Antonio María Rouco Varela does not dare to say that he has followed Christ completely. He acknowledged this at the end of a long video interview, when asked for an inspiring phrase and chose the Gospel scene of the rich young man, who had kept the law of Moses and still lacked one thing: to follow Jesus. “That has always been impressive to this day,” he said. “And I followed him.” He immediately added that no one can claim such a thing, that he does not claim it and that he is not sure, “by no means, on the contrary,” of having followed him “truly one hundred percent.” The confession closes a review of an entire life in which the archbishop emeritus of Madrid, who on October 31 marks fifty years as a bishop, speaks of his vocation as a child, of the crisis of faith he suffered at sixteen, of the fear of death, which he admits, of the existence of the devil, of Islam, of the Mass lived as routine, and of Conclave, the film he decided not to see.
The conversation is published on YouTube under the title “The story of Cardinal Rouco Varela: a lifetime dedicated to God”, within a video podcast that invites its guests to have “coffee with history.” The interviewer is the grandson of the historian Ricardo de la Cierva, who died in 2015. Rouco was already familiar with his historical work when he arrived in Madrid as archbishop in 1994, and a great friendship was born between them, which, in the cardinal’s words, was for the historian the friendship of his final years and for him the friendship of his first years in Madrid. The grandson recalled that as a child he would see the cardinal at his grandfather’s house talking until dawn. Rouco’s own references place the recording in the last days of May: Magnifica humanitas, the first encyclical of Leo XIV, published on the 25th, had just come out, and the Mass for the sixtieth anniversary of the Neocatechumenal Way in the Almudena Cathedral, celebrated on the 30th, was yet to come. He was then 89 years old. He turned ninety on August 20.
He wanted to be a priest from a very young age, like the parish priest of Villalba (Lugo), Don Gabriel Pita da Veiga, from a family of sailors from Ferrol, whom he considers a saint: his cause for canonization was not opened “for multiple reasons,” he said, but it could have been. At six he was already an altar server and had no doubt. He rejects the idea that children cannot have a vocation, “they can have one and they do,” and assures that in his years as a priest and bishop he has often seen children in whose eyes it was evident. In the Villalba of the forties and fifties, he explained with a reference to the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, there was no distinction between the Christian community and the civil community: every villager was a parishioner of the parish and every parishioner was a villager. “We were children of the parish and citizens of the town.”
His father died suddenly when he was seven. His mother, widowed in her early forties, had him as the youngest at home and found it very hard to let him go. He turned ten in August 1946 and on October 1 he was already in the seminary of Vilanova de Lourenzá; the following year, in Mondoñedo. The boarding school was strict and one did not return home until summer. They allowed him to attend the funeral of a great-uncle in 1947, but not the baptism of a niece, his sister’s daughter, for whom he stood as godfather by proxy, nor his sister’s wedding. “It seemed relatively normal to us.” Of some twenty altar servers from his parish, he was the only one who entered the seminary, and even so he does not consider it “any act of heroism.”
That world no longer exists. Rouco dates the practical disappearance of the minor seminary, turned into an open school, to the seventies, shortly after the Council, and with it the reversal of vocations: what in his time was called a late vocation is today the norm. During his years as archbishop of Madrid, he recounted, most seminarians entered after high school, during university or after finishing it. Not long ago he shared a table with someone who was going to enter at 32, after having worked, and who would be ordained around forty. “It seems to me that is a long time of formation,” he commented, and compared: “I was made a bishop at 40.” The interviewer told him about a friend who has been hesitating for some time about becoming a priest, and Rouco gave advice for anyone in that situation: pray a lot, ask the Lord to show the way, be humble, “let themselves be led and have no fear,” because “the one behind those decisions is He.” He recalled that the yes must be repeated. At fourteen or fifteen, with adolescence, “you start to meet girls” and “you have to renew the yes.”
The formation of that time consisted of five years of Latin and humanities, three of philosophy and four of theology. He studied theology at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, as a resident at the San Carlos college, housed in the Clerecía building, with some two hundred major seminarians from all over Spain: Basques, Catalans, Andalusians, Valencians, Canarians, Balearics, Castilians, Madrilenians, excluding no “nationality,” he specified, quotation marks included. The classmate who followed him on the course list was the Barcelonan Jordi Sánchez Bosch, who would become a great biblical scholar. That community lived inwardly, but was open to the street and to university life, including that of the civil university.
In September 1959, a few months after his priestly ordination, he went to study in Munich. First he called the rector of the Spanish college in the city, who according to his account was the writer and journalist José María Javierre, to ask how a priest dressed in Germany. Black suit and black tie, he was told, and an overcoat, because it was very cold. Rouco, who had worn a cassock since he was eleven, did not dare to leave Villalba like that and changed in Barcelona, at Sánchez Bosch’s house.
