These rapturous write-ups feel especially impressive when you consider this is not your run-of-the-mill pop record. Spread across four movements and sung in 13 languages, Lux is a concept album structured around the lives of female saints and mystics, including the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the Hebrew prophetess Miriam. It also features operatic vocals, massed choirs, fado singer Carminho, poetry from Patti Smith, plus thundering accompaniment from the London Symphony Orchestra. To call Lux esoteric would be an understatement, yet that hasn\u2019t stopped it from landing in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart, or from topping the Billboard Latin, Classical and World album charts. <\/p>\n
More unusual still is that Lux serves as a showcase for its creator\u2019s spiritual convictions. On the song \u201cDivinize\u201d, Rosal\u00eda compares her vertebrae to rosary beads, while in \u201cNovia Robot\u201d, she sings that she\u2019s \u201cguapa para Dio\u201d, which roughly translates to \u201chot for God\u201d. In case we were in any doubt of the album\u2019s religious meaning, its cover has the singer in what looks a lot like a nun\u2019s veil. <\/p>\n
Now, extraordinarily, the Vatican has delivered its verdict on Lux<\/a>. Though it stopped short of issuing a star rating, the feedback from the Holy See has been glowing. This week, Cardinal Jos\u00e9 Tolentino de Mendon\u00e7a, the Vatican\u2019s culture minister, stated: \u201cWhen a creator like Rosal\u00eda speaks of spirituality, it means that she captures a profound need in contemporary culture to approach spirituality, to cultivate an inner life.\u201d Meanwhile, Xabier G\u00f3mez Garcia, bishop of Sant Feliu de Llobregat, the diocese which includes Rosal\u00eda\u2019s Spanish hometown of Sant Esteve Sesrovires, wrote that its creator \u201cspeaks with absolute freedom and without hang-ups about what she feels God to be, and the desire, the thirst [to know God]\u201d. <\/p>\n A young pop star getting the thumbs-up from the Catholic church? It\u2019s a far cry from the days when the Vatican was in the habit of condemning any artist or celebrity it suspected of having lax morals, or who didn\u2019t treat Catholic beliefs or iconography with sufficient solemnity. Sure, Sabrina Carpenter did inadvertently cause the removal of a New York priest<\/a> from his post after he granted her permission to film a music video in his Brooklyn church, but increasingly, such censure is rare. (The priest later admitted to a \u201clapse in judgement\u201d). <\/p>\n Compare this with the late 1980s, for example, when Madonna felt the wrath of the pontiff after releasing \u201cLike a Prayer\u201d, the video of which saw the negligee-clad singer in a clinch with Jesus. The Queen of Pop incited the ire of the church a second time in 2006 when, on the Rome date of her Confessions tour, she staged a mock crucifixion. A Vatican spokesman called it \u201ca blasphemous challenge to the faith and a profanation of the cross\u201d. <\/p>\n All this was small beer next to the uproar caused by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, whose ostentatious antics while filming Cleopatra in Rome in 1963 \u2013 documented in lascivious detail across the world press<\/a> \u2013 led the Vatican to release a statement accusing them of \u201cerotic vagrancy\u201d. (It\u2019s worth noting that both actors were married at the time, but not to each other). The church was also irked by John Lennon\u2019s pronouncement in 1966 that the Beatles were \u201cbigger than Jesus\u201d, although it revised its position in 2010 via the Vatican\u2019s newspaper L\u2019Osservatore Romano, in which it offered the Fab Four \u2013 or rather the two still living \u2013 absolution. <\/p>\n Over the years, pop culture has produced plenty more thorns in the side of the church, among them The Da Vinci Code, the Twilight series, Sinead O\u2019Connor (who ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live<\/a>) and The Last Temptation of Christ<\/a> director Martin Scorsese. With the exception of O\u2019Connor, who knew she was blowing up her career but did it anyway, all benefited from the backlash, earning column inches and a boost in sales in exchange for their sacrilege. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n \u2018I pray every night before I fall asleep. It\u2019s a very personal relationship with God,\u2019 Rosal\u00eda told an interviewer earlier this month (Press)<\/p>\n So could an endorsement from the Vatican, famously one of the world\u2019s most conservative institutions, be the kiss of death for Rosal\u00eda\u2019s career? Not a bit of it. This is partly because the singer has never shied away from talking about her faith (\u201cI pray every night before I fall asleep. It\u2019s a very personal relationship with God,\u201d Rosal\u00eda told an interviewer earlier this month), but mostly because the Catholic church appears to have given up castigating artists and their work, and not before time. <\/p>\n At this point, the Holy See understands nothing good can come from appearing censorious or out of touch with the cultural zeitgeist. Not for nothing did Pope Leo XIV summon Hollywood stars, including Greta Gerwig, Spike Lee and Cate Blanchett, for a meet-up at the Vatican this month. In his speech, he hailed the role of film in helping us to \u201ccontemplate and understand life, to recount its greatness and fragility\u201d. <\/p>\n Though there are still countries, the US among them, where the Christian right holds political sway and are prone to the odd Satanic panic, we nonetheless live in more secular times; for the most part, we are unfazed by the religious provocations of art and music. And in this secular age, there is something radical about a smart and talented young pop star exploring her faith through the medium of art and sharing her convictions without preaching or proselytising. In laying out her spiritual journey on Lux, Rosal\u00eda is not wagging a finger and telling us how we should think or be. She is simply telling us who she is. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-157177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u2018I](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Screenshot-2025-11-06-at-16-41-50.png\")
<\/p>\n