In 2014, YouTube took to the skies with the appearance of seven sisters who created the musical group Flos Mariae. As a result of a malignant tumor of her mother, María Durán de Bellido -founder of CatholicosOnline-, they promised Jesus and the Virgin that if she healed they would sing to transmit the faith. No sooner said than done. They got around 15 million views with their videos and as a result of their success they set up companies of different kinds with the intention, in theory, of donating the proceeds to charity.
According to the Focus program, whose premiere took place last Monday night, the Bellido Durán sisters -Alba, María, Flor, Estel, Victoria, Patricia and Montserrat- created a website for dating between Catholics, another platform to sell clothes with their own brand Meyalayer (according to them it means fantastic, excellent), a children’s production company and a publisher for which there are no financial records, etc.
At the age of 17, her parents married María Durán to the son of a friend, they had three children and she lived immersed in the world of ill-treatment. At the age of six she met Xavier, with whom she had another 13 children, whom she also adopted her three oldest. Two of them died.
These girls dressed in musty color schemes that went off-key from ‘C’ to the next ‘C’ made money, but doubts soon arose as to their intent. The matriarch, who finally passed away at the age of 52 in 2015, induced them to embrace what she considered convenient. Her power lay in having transcribed 435 conversations that God had supposedly transmitted to her, but deep down she doubted if her voices were in her head or if she was really the Creator. “I am your love”, it seems that this one told him. She asked him: “Is it true that you are the one who dictates to me?”; “He is my spirit,” pleaded God.
Problems soon arose. There was mistreatment, extreme fundamentalism, children out of school… This was confirmed by the Mossos d’esquadra when they went to their home in Santa Coloma de Gramanet (Barcelona) when they denounced that nine children had not gone to school for almost two years and were in bad conditions. The matriarch ignored him. What they transmitted from the doors to the outside had nothing to do with the supposed reality of union, peace and harmony.
The Catholic pop group never gave interviews, they rejected offers to attend the most important festivals in our country and they almost never socialized with their environment, which began to raise suspicions. Spreading the word of God and transmitting the Catholic faith was being questioned. The eldest son even wrote in an email that when he was little his mother told him that he was a bad boy possessed by the devil and that he deserved to be punished to turn him into a holy child.
The other five siblings made certain reproaches visible: “What are we to you?”, “Just a number?”, “When are you going to talk to us?”, “If you did not agree with what mom said, there were punishments”, “He told us that more than 90% of his writings were not from God”… They even came to think that Flos Mariae had become a sect that could end in collective suicide, as had previously happened with others. They and their father, Xavier, a gardener by profession who has also edited several books, claimed that María was ill. You had to help her, but she wouldn’t let it.
The group’s success gradually faded. The discrepancies between them also caused the dissolution of the formation from which two others were born. Apparently, according to Estel, Victoria, Alba and María -they created 4HBD, the Bellido Durán sisters- were Flor, Montserrat and Patricia -Mariah’s Pop- the ones who got into trouble to the point of breaking their promises.
Although they continued to sing until 2021, the pecuniary remuneration was rich in accordance with their expectations. Secluded in a town in Castilla-La Mancha, Montse, Flor and part of the family do not want to know anything about the press, they only let themselves be seen when they go to mass on Saturdays and Sundays and the rest of the week is as if they had vanished from the face of the earth.
His first album with 21 songs remains far away, among whose songs stood out A mi paso or ¿Qué me pasa?
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