The Bishop of Málaga, José Antonio Satué, has called on brotherhoods and confraternities to welcome homosexual couples and divorced and remarried persons with joy, in the lecture with which he opened the confraternal formation course of the Local Council of Brotherhoods and Confraternities of the city on Wednesday, October 28, at the Church of Santiago in Cádiz. According to the Diario de Cádiz, cited by the U.S. portal LifeSiteNews, the bishop listed those who should feel at home in a brotherhood: the gay couple and the large family, the university student and the prostitute, the divorced and remarried and the devout woman who prays the rosary before Mass.
The lecture was titled Recovering the Roots of Our Faith in Jesus Christ. Satué defended, according to the chronicle of Mundo Cofrade, that brotherhoods must open their doors to all without distinction, whether gay, divorced, children or devout women, and that everyone should feel welcomed, respected and loved just as they are. The confraternal portal summarized his intervention in a headline stating that the bishop called for welcoming gays and the divorced. Neither that chronicle nor the one from La Voz del Sur, which covered the lecture under the motto of brotherhoods as open doors of faith, makes any reference by the bishop to conversion or to the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality.
The bishop used an image to explain the difference between the parish and the confraternity: the priest fishes with a rod and the brotherhood with a trawl net, according to the version of the Diario de Cádiz translated by LifeSiteNews. That is why, he said, tensions between parish priests and confraternity members do not frighten him, because they are a sign that both are fulfilling their mission: the priest demands processes and the confraternity member asks for spaces where everyone can fit. If that tension does not exist, he added, either the priest has become a confraternity member or the confraternity member has become clericalized. The ecclesial place of the brother, he maintained, is the street, culture, family and the problems of the neighborhood.
Satué also insisted, according to Mundo Cofrade, that brotherhoods must transmit the Gospel without turning it into a spectacle, give priority to the liturgy, not relegate participation in the Eucharist and help the most needy, because charity is what gives them authenticity.
It is not the first time that the Bishop of Málaga has spoken in this sense. Three weeks ago he sent a message of support to the XV Meeting of LGTBIQ+ Christians, held in Chipiona between October 9 and 11 under the motto “Todos, todas, todes,” in which he told the attendees that “you have much to contribute to the Church and, at the same time, you can enrich yourselves in it”, according to the chronicle of Vida Nueva. In February, in an interview with Málaga Hoy, he described the blessing of same-sex persons who have a couple project as a step forward and said that the Church will have to find a way to integrate that reality into its pastoral practice.
Satué, appointed Bishop of Teruel and Albarracín by Francis in 2021, was transferred to Málaga by Leo XIV in June 2025. His words in Cádiz were addressed to the confraternity members of a diocese that is not his own, that of Cádiz and Ceuta.
The Church’s doctrine distinguishes between the welcome of persons, which no one disputes, and the approval of unions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls for treating persons with homosexual tendencies with respect, compassion and delicacy and avoiding all signs of unjust discrimination toward them, but it calls them to chastity and states that homosexual acts cannot receive approval in any case. By placing the gay couple in the same list as the large family, the bishop did not make that distinction.
The Bishop of Málaga calls on confraternities to welcome the gay couple with joy in the same sentence as the family with children, without a word about conversion.
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