If anything reveals the exhaustion of the Sanchista political project, it is the constant recourse to outdated political wildcards with which to pass off the desire to perpetuate themselves in power as heroic resistance.
After the extreme right, the “rich”, the “powerful” and Franco, Pedro Sánchez’s new imaginary enemy seems to be the Episcopal Conference.
“The time in which bishops intervened in politics ended when democracy began in this country,” Sánchez declared this Sunday at a campaign event in Cáceres.
This rhetoric with populist overtones is laughable in a context where the Catholic Church is far from preserving the status of de facto power that it held in the times of national Catholicism.
If Sánchez now attacks the bishops, it is because the president of the Episcopal Conference has dared to express his opinion, in an interview this Sunday, that in the face of the “blockade” of legislative action, his request for a “question of confidence, a motion of censure or giving the floor to citizens” is ratified.
Luis Arguello He has verbalized these statements in his personal capacity, not even as president of the Episcopal Conference. However, Felix Bolaños has considered these “partisan pronouncements” serious enough to officially respond by letter to Argüello.
He has accused him of breaking “the political neutrality of the Church” for speaking out “in favor of the end of the current Government”, and has urged him to act with respect towards democracy” and the Executive.
Not without adding that from Argüello’s statements “it seems to be deduced that he would prefer his interlocutor” to be “a government of the right and the extreme right.”
It is ironic that the Government is trying to link the Episcopal Conference with the extreme right.
Because if Argüello has asked to unblock the political situation, it is not due to an ideological preference, but rather to the inability to move forward (in the absence of a parliamentary majority or Budgets) the popular legislative initiative on the regularization of immigrants.
What’s more: under Argüello’s mandate, The Episcopal Conference has stood out for arguing precisely with Vox for his dehumanizing anti-immigration speech.
Whether the bishops or anyone else says it, confirming an empirical situation of political paralysis, and invoking the political mechanisms contemplated in the supreme law to undo it, does not constitute contempt for the Constitution or national sovereignty.
If Sánchez portrays them this way, it is because he tries to brand as insurgent pronouncements what are nothing more than transversal expressions of a national clamor about the unviability of his government. In fact, that is the reason why he resists calling elections.
In reality, Moncloa does not care as much about the ecclesial neutrality due in “a non-denominational State” as it does about silencing criticism of its malpractice, disavowing them by virtue of their origin.
That the who matters more than the what is demonstrated by the fact that the Sánchez Government and all the official media have declared and continue to declare innocent a convicted person in a final sentence such as Alvaro Garcia Ortizwhile they disdain the presumption of innocence, blaming the emeritus bishop of Cádiz who faces accusations of sexual abuse.
Sánchez’s funnel law is clamorous: He reprimands bishops for giving their opinion on government decisions, while he, as head of the Executive, questions and disqualifies the decisions of the Judiciary.
Sánchez has extended the perimeter of his polarizing strategy to the Spanish Church as well, thereby displaying an almost Caesaropapist conception of political power.
As if it were an accidental confession, Maria Jesus Montero He has asked Argüello to “back off” her criticism of the Government “as a woman of the progressive Church.” And, in fact, it would seem that the last remaining faithful of Sanchismo, even in this agony of corruption and scandals, They show signs of an aversion to heterodoxy bordering on sectarianism.