Xavier Novell was once the youngest bishop in Spain and very popular. Now the charismatic clergyman, who also worked as an exorcist, has left the church – for a woman who writes erotic books
Xavier Novell is a cool guy. When he receives the star reporter from El País, Luz Sánchez-Mellado, for an interview, the first thing he asks her to fasten his cufflinks. “It’s one of those many things that you can’t do alone,” he says. Then he vigorously shakes the journalist’s hand, “not like these clerics who hold out their soft and fleeting rights to the interlocutor,” writes Sánchez-Mellado. She finds Novell “talkative, ironic, amusing”. And because the chemistry is right, she asks him if he could imagine falling in love.
The conversation took place around the turn of the year from 2010 to 2011. Novell was just received by Pope Benedict XVI. was appointed the youngest bishop in Spain at the time, bishop of the small Catalan diocese of Solsona. He was a young, handsome man with clear opinions who was not afraid of microphones. A man to fall in love with. And, yes, he too could imagine falling in love, he replied to the reporter. “I think if I ever meet a woman who attracts me because of the way she is, how she thinks or acts, who makes me feel marital affection, a feeling of being in love – what to do and what to do would be not to see her again. “
But that didn’t happen.
At 52 years old, the clergyman, who is still quite young, fell in love and instead of his wife he left his diocese. That doesn’t happen very often in the Catholic Church. The cases in which a bishop also exercises the office of exorcist in his church district, which Novell has been doing since November 3, 2015, reports the very Catholic, very conservative and very old daily ABC, are also rather rare. So it will be true.
The same newspaper writes that his infatuation “according to sources of the Catalan Church” was the work of the devil. An accident at work, one might say. “It is not the fault of the church, nor of God, or of celibacy, but of the devil and his evil deed.”
The thought is obvious. The woman the bishop fell in love with has a demonic tendency. Her name is Silvia Caballol, she is 38 years old, a psychologist, and has written two erotic novels – after a look at some published excerpts, rather: pornographic ones. The second is called “Hell in Gabriel’s Lust”. According to the publisher’s advertisement, it is about “the raw struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan and between angels and demons”. The author questions “once again, with clear and direct language and an unusual plot, our moral system, our values and our religious convictions”.
The 230-page novel from 2016 is currently only available second-hand. On the most important portal for antiquarian books, Iberlibro, there are two offers: for 179 and for 349 euros, plus shipping costs. Caballol is suddenly a sought-after writer.
If you want to find out more about the lovers, you have to be content with speculation for the time being. The once so talkative bishop has changed his phone number and email address, and his abandoned diocese does not want to speak on his behalf. Novell was a bishop as a bishop should be, a faithful preacher of Catholic doctrine, a staunch opponent of abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage. That he was an exceptionally conservative clergyman in the fundamentally conservative Catholic Church cannot be read from his public statements. Rumor has it he has dealt with circles trying to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, but there is no good source for this claim.
What now? Silvia Caballol, mother of two children to a Moroccan father, wrote sentences in her “Hell” novel that seem to be addressed to herself and her lover today: “Nobody has the monopoly on delirium. Our only hope is to devote whatever time we need to who we really are and then decide whether it is a reality we can both live with. “