He traveled third class, because there was no money for more at home. The train had to be changed because of the gauge; he fell asleep in a corner of the carriage while the passengers wondered whose young son, dressed in black, had died. He said nothing. He helped an elderly man with a large suitcase and a child onto the train, arrived in Geneva, looked for a place to celebrate Mass and, already on the way to Munich, a couple asked him in German if he was a Catholic theologian. He, who barely spoke the language, replied that he was a Catholic priest. From all that he draws a lesson about vocations: sometimes they seem to arise suddenly, but “the sudden has precedents, has consequences and always has company.”
Being a cardinal, he maintains, “is not a career.” In the ministry, the only thing one can aspire to is the priesthood, and a newly ordained priest has the same capacity to preside at the Eucharist as the bishop of Rome. “You do not take competitive exams to become a bishop.” There were competitive exams for parishes: from Trent until Vatican II, he recalled, in Spain they were classified as entry, promotion and terminal parishes, and were filled by competition. He was never a parish priest, not even an assistant. As a student he was a cooperator in the parish of San Rafael, in northwest Munich, where he lived three years in the parish house; as a professor in Salamanca he helped some Sundays in the university chapel. “They took me out of the university to be a bishop, but not out of a parish or a position.” When they informed him of his appointment to Santiago he asked for time before accepting. Canonically no one is obliged to accept the episcopate, he explained: it is “a matter of your conscience and before our Lord.” He recalled the jokes prompted by the first letter to Timothy, according to which whoever aspires to the episcopate desires something good, and concluded: “I do not know if anyone has a desire to be a bishop.”
The red hat depends only on the Pope, and there he left a note about the previous pontificate. With Francis it was very difficult not to accept, he said, because he announced the appointments from the window of the apostolic palace and the chosen one might know nothing. He was created cardinal by John Paul II in 1998, “but they asked me beforehand, of course, because I could have rejected it.” He recalled the case of Romano Guardini: Paul VI offered him the cardinalate in 1965 and the theologian did not accept it, although he wrote that that offer, as papal confirmation of his entire intellectual trajectory, was one of the greatest joys of his life.
The interviewer asked him about Conclave, the film by Edward Berger which, in his words, suggests politicking and power struggles between progressive and conservative cardinals. Rouco said that, knowing the script it was going to develop, he did not want to see it, because “it has little to do with reality.” He, who voted in the conclaves of 2005 and 2013, described what one is like: the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel after invoking the Holy Spirit with the Veni Creator; there they do not speak, they pray and they vote; each one places his ballot on the altar with a formula that is prayer and commitment before the Lord; the cardinals themselves collect, count and review the votes, and if no one reaches two-thirds the vote is repeated. Afterwards, dinner at the Santa Marta residence and each one to his room or to the chapel. One can speak with someone, he admitted, but there is nothing more. “Much simpler than what they show in the film.”
On atheism he was brief. It has logical sense as a denial of God, but “to deny God you have to be able to prove that he does not exist,” a syllogism that contradicts itself and from which, he recalled, the proof of Saint Anselm starts.
His response was more extensive to the objection of someone born Catholic in Spain as another is born Muslim in Morocco: why is our God the true one? Rouco answered with history. God’s relationship with man becomes dense in the Middle East, in the people of Israel, surrounded by cultures such as the Persian and in contact with Greek reason, and culminates in Jesus of Nazareth, a novelty that bursts into history, a revelation of God “that is full.” In today’s Israel, he pointed out, Catholics weigh more than their number suggests, especially because of the Neocatechumenal Way, “a Spanish foundation” with a great center of spirituality in Galilee. Knowing that revelation depends on the freedom of persons and peoples, and there he drew the difference. Christianity spread in its first centuries through martyrdom. Islam, on the other hand, “is born in a very imposed way”: North Africa was Christian and ceased to be so, he said, not because of an interior conversion movement, but because of overpopulation, repopulation and violent action against its communities.
Spain preserved the faith with freedom and at a cost. Spaniards, he affirmed, were not Christian “because they were going to do better business with Rome”: maintaining the faith cost martyrdom under the Empire, cost under Visigothic rule and, after the Muslim invasion of 711, cost the Reconquest. Some want to revise the concept, he admitted, but it is “an indisputable fact.” He invoked his interviewer’s grandfather, Ricardo de la Cierva, and Julián Marías’s La España inteligible to recall that Spaniards did not want to be Muslim and that that always cost. “There has been freedom in all that process.”
