Yesterday we published two news stories that crudely and unbearably depict the situation of the clergy in Spain. An exclusive from InfoVaticana: the video of «Josete», the priest who for years paraded around Madrid as a progressive reference, now appearing in a gay bar in Chueca, publicly boasting about the size of his partner’s member. And another news item, from the national press: the arrest of Carlos Loriente, canon of the Cathedral of Toledo, who also acted as an inquisitor, caught in Torremolinos with pink cocaine and on his way to a homosexual orgy.
Two scandals in one day. Two isolated cases, a mere coincidence? Or confirmation of what we’ve been denouncing alone for years, amid stabs, insults, and contempt: that the Church in Spain is taken over by a mafia of homosexual clerics and cover-up artists, who live like kings while destroying the faith of the faithful?
The silence that kills
Following these publications, a good number of priests have written to us. Messages of support, laments, even shared tears. “How right you are”, “how hard this is”, “what a shame”, “how bad everything is”. But here arises the question we can’t leave hanging: what are you doing?
Because good priests exist, we know them, we love them, and we support them. But if their role is limited to sending us back-patting messages while in public they remain silent, obey unjust orders from openly homosexual vicars or from complicit bishops and cardinals, if all they do is lament in private and then in public tear down those who expose these sewers, don’t they become accomplices too?
Victims or passive cover-up artists?
The silence of the good is not neutral. It is deafening. It is the cement that holds up the rotten building. It is the alibi that allows these corrupt clerics to continue living as they please, secure in the knowledge that no one from inside will stand up to them.
They are also guilty, to a lesser extent, those who, knowing what happens in their archpriesthoods, in their vicarages, in their pastoral meetings, prefer to look at the ground and continue obeying.
Every day I am less moved by the suffering of those priests who say “I can’t do anything”. Yes, they can. They can raise their voices, they can refuse to obey immoral orders, they can denounce their superiors, they can unite among themselves. What they can’t do is continue silent and pretend that their silence absolves them.
The silence of the good is today the greatest victory of the bad. And if they don’t break it, if they don’t rebel, they will go down in history not as victims, but as accomplices of a Church that sank amid hypocritical applause and cowardly silences.