A secret logic incompatible with Catholic doctrine
Beyond the absence of an explicit condemnation, the Church has always discouraged membership in secret or reserved associations, especially when such reservation becomes a structural method of action. Both the 1917 CIC and the 1983 CIC recommend that the faithful integrate into approved, transparent associations under the legitimate oversight of ecclesiastical authority. The Yunque, on the other hand, operates with an initiatory logic, internal commitments, systematic denial to third parties, and a largely opaque structure, which clashes head-on with the principle of truthfulness that constitutes the minimum basis of Catholic morality. The usual justification—that the reservation is a strategy for political effectiveness—reveals the most worrying doctrinal background: the subordination of truth to utility.
The utilitarian drift: when “anything goes” in the name of the good
This is, perhaps, the core of the problem. The internal culture of the Yunque has normalized the use of lying as a tool of action, a “sly” lie, internally justified as a legitimate means to serve a higher cause. This approach has generated, over the years, dynamics as predictable as they are destructive. Money has been requested for one purpose and used for another; figures, projections, and expectations have been inflated to justify unviable projects; fictitious or semi-fictitious associative structures have been built to give the appearance of representativeness; parties, universities, and civil associations have been infiltrated with the intention of reorienting them “from within.” What was initially presented as a sophisticated strategy ended up configuring a system based on half-truths, concealments, and manipulation. The inevitable consequence has been the loss of credibility, the confusion between ends and means, and, finally, public disrepute.
An internal coordination that emerges: public supports, proper names, and ideological shift
The Revuelta scandal has also made visible something that until now was only intuited: the internal coordination of the Yunque when one of its own is compromised. The closed defense of Revuelta’s «president» Jaime Hernández Zúñiga—leader of Hazte Oír’s youth—has triggered a cascade of public supports that, in practice, reveal a very evident network with satellites.
The coordinated reaction is significant for two reasons. First, because it confirms that the internal brotherhood remains active and operational: when one falls under suspicion, the rest mobilize. And second, because it evidences a generational change that is altering the very identity of the Yunque. People close to it involved (consciously or unconsciously) in its structures, such as Javier Villamor or Pablo Gasca, would have generated genuine panic among the more liberal neoconservative sector of the Yunque in 2010, who would have seen in those profiles a radical shift incompatible with their objectives of sly infiltration.
However, the “Overton window” has been shifting. What a decade ago would have been considered unacceptable within the Yunque itself—harsher discourses, links with previously discarded currents—is now tolerated and even integrated without difficulty. The explanation is not ideological, but pragmatic: in a structure where “anything goes for power,” the boundaries move according to utility. The result is a movement that adapts not out of conviction, but out of survival, and ends up accepting as its own what it previously repudiated if it considers it can offer tactical advantage.
Hazte Oír and the loop repetition of the same pattern
Hazte Oír reproduced, with greater organizational intelligence than Revuelta, the same operating pattern of the Yunque that is now under scrutiny: diffuse parallel structures, affiliates who are not really affiliates, nominal boards of directors, donations of uncertain destination, and emotional campaigns that sustained fragile financial models. The Revuelta case illustrates once again what happens when that method is applied in contexts where transparency is indispensable: the distance between the official version and reality widens until it breaks public trust. What some present as “communicative strategy” is, in practice, a continuous breach of basic governance standards.
A political project flawed from its premise
The Yunque was born from a mistaken intuition: the idea that the only way to influence a hostile society was through infiltration, anonymity, and emotional manipulation. That approach turned sociopolitical Catholicism in Spain into a permanent covert operation, incapable of acting in the public light with the truth and clarity proper to ecclesial institutions. Today, that strategy has proven not only ineffective, but counterproductive. Conservative civil society is beginning to generate projects that advance without complexes, without secrets, and without the need for clandestine plots. Where the Yunque failed with secret documents and opaque structures, others progress by openly appealing to the truth. Conspiracies were not only unnecessary: they were a burden.
The result: a worn-out, unnecessary, and failed movement
The final balance is that of a project that did not achieve its objectives and wore down everything it touched. The Yunque failed in transparency, as it never consolidated a reliable institutional structure. It failed in effectiveness, because it squandered vast resources on improvised operations. It failed in morality, by normalizing lying as a tactical instrument. It failed in strategy, confusing militancy with conspiracy. And it failed in credibility, alienating society and fracturing the Catholic world itself. The deepest damage, however, is internal: the erosion of Christian witness when political action is based on practices that openly contradict the ethics it claims to defend.
The discussion opened by the Revuelta case and by Cuquerella’s recent statements should not focus on the existence or not of a formal condemnation. The essential question is whether the method, the internal culture, and the consequences of the Yunque are compatible with honest, transparent, and genuinely Catholic activism. What has been demonstrated over two decades is that secrecy, manipulation, and half-truths are not only morally reprehensible, but strategically ruinous. Spanish conservatism does not need conspiracies: it needs truth, competence, and public, open, and accountable structures. The Yunque did not fail due to external persecution. It failed because of its own methods.