To someone who finds it hard to keep the faith he proposes starting by “accepting the humility of being human.” No one is here because they wanted to be nor remains here because they want to; if my parents loved me, someone loved them before, and in the end someone has loved me and continues to love me, because if not, I would not be here. If the one who loves me stopped loving me, we would be nothing. He also does not believe that doubts are a matter for the new generations: “We have all had our crises of faith.” His came in Mondoñedo, at sixteen, studying German idealism, Kant and Hegel. If what I see and understand is subjective, he wondered, the Padornelo, the peak above the seminary, is it there or not? “I had a terrible time.” He consulted the formator, a young priest trained in Comillas, who laughed a lot at him and did not take him seriously. The spiritual father, on the other hand, did.
For those seeking he recommended Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, although he warned that it requires some culture, and Guardini’s The Lord. Above all, Introduction to Christianity, which Ratzinger conceived in Tübingen for students in interior crisis on the eve of May ’68. Rouco turned to it in Salamanca between 1973 and 1975, years he described as the critical moment of the Spanish transition, when he was chaplain of a circle of students from the civil university linked to the National Catholic Association of Propagandists, young people with problems of faith more or less justified intellectually. Reason, heart, will and life form a unity, he explained: one can steer life along the path of science, but the ultimate decisions are taken with all that one is.
He had discovered Ratzinger around 1961 thanks to some notes from the fundamental theology classes he had taught in Freising at the end of the fifties, lent by a German priest, Martin Huber. He read them “like an explosion of light”: the supposed opposition between using reason and opening oneself to faith was dissolved. Since then he bought everything that came from his pen, and today he has Ratzinger in double format, the monographs and the complete works. He also cited the Spanish classics of spirituality: Saint John of the Cross, in the full third centenary of his canonization, whose poetry “touches the deepest part of your interior,” and the Exercises of Saint Ignatius, which have influenced his life enormously. He trusted that Leo XIV would keep the mystic in mind on his then imminent trip to Spain.
How does someone without faith or who has been away from the Church for years approach God? Rouco cited famous conversions, such as that of Paul Claudel in Notre-Dame on Christmas 1886, but pointed to a more common path: the liturgy, “well celebrated.” He gave as an example Iesu Communio, the family of contemplative sisters of La Aguilera (Burgos), numerous and young, and the monasteries of contemplative life, female or male, when the community is observant, faithful and prayerful. Caritas is important, he specified, but material work alone does not solve the problem of faith. He recounted that two ministers of social affairs, one from a PP government and another from the PSOE, told him the same thing: that Caritas did a lot, but that they, with their budget, could do “infinitely more.” Materially, he acknowledges, they were right; but Caritas gave “much more than a material gift.” When at the beginning of this century he cited as an example the family policy of Germany and France, with the Kindergeld paid per child and per month, they replied that there were no resources. His reply: “Do not come to me with the story that there are no resources. There are resources for what you want.”
A friendship helps, and spiritual direction too, but “there comes a moment when you are alone with Him”: no one can say the yes for one, and to convert is to surrender “to the greatest,” to the one who wants to save you and to whom you owe the most basic thing, yourself. To the question of whether it is necessary to hit bottom he answered that in so many years he has known “everything,” including surprising cases, and evoked one he attributes to an extraordinary intervention of God: that of Manuel García Morente, dean of Philosophy and Letters at the Central University, who fled to Paris in 1936 after his son-in-law was murdered in Toledo and who there, in 1937, lived an experience of the presence of God that changed his life. He returned to Spain, was ordained a priest and died two years later, which Rouco regrets because he could have helped many others. All the great saints, he added, were converts: Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Ignatius of Loyola. And he asked to live the path with “a certain peace.”
The interviewer reminded him of a controversial 2013 news item according to which he had appointed eight exorcists for Madrid in view of the increase in requests, and asked him if the devil exists. “Yes he exists, he exists.” He relied first on Scripture: Jesus cast out demons, a fact that appears again and again in the synoptics, in the most studied historical book of humanity, analyzed to the millimeter by an exegesis to which Protestant free examination and rationalist criticism contributed. He referred to the introduction of the second volume of Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth on the historical and theological method. He admits that there may be psychic disorders, but not only: “there was more,” also “now there is more,” and “there are psychiatrists who clearly recognize it,” some of whom he treated. Has he witnessed any exorcism? “Man, that no.”
