Antonini de Jiménez is a character who has discovered the most effective formula for «succeeding» on social media: building a walking contradiction. Obsessively talking about «success» while appearing on camera with the aesthetics of a shipwreck. Preaching wealth while looking as though he had slept in his clothes. Exalting the entrepreneur while sporting a kind of dirty, unkempt hippie toupee on his head.
His misaligned teeth, his deliberately (or unintentionally) unkempt appearance, the swaying as he speaks in shouts alongside pathological facial tics, complete a character that produces an inevitable aesthetic clash. None of this would matter—the orthodontics is not among the cardinal virtues—if Antonini had not made precisely success, money, prosperity, and the superiority of the winner a substantial part of his intellectualoid merchandise.
The network demands short phrases, enormous certainties, simple enemies, and provocations that can be cut into thirty seconds. Antonini delivers the complete package: Poverty is sin. Entrepreneurs will be the saints of the twenty-first century. Israel as a civilizing beacon. The civil servant as a drag. The market as a stage of redemption. All mixed with a sort of pseudo-taurine anthropology in its lowest register. A kind of Paulo Coelho for slightly pious libertarian brothers-in-law.
The problem is not that Antonini defends business, private property, or the market. A Catholic can hold questionable economic positions and discuss them within the Church’s tradition. The problem begins when provocation replaces thought and economics claims to transform itself into theology.
Antonini has defended a kind of mystification of commerce. In a text published by the Acton Institute, he went so far as to present commerce as «the path man has taken to love his neighbor» and established an explicit parallel between God’s saving action and economic development. The extravagance reached its most perfect expression in April 2026, during the I Forum on Liberalism and Christianity organized by the Centro Diego de Covarrubias at the Hospedería of the Benedictine monks of the Valley of the Fallen: «Christ was the first entrepreneur in History,» he maintained, because he gave the world a commodity it could not provide for itself: «Salvation.» This was recorded by the organization itself.
Christ turned into an entrepreneur and Salvation turned into merchandise. The Gospel according to MBA.
The quip would simply be that, a quip, if Antonini remained confined to the usual ecosystem of internet provocateurs. But that is not the case. For years he was a lecturer at the Universidad Católica de Pereira, from which he published numerous texts. In October 2024, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Colombia, another Catholic university, brought him to its Aula Magna to deliver a lecture organized by its Directorate of Humanities. And in 2026 he appeared at the aforementioned Forum on Liberalism and Christianity, conceived expressly to reflect on the relationship between Christian faith and economic freedom.
He also attended El Despertar, the massive gathering held at Vistalegre in January 2026 by the Tatiana Foundation, sharing the stage with figures unequivocally linked to the Catholic world such as Father Jacques Philippe, Fabrice Hadjadj, or the very purist and exquisite Juan Manuel de Prada. There the phrase about the «entrepreneur Christ» reappeared.
It is not only Antonini, but those who hand him the microphone.
A Catholic university or forum does not have to become a conventicle where everyone thinks alike. Precisely, a university must debate. But debating requires thought, not simply viral capacity. And placing someone behind the shield of a Catholic university or seating them at a forum dedicated to Christianity means granting them an intellectual respectability that deserves, at the very least, some demand.
Because Catholicism possesses two thousand years of reflection on poverty, wealth, work, property, greed, justice, almsgiving, the universal destination of goods, and the dignity of the poor. Reducing all that to the idea that poverty is sin or that Christ was an entrepreneur who commercialized Salvation is not provocative thought. It is wickedly erroneous thought presented amid shouts and nervous tics.
Antonini is, in that sense, a perfect product of our time. He has sufficient academic training to know that things are considerably more complicated than he recounts, but he has understood that complexity gets fewer views than outright nonsense.
He has found his business. The question must now be asked by those who, from Catholic institutions, decide to turn him into a reference.