Catalan is not a variety of Spanish. It is a separate Romance language with its own literature, and for a long stretch of the twentieth century it was pushed out of schools, courts and broadcasting, then put back into all three. A community that has had its language taken out of public life once does not experience being handed the neighbouring one as a convenience. It is the same mistake as reaching for Russian when somebody speaks Ukrainian.
This is the pastoral part, and it is the reason the page exists.
Nearly every Catalan speaker also speaks Spanish, fluently, and will not make a scene if that is what you offer. That is exactly the trap. Fluency is not the same as being at home, and politeness is not consent.
What happens instead is smaller and worse. They follow the service perfectly well, and they log the fact that in this room their language was the one that could be dispensed with. Nobody says anything. The person who invited them never finds out.
The rule is the same one we write on the Ukrainian page: never assign somebody a language on their behalf. Offer both, quietly, at the door or on the sheet, and let them pick. It costs you nothing to run both at once. Every pass carries as many languages as your guests need.
Two more things worth knowing before it comes up. Catalan carries political weight for some people and none at all for others, and you have no way of telling which from looking. It is not your argument to have, and a guest should never be asked to explain it to a congregation. And do not call it a dialect, even kindly. It is the single fastest way to lose somebody in a conversation you were trying to be warm in.
A language does not have to die to be damaged. It only has to be removed from the places where public life happens.
Schools, courts, official paperwork, newspapers, broadcasting. For a long stretch of the twentieth century Catalan lost its place in those, and a language pushed into the kitchen starts to feel like a kitchen language even to the people who love it. Two generations grew up literate in one language and fluent but unschooled in their own.
It returned to the classroom, to television and radio, to the printed page and to the church. Catalan is the sole official language of Andorra, a sovereign state, and it is co-official across a large part of Spain's Mediterranean coast. Very few languages that lose that ground ever get it back.
That history is why the language is held so deliberately. People who watched a language be pushed out do not treat it as a neutral tool afterwards. It is the same instinct you see in Hebrew, in Ukrainian, in Welsh and in Basque: a language that was once at risk gets carried differently, and the care is passed down to children who never saw the danger themselves.
The same Danish sentences run into both, through the same path a live room uses. Nothing edited, nothing chosen after the fact. The point is not that one is better. The point is that they are not the same language.
Your speaker says, in Danish: Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Por gracia sois salvos por medio de la fe, y esto no procede de vosotros, es don de Dios.
Correct Spanish, in the register a Spanish speaking congregation expects.
Per gràcia heu estat salvats mitjançant la fe, i això no ve de vosaltres, és un do de Déu.
A different verb for saved, a different way of building the past, a different preposition doing the work in the middle, and a different word for God. Related, obviously. Interchangeable, no. Read them out loud one after the other and the distance is audible.
I l’Esperit va caure sobre tots ells, i van començar a parlar en altres llengües.
From the Danish Og Ånden faldt over dem alle sammen, og de begyndte at tale på andre sprog.
The Danish word means spirit, ghost, or a bottle of spirits, and only the passage tells you which. This is Acts 2, and the Catalan says the Spirit. Note also the word for tongues, which is the one Scripture uses rather than the everyday word for languages.
Ell diu que les obres de la carn són ben evidents i que s’oposen al fruit de l’Esperit.
From the Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
The works of the flesh, from Galatians 5. Word for word the Danish lands on meat at a butcher's counter. The Catalan reaches for the theological word, the one set against the fruit of the Spirit in the same breath.
Produced with no glossary and no preparation. Hand the service your outline in advance with Context Enhancer and it starts already knowing the passage and your names.
Which matters at a door, because a guest may not use the word you expect.
Catalan is spoken across a stretch of Spain's Mediterranean regions, in Andorra where it is the sole official language, in a corner of southern France, and in one town on the island of Sardinia where it has been spoken since the Middle Ages.
In the Valencian region it is officially called Valencian, and how that name relates to Catalan is a question people there hold strong views about. You do not need a position on it. What you need is to use whichever word your guest used, and to know that a person who says they speak Valencian will be perfectly served by what is listed here as Catalan.
What you get from us is the standard written form, which is what school, publishing and broadcasting use, and which is the register a sermon would be delivered in anyway. The everyday differences between regions are real and mostly live in pronunciation and in a handful of common words, not in the language of a reading.
In Europe, Catalan speakers turn up in ordinary ways: students, researchers, people who moved north for work, families with one parent from the coast. Rarely a whole congregation, often one or two people, which is exactly the case a church has never had a good answer for.
Four of them, so a room can choose a man or a woman.
Captions are useful and a voice is different in kind. Your guest puts in one earphone, keeps the other ear on the room, and hears the sermon in Catalan while everybody else hears it as it is spoken. They still hear the singing. They still hear the person next to them laugh at the right moment.
For a language somebody was raised in but perhaps never schooled in, and that describes a whole generation of Catalan speakers, hearing beats reading by a distance. Reading in a language you were never taught to read is work. Listening is not.
Both run at the same time, and it costs nothing extra either way.
Three separate questions. Catalan answers yes to all three, and is listed in its own right rather than under Spanish.
A Catalan speaker can preach or read and the room follows in every language you have running. One of the 81 languages that can be the source.
On a guest's own phone, or at the front with MulingDisplay. One of 182 languages that can be read.
Four Catalan voices. One of 81 languages that can be listened to rather than read.
This website is published in Catalan as well, which is true of only a minority of the 183 languages in the list. Everything on this site, including the pricing and the help, can be read in Catalan.
Catalan is the only official language of Andorra. That is not a symbolic status: parliament, law and schooling all run in it. It is one of very few languages that is somebody's sole national language while being a minority language next door.
Catalan was being used for philosophy, science and devotional writing when most of Europe still reserved the page for Latin. This is not a language that was written down recently. It is a language that was written down early and then interrupted.
Catalan has been spoken in one town on Sardinia since the Middle Ages, a leftover of an old Mediterranean crown. Islands keep languages long after the mainland has moved on.
Ask them, and offer both. Almost every Catalan speaker is bilingual and almost none of them will complain about being given Spanish. That is precisely why offering the choice is the whole of the courtesy here. Both can run in the same service with no extra setup and no extra cost.
For our purposes, a person who says they speak Valencian will be well served by what is listed here as Catalan. What that name should be is a question people hold strong views about and we take no position on it. Use whichever word your guest used.
It can be for some people and is not for others, and you cannot tell which from looking. Offering somebody their own language quietly is not a political act. Announcing it from the front, or asking a guest to explain their region to the congregation, might be. Offer it at the door, on the sheet, without commentary.
Yes. Catalan can be the language coming off the stage as well as one of the languages in the pews, so a Catalan sermon reaches everybody else in their own language at the same moment.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket.