The president of the Episcopal Conference and Archbishop of Valladolid, Luis Argüello, did not leave unanswered the accusations of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who, during a vote in Cáceres, demanded neutrality and responded that “the time in which … bishops interfered in politics It ended when democracy began in this country”, in response to his request for early elections in a press interview. Argüello, through a message in X, in clear allusion to Sánchez’s words, explained that cannot be “neutral” before “respect for the fundamental rules of the rule of law”.
More precisely, in a message published in“I’m not neutral.”. The text was also a response to the accusation that the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, Félix Bolaños, made last Sunday of the lack of political neutrality of the Church for having spoken out “in favor of the end of the current government”, and asked it to respect democracy and the Executive.
The statements of Sánchez and Bolaños, responsible within the Executive for dialogue with the Catholic Church, were a response to the interview published by the newspaper La Vanguardia in which Argüello affirmed that given the current political situation There were only three options: “a question of confidence, a motion of censure or giving voice to citizens”. An idea that he had already put forward last June in an interview with ABC in which he affirmed that the only “way out of this institutional blockage is to give citizens a voice”.
Sánchez attack
Faced with this proposal, during an event in Cáceres, which paradoxically took place in a desecrated church, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, addressed the controversy by declaring that in the Episcopal Conference “when the right governs, they do not say that, they want the four years established by the Constitution to be respected”, while offering Argüello a fourth option: “respect the electoral result even if you do not like it”.
“I tell Argüello that there is a fourth option, respect the result even if you don’t like it. I also encourage you to do the following: if you want to run for office, you have the far-right association Avocats Chrétiens, show up and see what results you will get”, added the president during the socialist electoral campaign. Likewise, he recalled that “the time when bishops interfered in politics ended with the beginning of democracy”.
It is therefore not the first time that the president of the Episcopal Conference has made statements linked to social and political reality, in aspects as diverse as denouncing the housing situation or supporting the integration of immigrants. In these cases, the Executive has never demanded neutrality. In this sense, this same Saturday, also in One State is characterized by the existence of universal norms – ethical principles, drawn from Creation – which underpin justice.
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