When the Spanish Episcopal Conference speaks out on immigration, it is worth remembering who pays the salary of the one speaking. Because what seems like a pastoral stance—the insistent hammering on welcoming, the silence in the face of the visible consequences of the phenomenon, the automatic reprimand to any critical voice and even the rhetorical excommunication of politicians who combat it—has behind it a very concrete accounting. The Spanish Church is not an impartial observer of the migration debate. It is one of its main economic operators. And economic operators, as is well known, do not defend principles: they defend market shares.
The most obvious case is Accem. It was created in 1951 by the Episcopal Conference itself under the original name of Spanish Catholic Commission for Migrations Association. In 1990 it shed the religious adjective and re-registered as a non-confessional civil entity, which was not an ideological shift but an administrative operation: the non-confessional accesses subsidy lines that the confessional does not reach. Two years later it signed its first major agreement with INSERSO to manage Refugee Reception Centers, and from there it entered the closed circle—Cruz Roja, CEAR, Accem—to which the State awards reception without a real public tender. The current president is still religious. The vice president, a priest. The non-confessional paint peels off when one looks at the organizational chart.
The figures explain the silence better than any theology. In 2018 Accem managed 45.9 million euros. In 2024 it reached 225.1 million. Its own economic report acknowledges that 99% of its funding is public: 88.16% from the central State, 7.77% regional, the rest scattered among provincial councils, municipalities, and European funds. The remaining 1%—barely two million—comes from the private sector. In other words, a foundation born from the episcopate and still run by ecclesiastical personnel operates with taxpayer money at 99%. The structure employs 3,839 workers in thirteen autonomous communities and the two autonomous cities. It is a parallel administration. An administration whose budget grows exactly at the rate at which irregular arrivals grow.
Cáritas presents figures of another order, but the logic is identical. In 2024 it moved 486.9 million euros, a historical record. Of those, 143.4 million come from public administrations: 29.5% of the global balance. The private proportion is greater than in Accem because Cáritas retains a base of donors and inheritances that partially shields it, but one hundred forty-three million euros annually in public money is no tip. It is a structural dependence. Its own report acknowledges that 47% of the people served are immigrants in irregular administrative situations: about 550,000. Cáritas does not accompany system residues; by volume, it accompanies above all those who have entered outside the law. And then it publicly defends extraordinary regularizations and the expansion of residency, as it did throughout the processing of the ILP in Congress. The organization that charges for serving illegal immigrants does lobbying to have more illegal immigrants to regularize. There is no mystery.
(By the way, when talking about Cáritas, it must be taken into account that the NGO lives off the prestige and reputation of the parish cáritas that have nothing to do with this accounting.)
The whole system is better understood with a single figure: subsidies to reception entities amounted to 1,458 million euros between 2020 and 2024 according to data published by the Ministry of Inclusion. The concerted action articulated in 2022 through Royal Decree 220/2022 and Order ISM/680/2022 allows direct awards, without tender, to a closed group of operators. Cruz Roja takes 49%. CEAR and Accem hover around 15% each. Those three entities concentrate around 85% of the total. Two of them—Accem by origin and direction, Cáritas by diocesan dependence—are ecclesiastical arms. The distribution is closed, the actors are always the same, and the amounts grow year after year in direct correlation with the migratory flow. In 2024, 63,970 people entered irregularly, 12.5% more than the previous year. The industry follows the same expansion cycle.
This is not charity. It is public contracting with an evangelical label. Christian charity, in its classical definition, involves giving the poor what is yours. What happens here is giving the poor what belongs to the taxpayer, charging a commission for the process and also claiming the moral monopoly of the operation. The difference is not semantic. It is structural. And it explains why the Spanish bishops, who in the 20th century spoke out on divorce, abortion, euthanasia, education, or political regime with energy and sometimes with anger, maintain a level of reverential docility on illegal immigration. It is not that they are convinced. It is that they are bought. The distinction matters.
It works like this. When a bishop sees a cayuco on television, he does not see a political issue with two sides—humanitarian and demographic, compassionate and prudent—on which the Church could provide nuances. He sees a unit of production. Each irregular arrival activates budget lines in his diocese, spots in supervised housing managed by Cáritas, contracts with Accem, programs with European co-financing. Each arrival is revenue. And when someone publicly opposes the model—a party, a mayor, a journalist, a dissenting priest—that someone is not an interlocutor: he is a competitor who threatens the income statement. The episcopal reaction is not directed at the substance of the argument but at the threat to income. Hence the automatic reflex of “racism,” “hate speech,” “anti-gospel.” They are not theological categories. They are commercial shields.
The proof that this is so, and not a caricature, lies in the asymmetric behavior. On euthanasia, the bishops speak little but they speak. On abortion, they have lowered the tone but still issue some annual statement. On the persecution of Christians in Africa, they are almost completely silent—there are no subsidies to defend there, so the prophetic zeal disappears—. On internal sexual abuses, they have collaborated just enough and often reluctantly. But on immigration they speak constantly, with sharpened doctrine, with explicit condemnation of those who dissent, with pastoral letters, with days, with manifestos. It is the only topic on which the Episcopal Conference maintains a continuous and unwavering activation. And it is, coincidentally, the only topic in which its network of organizations charges hundreds of millions of euros a year.
The additional hypocrisy consists in presenting this militancy as a fulfillment of the Gospel. It is not. The Gospel does not oblige anyone to open the borders of their country and much less does it oblige them to do so while charging a commission for the operation. Thomas Aquinas, in disputed questions that no Spanish bishop seems to have reread lately, distinguished between peaceful foreigners, hostile foreigners, and dangerous foreigners, and recognized the civil authority’s prudent right to regulate their admission according to the common good. Traditional social doctrine speaks of the right to emigrate and the right of the State to regulate immigration as two simultaneous principles, not as just one. The intellectual operation of the last twenty years—reducing the doctrine to the first and silencing the second—is not a legitimate development. It is an adjustment of theology to the business model.
It is worth saying this without adornments. The Spanish bishops do not opine on illegal immigration: they charge for managing it. The economic mortgage explains the editorial line. And as long as that mortgage is not lifted—as long as Cáritas, Accem, and the diocesan network continue to depend on the migratory flow to sustain their structure—no episcopal intervention on the matter deserves to be read as magisterium. It must be read as what it is: corporate communication from an interest group. The day a Spanish bishop speaks out on immigration after having renounced, in his diocese, any public subsidy linked to the phenomenon, that day his voice will become audible again. Until then, what is heard is not the Church. It is the revenue.