoned the medication that "had him drugged", with a girlfriend and in the midst of existential crisis, Alberto Pérez
leaves the organization he had created in 2015.
His homosexuality surfaces. He decides it in the United States, in Florida, where he periodically attends training courses in Theology. However, he knows the subsequent development of the organization through
the rebounds.
"
People are going to beat little by little
. Some are struggling for a few years and there comes a time when they get tired and see that conversion therapy is getting nowhere," says of those who have come to him a second time; the opposite situation of the first:
"This is nothing but a sect
, at least in its operation. You have a dependency on the group, you set expectations for yourself and you end up in a war against yourself. It is you who is failing and you live it with guilt and shame.
There are many victims who do not speak because they are very touched: there is shame, guilt, fear
".
Upon his departure, Sánchez Cordón
eliminates any hint of contact between the two
and even tries to "erase the interviews on the Internet." You do not need it, the network of therapies is already configured: some priests, therapists and psychologists participate in them. One of them is the psychologist
Lourdes Illán
, who works in Valencia and who has hung up the phone on this newspaper when contacted. He is a person very close to Xavier Novell who, without going any further, on February 20 participated, as published by the Bishopric of Solsona along with a screenshot of the telematic encounter, in a colloquium sponsored by a bishop in his death throes. They participated
"50 young people, priests and catechists"
under the slogan
Abuses: painful silence of guilt and shame
.
Several cases explain the degree of influence that the organization had on the then bishop of Solsona.
An investigator of the plot tells this newspaper that Novell "married a lesbian and gay couple, the two
reconverted
,
as the culmination of his model of healing
.
"
Alberto Pérez details another marriage celebrated in by Novell in Solsona where a gay man
cured
in Truth and Freedom
received the sacrament
.
The bishop forbade the bride's parents to attend the wedding due to suspicions about the group's sectarianism.
Novell participates in therapy "between 2013 and 2014"
, says the aforementioned researcher, "and from there he begins to add people to the cause and becomes a champion: seminarians, friends and some priests."
COMPLAINT, VATICAN AND WAIVER
The complaint of a
Jesuit priest from Salamanca
originates an investigation that reaches the Episcopal Conference.
The staff of the Spanish bishops debated the matter in October 2019.
"In that meeting Novell defends the organization with anger
,
"
the source details, explaining the astonishment of the majority of those present "except for less than
a dozen bishops
, the most conservative, who did support it. "
The seriousness of the case causes it to be sent to Rome.
The Vatican, in April 2021, calls for the total disassociation of these therapies.
This newspaper has not been able to confirm an alleged meeting between Pope Francis and Xavier Novell, his presence required by the Holy Father given the seriousness of the matter. Yes, the meeting this summer that, as the journalist
José Beltrán announced
in
La Razón
, was about the resignation of Novell, whose intention was none other than "the
express
processing
of his resignation."
After his resignation as bishop of Solsona,
Xavier Novell
has changed his phone and no longer answers his email;
Lourdes Illán
hangs up when asked about Truth and Freedom; with
Miguel Ángel Sánchez Cordón
"it is impossible to contact"; and
Alberto Pérez
, like so many others who were shipwrecked between despair, shame and guilt, continues to fight against the legacy of therapy.
Although he is well, uninhibited, accepted.
"Over the years you learn to look at yourself in front of the mirror and not feel disgust or guilt or shame. Not to be afraid.
Then you reinterpret everything that happened.
You realize that you made decisions that you should not have made.
It is to connect with that Alberto of 14 years
".
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