What unites Munilla and Mercant with Father Ángel

Churchill recounts in his memoirs that on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, his secretary John Colville pointed out the awkwardness: he, a lifelong anti-communist, would have to come out in defense of Stalin. “If Hitler invaded hell,” he replied, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” The man who said it was a politician, not a pastor of souls; the war was real; and at no point did he confuse the devil with anything else. Well, these days there are people in the Spanish Church who, out of aversion to their own particular Hitler, are lavishing favorable references, and they are neither politicians, nor at war, nor do they seem to have noticed the horns of their ally. The phenomenon already has a name, and the name was given to it by Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz.

In two articles published in The Objective on September 2 and 16, Quintana Paz described what in the United States is already being called Woke 2. The first, from the past decade, had the body as its battlefield: pronouns, quotas, bathrooms. The second changes the cast. The sacred victim becomes the immigrant—and “whoever says ‘immigrant’ today ends up saying ‘Islam,’” he adds—the foreign policy becomes the center of gravity of all morality, and the natural ally is anyone who abhors the heritage of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. In the second installment the philosopher wondered whether the Church would know how to resist, and he answered that he fears alliances more than criticism, for three reasons: because wokeism enters Christian drawing rooms disguised as love for victims, because the fever of Liberation Theology never quite subsided, and because immigration feeds too many ecclesiastical structures. His examples were textbook: the Jesuit Migrant Service, which for nine years pursued, all the way to the Supreme Court, prison sentences for seven Melillans who spoke out of turn on Facebook, and Father Ángel, who shortly after the Ceuta invasion declared the newcomers saints.

What interests one today are two cases that are not textbook, precisely because neither of their protagonists would ever pass for progressive. The first is a bishop whom half of Spain regards as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. The second, a Mallorcan priest in a cassock, doctor in Thomistic Studies and in Law, author of more than a thousand pages against Karl Rahner. They seem to inhabit different galaxies, and it is likely that they profess a perfectly describable esteem for each other. Notice, however, that both have quite a lot in common with Father Ángel.

Monsignor José Ignacio Munilla, bishop of Orihuela-Alicante, devoted his September 18 program Sexto Continente on Radio María to the regulation of artificial intelligence. In that same broadcast he called what happened in Ceuta an invasion, “that sort of green march or hybrid war by Morocco,” recalled that he had devoted an entire program to it on August 3, and aired a sung prayer, written by a listener, in which the Virgin of Africa is asked to save the homeland. A little later the homeland was already suspect. “National sovereignty cannot become absolute sovereignty,” he declared; before a universal technology “we cannot allow ourselves to return to an increasingly particularist, more autarkic, more nationalist policy,” and that, he insisted, “cannot be.” He lamented that the United States is pursuing the international tribunal in The Hague, “even pursuing the judges of that tribunal.” Of international organizations he admitted the “corrupt practices,” but “there have to be international organizations and we will go on improving them.” And behind the clash between powers he saw “Satan rubbing his hands”—“the Pope didn’t say that,” he had the honesty to specify.

No one disputes that sovereignty is not absolute: Vitoria and Suárez taught it long before there was a single official in Geneva. The question is another, and it is one of pure prudence, that virtue which the monsignor invoked with such emphasis: when sovereignty is ceded upward, it is advisable to know who lives on the floor above. And here there is a press archive. In 1998, when the statute of that same court in The Hague, which the bishop now laments, was being drafted in Rome, the Holy See delegation had to fight to keep the figure of “forced pregnancy” from entering it, which its promoters understood as the refusal to perform an abortion; if it prospered, the Vatican diplomats warned, applying the pro-life laws of a State could end up being classified as a “war crime.” They obtained a safeguard clause. The Holy See, by the way, has still not ratified that statute. Closer in time: the Beatriz case has kept El Salvador, whose Constitution recognizes the conceived as a person, in the dock of the Inter-American Court for eleven years. The Human Rights Commission sought to have that protection declared contrary to human rights—it even spoke of torture. The San José Court did not dare to go that far in December 2024, but it condemned the country for “obstetric violence” and ordered it to adopt protocols. We will go on improving them, says the monsignor. It is a plan. The Salvadoran unborn child would have benefited if the improvement had arrived before the lawsuit.

