The softest response that the bishops’ radio gave this week to the Ministry of Health’s abortion campaign did not come from a morning talk show, where anything can be said, nor from an afternoon magazine, where sometimes one says what must be said, but from one of the few spaces in which COPE speaks expressly as the Church. It was on La Linterna de la Iglesia, Friday the 25th at ten-thirty at night: three minutes of monologue by Irene Pozo, who directs and presents the program and who since 2023 has been head of the socio-religious area of Ábside Media, the COPE and TRECE group, a post for which, according to this portal at the time, she was chosen by the Episcopal Conference itself. Three minutes on abortion on the Church’s program, and not once the word son.
It is worth recalling what was on the table. On Tuesday the 22nd, Health presented an institutional campaign with the slogan “Everything will be fine,” and the minister, at the same event, announced that she had asked the State Attorney’s Office to force Madrid to lift the register of objecting doctors and called a journalist who asked whether the fetus suffers a “denialist.” COPE itself reported it for three days, with uneven enthusiasm (the flagship program, with very little), and José Luis Restán, in his Wednesday editorial, spoke of one of “the supreme immoralities of this era” and threw the adjective back at the minister: the denialist was her. On Friday it was the Church’s turn.
The monologue was not a live slip. It is a written text, read straight through and posted that same night on the network’s website as a “featured monologue,” under a headline chosen by the house: “Freedom does not consist only in being able to choose, it consists in being able to do so with all the information.” Any ethics committee of a public hospital would sign it without blinking (it is, strictly speaking, the doctrine of informed consent), and the rest of the text does not contradict it. It begins with a concession: every woman deserves respect, listening and welcome, and no one can be frivolous about an unexpected pregnancy. It continues with a thesis: a decision is not entirely free if all options are not known, because telling a woman “you decide” “is important. But it is not enough.” It claims for her the right to know what aid exists, cites the Red Madre figure (eight out of ten women who arrived with doubts went ahead after being accompanied), admits that after an abortion “some speak of relief” and others of grief or guilt, recalls that Spain records about 33 abortions for every hundred births and reaches its firmest phrase: “Abortion cannot be a matter of indifference to us. Not because we want to point fingers or judge anyone, but because we are talking about a life and a woman who needs to be cared for.” It adds that caring “is never offering a single way out,” that freedom without truth or accompaniment can end in abandonment, and then, without transition, an insurer that “adds peace of mind” comes in and offers you La Linterna de la Iglesia.
What is missing in those three minutes can be told quickly, because it is almost everything. “Pregnancy” appears three times; “right,” another three, and all three are the woman’s right: to know, to be aware, to know the whole reality. “Life,” referring to the one about to be born, only once, and paired: “we are talking about a life and a woman.” Son, none. Child, baby or unborn, neither. God does not appear, nor Christ, nor the Pope, nor the bishops, nor a line of the Magisterium, nor a single work of the Church (the accompaniment that is praised is that of Red Madre, which is a civil foundation), and the only time the word Church is heard is in the name of the program, when the sponsor comes in. Even the first sentence has its trap: it speaks of “decisions that change a life forever,” and it is true that the mother’s changes. The son’s does not change. It ends.
None of this is a stylistic nuance, because the Church has written exactly what to do in this case. Evangelium vitae warns against the “ambiguous terminology” that hides the nature of abortion and calls, in the face of something so grave, for the courage to “call things by their name,” without comfortable compromises (n. 58); it denounces expressions that distract from the fact that what is at stake is the right to existence of a concrete human person (n. 11); and it declares that direct abortion is always a grave moral disorder, as the deliberate elimination of an innocent human being (n. 62). The monologue says pregnancy where the encyclical says human being, reserves the right for the mother and, when it comes to judging the act, takes shelter in not wanting to judge anyone (the Church has for twenty centuries distinguished the sin from the sinner; here, so as not to judge the sinner, the sin is suppressed). It even borrows a very John Paul II idea, that of freedom detached from truth, and empties it: in the encyclical, the truth that freedom forgets is the life of the other; in La Linterna it is information about aid and after-effects. That information is exactly what the Aído law required to be given to the woman before aborting and what the 2023 reform suppressed, something the monologue does not mention either.
Nor is it necessary to go to Rome. In June 2009, the Permanent Commission of the Episcopal Conference entitled its declaration on the draft of that law “Attacking the life of those about to be born, turned into a ‘right,’” and wrote in it that deciding to abort is “taking the life of a son already conceived.” Seventeen years later, the Church’s program on the radio of those same bishops speaks of right without quotation marks and of decision without son. And the ethical and editorial-line code of COPE itself, published on its institutional website, promises the “unconditional defense of all human life, from its conception to its natural end,” with rights that cannot be conditioned under any concept. Unconditional, it says. The monologue conditions everything to information and accompaniment, and it never reaches defending the concrete life of someone.
What is striking is that the radio did know how to say it. Four hours earlier, on La Tarde, the host settled the debate on fetal pain with a clarity that needs no catechesis: “in abortion what is done is to kill the son the woman carries in her womb.” And half an hour after the monologue, on the same program, the network’s correspondent summarized León XIV’s speeches in Paris, recalling that, for the Pope, the protection of the right to life is the foundation of every other human right. So that Friday, on the bishops’ radio, the afternoon magazine said son and said kill, the Pope spoke of the right to life, and the Church’s program, between one and the other, said pregnancy and said decision.
It is not about Irene Pozo, who says sensible things about accompaniment (and some, like that abortion cannot be a matter of indifference to us, which elsewhere would be an obviousness and here is almost an audacity). It is that the softest response of the network to the “everything will be fine” campaign came from the space from which COPE speaks in the name of the Church, signed by the person the bishops entrusted with their religious content, and that here there is no talk-show host behind whom to hide. The encyclical the Church dedicated to life begins with the announcement of a birth, “for unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior.” The Gospel of Luke makes the first to recognize Christ, who had not yet been born, another child who had not yet been born either: “the creature leaped for joy in my womb.” Scripture calls it creature; the Church’s program, pregnancy. Everything will be fine, says the Ministry; adds peace of mind, says the sponsor. And between the two, on the bishops’ radio, the son remained without a name.
“COPE, the bishops’ radio” is a daily section of InfoVaticana. We listen attentively to the radio of our bishops and tell them what we find: advertising, guests, language, what is said and what is kept silent. COPE belongs 75% to Ábside Media, the company the Episcopal Conference created in 2020 with its shares and those of most of the dioceses. In addition, the Jesuits and Augustinians are part of the shareholding.
Everything that is heard on it is the responsibility, each in a personal capacity, of all the Spanish bishops.
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