A village priest who gave Catalan back its literature. And whom his own Church ended up suspending.
Jacint Verdaguer (Folgueroles, 1845 - Vallvidrera, 1902) was ordained in 1870 and became chaplain to the Marquis of Comillas, one of the richest men in Spain. From there he wrote the great poems of the Renaixença, the 19th-century revival of Catalan as a language of literature: L’Atlàntida (1877), an epic about the sunken continent, and Canigó (1886), about the medieval origins of Catalonia. He’s also the author of the Virolai, the hymn to the Virgin of Montserrat that people still sing.
Then he went off script. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1886 he threw himself into exorcisms and giving away everything he had to the poor, which the Church hierarchy and the Comillas family didn’t like at all. He was suspended as a priest in 1895, and defended himself in the newspapers, in articles collected as En defensa pròpia.
He died of tuberculosis at 57. His funeral in Barcelona was one of the biggest the city had ever seen: by then he was simply the national poet.
His verses are on a famous tomb in Poblenou: El petó de la mort.
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacint_Verdaguer_i_Santal%C3%B3