José Luis Restán is back at it. And he does it as always: raising a theological scarecrow to avoid addressing the heart of the matter.
In his latest editorial on COPE —clearly aimed against the criticisms arising from the episcopal position on immigration— Restán accuses a supposed “Catholic right” of reproducing the old progressive trap: separating the people of God from the bishops, opposing body and head, dynamiting the unity of the Church. According to him, we are facing the same maneuver that “all totalitarian regimes” have used to combat it.
It’s worth reading slowly, because the trap is very well wrapped.
No, Restán, it’s not the same. No one is trying to separate the people from the shepherds. What is being asked for —with increasing urgency— is for there to be shepherds, and not hired hands. And that distinction is not Marxist, nor progressive, nor invented on Twitter. Christ made it.
The Lord did not warn against the faithful who think, discern, or criticize. He warned against the hired hand, who is not a shepherd, who does not care for the sheep and flees when he sees the wolf coming. And He added why he flees: because they are not his own.
That is exactly what many faithful perceive today. Not an imperfect hierarchy —that has always existed— but a hierarchy that manages conflicts to avoid having them, that makes deals to survive, that confuses prudence with surrender and communion with vertical discipline.
Restán speaks of “denying the countenance of the Church.” But for years he has been denying, with facts and editorials, another equally evangelical countenance: that of the adult layperson, with a formed conscience, who does not need the episcopal media apparatus to tell him what to think about every political circumstance.
It is especially cynical that the one who celebrated the fall of a pro-life and pro-family government in Poland for being “not very Europeanist,” who applauded the handover of the Valley of the Fallen to the narrative of power, and who now blesses the Government’s conceptual framework on immigration, presents himself as a defender of “Catholic unity” against critical faithful.
Unity, yes. But unity in the truth, not in the Brussels playbook, nor in the Official State Gazette, nor in the press release from the bishop of the moment.
Restán accuses the critics of wanting to “read the riot act” to the apostles. Curious analogy. Because in the history of the Church, when shepherds have gravely erred in their relationship with power, they have not been corrected by totalitarian regimes, but by saints, by martyrs… and many times by laypeople.
Those who swore the Civil Constitution of the Clergy also spoke of unity. Those who made deals while the Cristeros were dying also spoke of common sense. Those who adapted to avoid being bothered always had a very spiritual discourse.
What bothers today is not the criticism, but that this criticism reminds them of something uncomfortable: that authority in the Church is not a moral free pass, and that when shepherds act as managers of consensus, someone has to remind them that they were ordained to lay down their lives for the sheep, not to administer their discontent.
No, Restán. No one wants a Church without bishops. What many no longer accept is a Church with bishops who, when the wolf arrives, look the other way… and then demand silence in the name of unity.