The interview begins, as some comedies do, with a delay. Bishop Fernando García Cadiñanos asks El País for five minutes because a friend has just called to comment on a news story about bishops that made them both laugh, and whose headline he prefers not to reveal. One will never know what they were laughing about, and neither will one speculate, for speculation is already the interviewee’s domain. Because what is remarkable about this conversation, published on October 15 and reproduced four days later on the website of the Diocese of Mondoñedo-Ferrol, is not that the president of the Episcopal Subcommittee for Migration denounces fear, ideology, and fake news, which is what is expected of him. What is remarkable is that he practices all three in the same interview, and two of them in the same answer.
The answer concerns Ceuta, where on July 30 and 31 some 72,000 people entered irregularly, in what the president of the Episcopal Conference, Luis Argüello, did not hesitate to call an invasion. The bishop warns that it was not only a migration crisis, but a complex event that conceals “interests that we can glimpse, but which we do not dare or do not know how to specify.” And then, without daring or knowing, he points to “the new geo-strategies of powers at the international level, the control of routes and political power: the United States, Israel, the chess game between Morocco and the European Union…”. Morocco, from whose territory everyone crossed, appears as a chess player. The United States and Israel, as suspects.
It is worth knowing what is known. The prime minister spoke at the end of August of accounts linked to Russia and Israel that had spread disinformation about the crisis, and was careful to add that this did not necessarily mean there was a state actor behind it. The General Commissariat of Information of the National Police, according to documents published by El País itself, put in writing that no report attributes the assault to any government, service or person, and that the instigator remains unknown. The bishop, therefore, does not repeat the Government: he corrects it upward. He removes Russia, adds the United States, turns some social media accounts into geo-strategies of powers and suppresses caution. That, in the language he himself uses to describe what he fights, has a name. The textbook hoax is not the outright lie, which is refuted in a single line, but the insinuation that is dropped without evidence so that the listener’s prejudice completes it on its own.
And note the reader the dilemma, which is not without merit: we do not dare or we do not know. Kierkegaard devoted an entire book to the alternative, Enten-Eller, and this one did not occur to him. If he does not know, he should not name names. If he knows and does not dare, there is the first of the three vices he reproaches others for, conjugated in the first person plural. The Lord left it said how a Christian should speak, sit autem sermo vester: est, est; non, non, and added that what goes beyond that comes from the Evil One. Between yes and no fits everything that a bishop should not say: the “we can glimpse,” the “we do not dare,” the ellipses.
The most striking thing, however, is not the hoax the bishop spreads, but the one he keeps silent. Because in Ceuta there was one, and it is documented. According to Spanish authorities, the stampede was provoked by videos spread on Instagram, TikTok and other networks claiming that whoever reached Ceuta by sea could stay in Spain, following a Supreme Court ruling in early July that prevented the immediate return of those intercepted while swimming. That it was false is shown by the outcome: of the 72,000 people who entered, more than 70,000 had been returned to Morocco by early August, according to official figures. It was not a hoax of hatred. It was a hoax of open doors, and it exacted its price on the shore.
The bishop counts those deaths with the highest figure available, 141, that of the NGO Caminando Fronteras, according to which 63 of those bodies were recovered in Moroccan territory and not in Ceuta, where he places them. Ceuta authorities spoke at the end of August of at least one hundred. He can do his own arithmetic. What he does not do throughout the interview is name what drove those people into the water. The Pope, on the other hand, did name it. On June 11, at the dock of Arguineguín, Leo XIV asked migrants not to believe those who promise “easy paradises,” siren songs that only bring death. Seven weeks later, the siren song sounded on TikTok and thousands believed it. The president of the Episcopal Subcommittee for Migration, who in the same interview devotes a paragraph to algorithms and influencers, has not a word for it. His fake news are always those of others.
Ideology remains, and here the bishop does not practice it alone: the journalist serves it to him and he does not return it. El País presents the archbishop of Oviedo, Jesús Sanz, as a dissenting voice who accused immigrants of leaving the Ceuta population besieged between fear, rot, intimidation and the rape of minors. It is enough to read Sanz’s weekly letter to see that the phrase describes the situation in which the city was left, that his criticism is aimed at the countries of origin and in particular at Morocco, and that in it he calls the young people who arrived “equally victims.” Sanz maintains, in short, the same as García Cadiñanos when he speaks of a war between victims. Asked about that supposed division, the bishop of Mondoñedo does not correct the journalist nor defend his brother: he concedes that sometimes the Gospel is read in ideological keys. Sit venia verbo, but reading an archbishop in the key that suits the newspaper interviewing you is also a key.
With a nuance that is indeed his own: both hurt, he says, “but these have died.” As of August 11, the National Police had registered in Ceuta six complaints of sexual assaults filed by minors. Those victims are still alive, and on the bishop’s scale that leaves them on the second rung.
El País also claims that the bishop tones down the apocalyptic speeches of parties like Vox, which support the great replacement theory, which the newspaper calls conspiratorial. What the bishop actually says is something else. First he offers the usual reading, that of the arrival of new cultures as an incentive for believers to know their own, and immediately afterward he admits that “that kind of dangers can occur,” although he presents them as challenges of the new society. The bracket with which El País clarifies what dangers are involved, those of cultural substitution, is the newspaper’s. The concession is the bishop’s. And the diocese has posted the interview on its official website with the bracket, with the concession and with the label of dissenting voice for a brother archbishop. Qui tacet consentire videtur.
There is one last detail, less flashy and more serious. The bishop enunciates with sound doctrine the three principles that, he says, must be combined: the right not to migrate, the right to migrate by legal and safe routes and the right of States to manage their borders and control flows. This is what the Catechism records in number 2241, which recognizes the political authority’s power to subordinate the right of immigration to legal conditions in view of the common good. But when he comes to Ceuta, all three remain in the infinitive. No one entered on the night of July 30 by a legal or safe route. The State exercised its right over some 70,000 people, and the bishop does not say whether it did right or wrong. He says nothing. And the right not to migrate, which he himself illustrates with the alarm of the Churches of Africa at the bleeding of their young population, demands a conclusion he does not draw: that the promise of staying in Europe is, for Africa, another hemorrhage.
The interview ends with David and Goliath. The bishop describes his task as a struggle of the shepherd against the giant, and the giant, throughout the entire conversation, is called the economic system, structures of sin, power games. El País adds that his name is being mentioned for the see of Cádiz and Ceuta, now under apostolic administration. It is worth remembering that David did not throw the stone at a geo-strategy. Goliath had a name, a homeland and a stature, Gath, six cubits and a span, and the boy, before going down to the torrent for five smooth stones, had already called him what he was: an uncircumcised Philistine. No one has ever brought down a giant without a name.
Asked about Cádiz and Ceuta, García Cadiñanos replies that he neither knows nor wants to know anything.
Which is, all things considered, the best summary of what he has done throughout the interview with the hoax that pushed thousands into the water.
Read also
- The head of Migration at the CEE rejects pitting Ceutans and immigrants against each other after the invasion
- Mons. Sanz denounces the invasion of Ceuta and recalls that the young people who arrived “are equally victims”
- Ceuta according to the new secretary of CONFER: everything collapses on its own and no one pushed