What is remarkable is that the very speech Munilla cited in his support—the one by Leo XIV to the diplomatic corps on January 9—says both things. The Pope did, in effect, lament the weakening of multilateralism. But in that same text he expressed his deep concern for projects aimed at financing cross-border mobility to access the so-called “right to safe abortion,” projects that are not usually hatched in city halls, and he deplored that in the West the space for freedom of expression is visibly shrinking while an Orwellian newspeak prospers. The Pope, then, defends international arbitration and immediately warns of what the arbitrator carries in his briefcase. The monsignor keeps only the first half. Why? Because in his program the villain has a proper name. Tariffs, Venezuelan oil, Greenland, Canada, Iran: he listed all of them as “the common pattern” of a foreign policy “increasingly centered on national sovereignty.” Even the regulation of algorithms ends up being, on Sexto Continente, a chapter in the general cause against Donald Trump. Quintana Paz pointed out as a feature of Woke 2 that foreign policy becomes the epicenter of everything else. There you have it, with a zucchetto.

Mosén Jaime Mercant does not share with Munilla either the ecclesiology or, one suspects, the contact agenda. His is Thomism of strict observance, and when labels are hung on him he replies that if he criticizes liberalism they call him a communist, if he criticizes communism they call him a liberal. He is right that impugning liberalism from Saint Thomas is an old and honorable tradition. The problem begins when the impugning turns into applause. These days it has become known that the Prosecutor’s Office is asking for three years in prison, the closure of the account and the deletion of the messages for a local police officer who, from a soccer-profile account with a pseudonym and 25,000 followers, tweeted against Maghrebi immigrants after the events in Torre Pacheco. One has not read those tweets and would not put one’s hand in the fire for their good taste. One has read those who celebrate them. An activist of those who wear a red triangle next to their name boasted of having taken off his “hood” and having denounced him in 2025; he illustrated it with a screenshot from Diario Red, Pablo Iglesias’s digital outlet, and with a sunglasses emoji. The tweeter Fonsi Loaiza spread the agent’s name and photographs. And beneath both, as if leaning into the huddle, appeared the priest fraternizing with the most extreme left. To the first he pointed out: “He has put a padlock on his account…”. To the second: “If he is guilty, I hope that, at the very least, they expel him from the police force.” Even Óscar Puente was commenting on the tweets with the good Mercant. What embarrassment!

What, then, unites the bishop and the Thomist with Father Ángel? Certainly not Woke 1: Munilla has spent years battling gender ideology and Mercant has dedicated his academic life to dismantling Rahner. That is why they are interesting. Woke 2 does not enter through the door they are guarding, but through another they have wide open: the door of the enemy. Each has his own Hitler. For the monsignor it is Trump and “my own first”; for the priest, liberalism in all its advocations, from Milei downward. And what bothers both of them is the same thing: the concrete nation, the one with borders, police, and the right to decide what laws it gives itself. The one dissolves it upward, on the way to The Hague; the other cheers as it is emptied from below, neighbor by neighbor, in the hate-crimes prosecutor’s office; and in both cases the one who picks up the package is the same progressivism from which both believe themselves safe. Quintana Paz gave three reasons why the clergy will succumb. These two cases suggest a fourth, which is neither pecuniary nor theological: resentment toward one’s own. Corruptio optimi pessima.

Mosén Mercant calls those who on social media call him a communist a “Sanhedrin.” The image is his, but it is worth finishing it. What the Fourth Gospel reproaches the high priests for is not having criticized anyone, but having shouted before Pilate, out of aversion to a closer enemy, the most improper phrase that could have come from their mouths: “We have no king but Caesar” (Jn 19:15). They abhorred Caesar. But that day he came in handy for them.

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