The emeritus bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández, has shared how he is living the new stage that has opened after leaving the pastoral governance of the diocese. After decades marked by intense episcopal activity, he acknowledges that now another learning awaits him: to step away from the spotlight, accept silence, and have more time for prayer and the encounter with God.
He explains this in the recent episode of Between God and Me, dedicated to the spiritual desert, illness, prayer, and the way to live faith when life’s circumstances change. “I have to learn not to be. Just as I spent time and time learning to be,” Fernández states.
“It’s as if many lights have gone out”
The change is especially striking after twenty years as a bishop: fifteen leading Córdoba and five previously in the diocese of Tarazona.
Accustomed to “a tremendous schedule” and several activities each day, Fernández describes the new situation with a simple image: “Now it’s as if many lights have gone out.”
The process involves learning to move “to the second or third plane, or even not to be on any plane.” The emeritus bishop does not present it as a loss, but as a new experience that allows him to dedicate much more time “to prayer, to being with the Lord.”
The stage reminds him of Christ’s hidden life in Nazareth: thirty years away from public ministry before the three years of preaching.
“I don’t know if God will want me to be here thirty years now—whatever He wants,” he comments, before speaking naturally about death: “When God wills, I must go with Him to heaven. Something I desire, I ask Him for, but without pushing.”
From noise to silence
Fernández acknowledges that he always enjoyed pastoral activity. By temperament, he explains, he tended to stay busy, attend to others, and seek new ways to serve.
“I have always been inventing things to be able to attend to others, to serve others,” he recalls.
He also admits that such a pace could be exhausting, especially as the years passed. Now, however, he says he is equally enjoying “this solitude and tranquility.”
The contrast between the two stages does not mean abandoning his vocation, but living it in another way. Visible service gives way to a more withdrawn life, where silence and prayer occupy a space that was previously harder to find.
The illness that marked his life
The current retirement is not the first experience of “desert” he has gone through.
When he was 33, Demetrio Fernández suffered a serious illness that kept him practically bedridden for an entire year and even led him to think his death was near.
His life was then reduced to the essentials. He would get up around midday, gather strength to celebrate Mass, eat with the community, and return to bed until the next day.
He could not study or make great efforts. He spent the hours resting, praying the Rosary, and, as he recalls, simply trying “to feel the presence of God” in his life.
“It was a very hard moment, but I lived it with much peace, serenity, and always accompanied by the Lord,” he explains.
“That was like a novitiate”
Fernández considers that year of illness decisive for the rest of his ministry.
“That was like a novitiate that later launched me into pastoral work with a different attitude,” he states.
Since then he has known other periods of fatigue, change, and solitude—moments when “all the lights go out” and the usual supports and securities disappear. But he insists he never lived them as an absence of God.
That experience also helps him understand his current stage as emeritus bishop. After the noise of years of pastoral governance, silence does not appear as a void to be filled, but as another place from which to continue responding to his vocation.
For Fernández, that is precisely the Christian meaning of the desert: “It is not to disconnect from God, but precisely to connect with God.”