José Ignacio Munilla dedicated this Friday’s program Sexto Continente on Radio María to interpreting the present moment, which this week consists of half of Europe in flames. The bishop of Orihuela-Alicante crafted for the occasion a textbook reflection: Saint Augustine and the two cities, personal conversion as a condition for any social reform, and a warning against ideologies that always place evil in one’s neighbor. Half an hour later, without letting go of the microphone, he had placed his own in Washington.
The opening deserves no reproach. Munilla contrasted the France that two weeks earlier had gathered around the Pope with the one now looting stores, and reproached those who manipulate youth for never finding reason to examine themselves. «There is always a culprit to point to, an enemy to fight,» he summarized. He even allowed himself an uncomfortable question for Macron, who condemns today’s violence while continuing to present the Revolution, guillotine included, as an emancipatory myth. Blowing and sucking at the same time, he concluded, cannot be done.
The stumble came with immigration, the fourth of the six causes the bishop listed to explain the riots. Before getting into the data, Munilla paused on Donald Trump, who has indeed turned France into an argument: on Monday he wrote on Truth Social that migrants have taken over the country and that borders must be closed, and before Vatican journalists he predicted that Paris will very soon be a Muslim city. For Munilla, the explanation is electoral. Trump has elections in November and the Hispanic vote is turning against him because of what the bishop called «the hunt for Hispanics in irregular situations,» a persecution he described as «so cruel.» He needs the fires in Paris, he concluded, «to whitewash yourself.» The electoral reading is not far-fetched and has also been made by a good part of the American press. What is striking is what came next.
To dismantle what Trump claims about France, Munilla began by admitting that in France no data has been provided on how many of those detained are foreigners. So he went to Italy. There, he said, Giorgia Meloni has come to point out that half of those detained may be foreigners or descendants of foreigners already born in Italy. From that figure he extracted, without transition, that more than half of those who participated in the Italian riots are «Italians from Italy.» The math doesn’t add up. From half one does not deduce more than half, and those detained are not the participants. But the underlying problem is another: foreign residents make up around 9% of the Italian population according to Istat, and naturalized descendants do not bring that proportion close to half. If the figure the bishop attributes to Meloni is correct, what it shows is a very notable overrepresentation of the population of immigrant origin among those detained. Munilla used it as proof of the opposite, to refute a claim about the only country for which he acknowledges having no data.
Three minutes later, when he reached polarization, Munilla described the phenomenon with precision: political leaders who take advantage of the riots to proclaim that they prove them right, each side presenting events as confirmation of their theses. It is an accurate description of what he had just done. The fires in Paris confirmed Trump according to Trump, and confirmed to Munilla that Trump manipulates according to Munilla.
The program also included a warning about decontextualized videos and those generated by artificial intelligence that fuel outrage on social media. It is terrain the bishop knows firsthand. In December 2025 he had to publicly correct himself and apologize for having spread a video with images of arrests of Hispanic immigrants in the United States generated by artificial intelligence. The issue, then as now, was the hunt for Hispanics.
Munilla closed the analysis by attributing the ultimate root of the riots to the devil, capable of twisting any claim of justice until it becomes indistinguishable from injustice. It is probably his most solid diagnosis of the day. What it does not explain is why, in a program dedicated to examining one’s own conscience before seeking culprits outside, the only proper name that deserved the qualifier of cruel was that of an American president who has nothing to do with the looting in Milan or Paris. He reminded Macron that one cannot blow and suck at the same time. The advice admitted a second recipient.
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