There are portals that are born with the vocation of a manifesto. The Grass is Green, which takes its name from that Chesterton prophecy about the day when it would be necessary to unsheathe the sword to maintain that grass is green and that two and two are four, presents itself as a refuge for those who refuse to resign themselves to every piece of evidence dissolving into a slogan. A laudable purpose. It is all the more curious, therefore, that one of its first swords has been unsheathed not against the prevailing relativism, but against Vox, and that it is wielded by Santiago Leyra-Curiá—professor at Villanueva University, doctor in Ecclesiastical Law, numerary of Opus Dei—with the argument that Abascal’s party has broken irreparably with the Social Doctrine of the Church. One expected Chesterton and instead finds a glossed episcopal note. The grass, it seems, is only green until one has to speak of borders.
It is worth taking the text seriously, because it is well written and because its author knows what he is talking about, which is precisely what makes it debatable. Leyra levels three charges: that Vox has fractured human dignity by adopting an anti-immigration discourse incompatible with the evangelical mandate to welcome the stranger; that its pyramidal structure, with its internal purges and cult of the leader, is alien to the subsidiarity and freedom of conscience that the Church promotes; and that Abascal’s words against the Spanish bishops and against the Pope place him outside coherent Catholicism. The conclusion is that the Catholic voter has once again been left orphaned and that it is advisable to found something new, a politics “by elevation” that transcends the outdated categories of left and right. It is an elegant diagnosis. It has only one flaw, and it is not minor: it systematically confuses the plane of dogma with that of prudence, and it does so in only one direction.
Let us begin with the insults to the bishops, where the confusion yields the best results. Abascal has not been seen insulting any bishop. What has been seen is a political response—harsh, if one wishes—to a very harsh, improper and perfectly debatable intervention by the Episcopal Conference against a legitimate position on immigration. And here the distinction is not a sacristy nuance: one thing is the respect due to pastors and quite another to accept that an episcopal note on a debatable matter should be transmuted, by the art of binding, into a political dogma of obligatory adherence. Catholic doctrine does not require defending mass, disorderly immigration or immigration promoted as social engineering. The Gospel does not require it, the Catechism does not require it, the political tradition of the Church does not require it. The Church teaches the dignity of every human being, the duty to succor the needy and the obligation to treat the foreigner with justice and charity; but it also recognizes the right of political communities to order their borders, protect their cohesion and demand that welcome not destroy the very conditions that make it possible. Presenting Vox’s position as a moral heresy is not theology: it is manipulation with fine lettering. And if some bishops decide to enter the arena with a broad brush, pointing to a specific party while remaining silent before other public barbarities, they cannot later expect to be answered with incense, genuflection and organ music. Whoever intervenes in politics receives a political response. What is truly clerical is not answering a bishop; what is clerical is supposing that a bishop can pontificate on any temporal matter without anyone replying.
The matter of the Pope requires an even more basic distinction, one of those learned before the first intellectual communion. There is no contempt in noting that when the Roman Pontiff opines on immigration, economics, borders or models of integration, he is not defining doctrine of faith. His judgment deserves to be heard with filial respect, of course, but it does not automatically make a public policy Catholic nor the contrary one anti-Catholic. This is catechism, not barstool sedevacantism: infallibility operates under very precise conditions, not every time an impression about the Mediterranean is issued. In the realm of the debatable, the papal criterion is worth what its arguments are worth, and if the arguments are weak, they are weak even if pronounced by whoever pronounces them. What is theologically scandalous is not saying it: what is scandalous is the opposite, turning every pontifical comment into an article of the Creed according to the convenience of the day’s cause.
And it is here, precisely here, that the pen of an Opus Dei numerary asking Vox for greater submission to the Pope acquires an unmistakable aroma. Because if we are going to be exquisite about obedience to Rome, let us do it completely. In June 2022, the motu proprio Ad charisma tuendum determined that the prelate of Opus Dei should cease to be a bishop and transferred the Work from the Dicastery for Bishops to that for the Clergy, obliging it to reform its Statutes. In August 2023, a second motu proprio on canons 295 and 296 deepened in the same direction, reordering the entire legal figure of the prelature. These were not pastoral suggestions: they were decisions of the same Pope whose authority is now invoked to admonish Abascal. And the Work’s response to those blows was not precisely the enthusiastic compliance of the soldier, but the patient retreat of the jurist: studying the scope, preserving the charism, dialoguing with the Holy See, fitting in pastorally, gaining time. All very understandable. All very human. But then let us not call that obedience; let us call it by its name: institutional discernment. The same Roman sensibility that is demanded of a party on immigration becomes, within the house, a notable capacity to qualify, delay and contextualize every time it is Rome that corrects.