The question led him to his generation, that of the postwar period: a Europe that was rebuilding after the Second World War and a Spain that was emerging from a civil war with a history of martyrdom that he described as incredible and that sought reconciliation and forgiveness, starting with the martyrs. He evoked John Paul II’s speech in Santiago in 1982, which asked Europe to return to its roots; the Christian democracy of the fifties and sixties, heir to the Zentrum of Bismarck’s Germany; the Bad Godesberg congress, with which German social democracy renounced Marxism, and the crisis of the late sixties, which the Frankfurt School channeled, he said, partly toward revolution and partly helping to overcome it. He observed that romanticism, which in Ireland, Greece, Italy or Germany pushed toward independence or national unity, in Spain worked in reverse and fueled the particularisms of Catalonia, the Basque Country and, in part, Galicia, and that in postwar Europe no one spoke of left and right, but of socialists, communists, liberals or Christian democrats. Then he stopped: “I do not know what this was about, we have already talked so much.”
On the Virgin he asked not to confuse devotion with something cloying or sentimental, because “it is much more serious”: in the incarnation of the Son of God “there is no male flesh,” all that is human is given by her and she continues to offer it. Hence his defense of popular Marian piety, “always very accurate,” although it must be deepened. It was the end of May, and he recalled how in the Salamanca of the fifties those major seminarians, intellectuals and already a little critical, had flowers for the Virgin every day and at night went singing Venid y vamos todos like parish boys. Today it is his turn to sing the hymn of the Almudena.
To the formula “I am Catholic, but not practicing” he dedicated a definition: “an evasive expression that you are Catholic, but it costs you to be one, you have not won the battle and you do not want to face it.” To win it he proposed the exercises of Saint Ignatius: “there must be a second conversion.” The interviewer admitted that sometimes he goes to Mass as if he were clocking in, and Rouco listed what is missing: a minimum formation on what the Mass is, attention to the readings and the psalm, and awareness that in the sacramental part a mystery of the presence of Christ occurs in which one participates fully when receiving communion, “a kind of gift that you receive for your week, for your work, for everything.” Without that it serves little, although “there is a certain fidelity that is also worth something.”
He acknowledged that around the ancient liturgy there is “a great debate again.” He celebrated with the rite in force since Trent between 1959 and 1965 or 1966, all in Latin except the preaching, including the reading of the Gospel, and everything “more mysterious.” The faithful followed the Mass with their missal. Today no one carries it, and it is up to the bishops and priests, he said including himself, to offer other helps against routine, such as the songbook Gotteslob in Germany, in addition to arriving at church a little earlier. Weeks later, in an interview with La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, he would ask for understanding toward the faithful linked to the traditional Mass.
In this conversation he focused on something else: before Mass the church has become “a kind of conversation room,” something that “we have not overcome” and that is “not a good thing” for being aware of the presence of Christ. As a child, when opening the church door, there was complete silence. When the interviewer pointed out that before one did not even leave with one’s back to the altar, Rouco toned down the image: there would be those who did, but “not so much.” He recommended reading what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about the Eucharist, “an intellectually very valuable book,” and knowing the structure of the Mass, which many people ignore.
Why is it so hard to speak of God in public? “Because the power of evil is there,” and it is alive. The definitive triumph of grace occurs in each one at the hour of death and will be complete when creation reaches its end; in the meantime one must overcome. In that framework he placed physical, psychological and spiritual pain, and war: “No one can say: there will not be an atomic war. Who knows?” None of that contradicts the paschal mystery, because from the human point of view “the cross was a total failure.” Modernity has not been the easiest time to live the faith in public, and the twentieth century brought a devastating oppression in which one risked one’s life. That is why every life has something of martyrdom: good “has to fight to impose itself,” with the weapons of the spirit.
He addressed death without euphemisms. What is there after? “Well, life,” he answered: life “now without any limit,” glory, but conditioned by the freedom of each one. “The answer to the problem of death is the Risen One,” and to rise with Him, but one must want it: “They want you so that you may want, they do not want to carry you like a puppet through life.” Does he fear it? “Man, well something yes, of course.” He does not know if there is anyone who does not, except Saint Teresa, who was dying because she was not dying. He proposes to look at death as a form of martyrdom: it hurts, but one says yes, like Jesus, to whom the Passion hurt tremendously and who complained to the Father, but rose again. And he spoke of himself: “I go to meet someone, the risen Jesus, and I go knowing that there is a certain judgment.” The one who judges, he added, is a friend, one who loves you, and so one must entrust oneself.
At the end of life, he said, what is important is to have been “sufficiently humble to know that everything that has been one’s life, all the good, is the fruit of the gift,” of the love of the Lord who has guided and accompanied you, and of his Mother. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he admitted that he had never considered it, and answered: “That they recognize that I have been a priest, but a Catholic who wanted to be faithful, who tried to respond to that gift with many ups and downs throughout his life, but in the end always wanted to correspond to that gift by giving himself, giving his life.”
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