There are bishops who still believe that their mission consists of saving souls. And there are others who, apparently, understand their ministry as an ecclesiastical variant of the communications office of a progressive ministry. In this second category, the Military Archbishopric of Spain has just inscribed itself with scandalous letters by confirming that it denied the celebration of a Mass for the soul of Antonio Tejero in the Military Cathedral due to «risk of connotations.»
The phrase deserves to be preserved. Not for being brilliant, but for being infamous. Because in very few words it summarizes an entire capitulation. It is no longer a matter of discerning whether a baptized person can receive suffrages for their soul. It is no longer a matter of applying Church law. It is no longer a matter of acting as a shepherd. It is about calculating possible external noise, anticipating press judgment, bowing to what people might say, subjecting the liturgy to the filter of fear. The Mass, which is the sacrifice of Christ offered also for the deceased, is thus reduced to an act subject to reputational damage control. It is not a pastoral decision: it is a surrender.
The most revealing part of the statement is not only that it confirms the denial, but the reason chosen to justify it. The Archbishopric does not claim that the deceased was deprived of ecclesiastical exequies. It does not assert that any canonical censure weighed on him. It does not say that there was any intrinsic doctrinal or moral impediment to offering a Mass for his eternal rest. Nothing like that. It implicitly recognizes that the problem was not religious. The problem was political. Or more exactly: media-related. The problem was the external gaze. The possibility that someone might interpret the Mass in a way inconvenient for the guardians of consensus. And so, to avoid discomfort, the only thing that should truly matter to a bishop is sacrificed: the sacred character of the liturgy and the rights of the faithful.
Here lies the entire disease of a notable part of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy. They no longer believe that the Church should teach the world, but that it must constantly justify itself to it. They do not believe they should govern with supernatural criteria, but with the cowardice of a civil servant who fears looking bad in the photo. They do not believe that truth and worship should prevail, but that they must be dosed, diluted, and subjected to dominant sensitivities. The result is a domesticated, trembling, servile Church, more concerned with avoiding headlines than exercising the spiritual authority it claims to have received.
And all of this, moreover, with that unctuous and bureaucratic tone with which the worst indecencies are usually wrapped today. They speak of «alternatives,» of «proposing other parishes,» of avoiding «connotations alien to the strict religious meaning.» What clean language to cover up such evident moral filth. Because what is really being said is this: the Church admits to celebrating Masses for the deceased, yes, but not if the dead person inconveniences the prevailing sentimental regime; not if their name activates Pavlovian reflexes in journalists, pundits, or politicians; not if the bishop fears being called something ugly the next day. Pastoral care has degenerated into public relations.
It is worth saying it without beating around the bush: a bishop who thinks this way no longer reasons as a bishop. He reasons as a manager cowed by the environment. He has accepted the thesis that what is decisive is not what the Church does, but how it will be read by the Church’s enemies. He has completely internalized the world’s prior censorship. And once that principle is accepted, there is no limit. Today it is the «connotations» of a Mass for an inconvenient military man. Tomorrow it will be the suppression of a lecture, the cancellation of a priest, the marginalization of a community, or the practical prohibition of any Catholic gesture that does not fit into the narrow ideological corridor allowed. The mechanism is always the same: it is not denied for what something is, but for what others might say it means.
The gravity of the case increases when it is also known that up to eight churches would have rejected hosting the Mass and that the temple finally willing to celebrate it would have imposed such grotesque conditions as prohibiting the hymn of Spain and that of the Civil Guard and subjecting the sermon to prior review. That is no longer just cowardice: it is humiliation. It is the Church treating itself as if it were a suspicious entity, incapable of celebrating a liturgy without implicit political oversight. It is the substitution of the altar by protocol, the shepherd by the censor, the priest by the preventive commissar. And all of this for a deceased whose soul, in theory, should move to prayer and not to image engineering.
It will be said that a Mass was not denied, but only a place. It is a miserable defense. Because precisely the official argument recognizes that the problem was not logistical or accidental, but symbolic. No objection was raised to a matter of agenda or organization. The Military Cathedral was vetoed for what it represented. And by doing so, the Archbishopric made it clear that it considers it legitimate to restrict the liturgical expression of the faithful when it might project an inconvenient image. In other words, it turned a cathedral into a space of access conditioned by unconfessed political criteria, though barely disguised. A temple would no longer be a place where the Holy Sacrifice is offered, but a space whose availability depends on the degree of ideological acceptance of the deceased and their surroundings.
There is in all this a monstrous inversion of the Christian order. The Church, which for centuries prayed for emperors, kings, soldiers, notorious sinners, and men of all conditions, now cowers before a funeral because it might generate comments. The institution that buried entire generations without asking permission from the on-duty columnists now needs to shield itself from «connotations.» The spouse of Christ, reduced to a fearful office of the dominant narrative. It is hard to imagine a more humiliating image of the inner collapse of a part of the episcopate.
And then the laments will come for the disaffection of the faithful, for the loss of respect for authority, for the erosion of the bond between the Christian people and the hierarchy. But that disrepute does not fall from the sky. They work for it with discipline. Every time a bishop suggests that the salvation of a soul weighs less than the fear of the press, he teaches the faithful that his shepherd does not fully believe what he preaches. Every time a Mass is subjected to calculations of opportunity, it conveys that the liturgy is not the most important thing. Every time prudence is invoked to cover up cowardice, the word prudence is profaned a little more.
We are not faced with a simple error of governance or a communicative blunder. We are faced with a moral X-ray. That of a hierarchy which, in too many cases, no longer fears God, but the world. A hierarchy that dares to preemptively correct the faithful, but not to challenge the dominant ideological climate. A hierarchy that preserves the forms, but has lost the nerve. And a bishop who denies a Mass in his cathedral due to «risk of connotations» is not avoiding a scandal: he is starring in it.
Because the true scandal was not praying for the soul of a deceased person. The true scandal is that an archbishop considered the possible discomfort of published opinion more grave than his duty to act as a Catholic pastor. That is the scandal. That is the symptom. And that is also the most severe judgment against one who has preferred to manage perceptions rather than safeguard the altar.