- A Spanish bishop, Xavier Novell Gomà, has been stripped of all his powers after leaving the church to marry.
- His wife is Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist.
- Gomà, aged 52, now works at a pig semen company.
A Spanish bishop has been formally stripped of his powers after marrying an erotica author.
Xavier Novell Gomà was appointed to the Catalan municipality of Solsona in 2010 when he was 41, making him Spain's youngest bishop at the time.
As a bishop, he courted controversy, backing so-called 'conversion-therapies' for the LGBT community and actively supporting regional independence for Catalonia, a significant point of political division within Spain.
At the end of August, it was announced that Novell had resigned as a bishop on "strictly personal grounds." It later emerged that Novell had fallen in love with Silvia Caballol, a 38-year-old clinical psychologist and erotic novelist, who he married last month, The Guardian reported.
Caballol has been described as a satanic-erotic novelist and is the author of Gabriel's Hell of Lust.
According to the website of her publisher, Lacre, it offers a "whirlwind of sensations," transporting the reader to a world of "psychopathy, sects, sadism, madness, the unreality of immorality and the crude struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan, and between the angels and demons."
On December 11, the Spanish Episcopal Conference announced that while Novell can still use the title of Bishop, he has been stripped of his powers, including the administration of the sacraments and any teaching activity in public or private.
In a dramatic career change, Spanish news site El Mundo reports that Novell, who has a degree in agricultural engineering, is now working for a pig semen company named Semen Cardona. It describes itself as "specialized in the elaboration of doses for high-performance artificial swine insemination."