That is not Catholic obedience. It is papism of convenience. Pope maximum when it serves to reprove Vox; Pope relative when he puts his hand in the Statutes, in internal government, in the episcopal condition of the prelate or in the power routines of the institution itself. Such selective obedience is not a theological virtue: it is a tactic. And it is worth recalling precisely when it is erected as a yardstick for measuring that of others.
The same happens with the purges, that chapter in which the article raises the epic tone. That the internal discipline of a party should be denounced with scandal has, coming from where it comes, a point of involuntary humor. If the history of closed, disciplined institutions with a strong internal culture understands anything, it is the art of managing the memory of those who leave, those who bother or those who no longer fit the official narrative.
We could speak, for example, of Miguel Fisac, who was not a vulgar enemy nor an upstart, but one of the central figures of the Work’s early days—eminent architect, intimate friend of Escrivá for twenty years, one of those who carried the founder on his back while crossing the rivers in the flight through the Pyrenees during the Civil War. That group that crossed the mountain range numbered eight. Fisac himself recounted it: eight men, with names and surnames. But because he and Manuel Saiz de los Terreros later left the institution, the official biographers removed them from the account, and since then the canonical history says there were six. It is not a metaphor nor a suspicion: it is a subtraction. From eight to six, without stridency, by the simple procedure of ceasing to name the one who leaves. An elegant operation, in which no one is shot: they are erased with fine calligraphy.
So yes, let us speak of purges, those of Vox and their supposed injustices, because no party is free of human miseries. But let us do so without the tone of institutional purity of someone who comes from a tradition that knows very well the devout erasure and the enveloping silence. There are purges with a communiqué and purges with spiritual direction. Not all make noise. Some simply smell of wax.
There remains the charge of the “single issue,” which is the most revealing, not for what it says, but for the place from which it is said. For someone who lives protected by income, neighborhood, selected school and homogeneous social environment, mass immigration can seem a plebeian obsession of agitated people, a matter good for the pastoral column and the breakfast of conscience without personal cost. It is very easy to be generous with someone else’s neighborhood. But for millions of Spaniards this is not a doctrinal abstraction: it is their children’s school, the saturated health center, the neighborhood that changes in five years, the pressure on wages, impossible housing, the growing feeling that certain elites have decided to experiment with diversity in working-class neighborhoods while they contemplate it from behind the gate, the alarm and the twelve o’clock Mass.
Calling that concern a “single issue” is quite obscene. A single issue is not talking about immigration; a single issue is refusing to look at its consequences because they do not touch one, repeating “welcome, protect, promote and integrate” as a magic formula without ever explaining who pays, who coexists, who yields and what happens when integration does not arrive. When someone installed in comfort reproaches the worker for his obsession with bread, one can only smile at the purity of the diagnosis: from certain heights, every real problem seems a plebeian mania.
None of this denies the dignity of the immigrant; on the contrary, it takes it seriously, because taking politics seriously consists precisely in governing consequences and not in throwing principles into the air with the hope that they will fall ordered upon reality. Whoever refuses to speak of consequences is not more Christian: he is more irresponsible, perhaps with the best intentions, which is how the best-educated disasters in history are usually paved.
Hence the conclusion of the article—the orphaned invitation to found a politics “by elevation” that transcends left and right—sounds less like a program than like an alibi. It is a respectable aspiration as old as disillusionment, and it has the charm of committing to nothing: from on high, every real conflict seems a quarrel of barbarians who have not yet understood the synthesis. But politics is not done by elevation; it is done by gravity, there where decisions weigh and someone pays the bill. And it is striking that whoever demands that height for others has not applied it, with the same rigor, to the obedience due in his own house.
Being Catholic does not oblige one to be naïve. Nor does respecting the bishops grant a bull to elevate a prudential opinion to the category of dogma. Nor does loving the Pope require pretending that every phrase of his about borders carries the weight of a conciliar definition—and least of all does it require it of someone who, when the case arises, knows how to read the motu proprio that concern him with notable sense of nuance. The grass, indeed, is green. But perhaps the author should be reminded that defending the obvious also includes the obvious that is uncomfortable in one’s own house: that obedience, when it is real, does not choose its days; and that the sword unsheathed to correct the neighbor ought, first, to have been tested in one’s own garden.
Note: Articles published as Tribune express the opinion of their authors and do not necessarily represent the editorial line of Infovaticana, which offers this space as a forum for reflection and dialogue.