On Saturday, at ten forty-four in the morning, Fin de Semana, Cristina López Schlichting’s program on COPE, opened the microphone to the Stop Abolition platform. They are women who present themselves as sex workers, call for the legalization of prostitution, and have slipped into the pre-campaign with a video against Pedro Sánchez. The host framed the issue with a moderator’s even-handedness: “There is a debate about whether it is advisable to legalize them along the lines of the Netherlands or Germany or to continue persecuting the johns, and them. And that debate is open.”
Open. On the bishops’ radio station, since Saturday prostitution has been an open debate (like daylight-saving time, or homework during vacations), and abolition, a form of persecution. The guest did not say it. The station said it, before the guest even opened her mouth.
The video was then played; it has been circulating on social media since late October. In it, the women of the platform remind Sánchez that he has had “sex work nearby” in his family, claim to have visited “the more than 15 venues” that family “managed at some point,” and accuse him of “pathological cynicism.” The phrase that best sums up the tone is this: “The clubs are not concentration camps for women.” The bishops’ radio station gave it almost a minute, and when it ended the host delivered her verdict: “Sometimes people speak very clearly, more clearly than politicians.”
Once the guest was on air, her first intervention was another compliment: “Certainly, their entry into the campaign has been resounding. I mean, I think that as far as your business is concerned, you have hit the nail on the head.” Your business. From that point on, prostitution was discussed as one would discuss an industry: taxes, the German model, mortgages, work-life balance… At times it sounded like the entrepreneurs’ section of a Sunday supplement. The guest, who is “registered as self-employed,” explained that she saw “a market gap where you see a business opportunity,” that this way she can take her son to school and pick him up every afternoon, and that her previous job was “my morally correct work.” The obvious question (and this one?) never came.
There was even professional complicity. The host, who said she had done reports on the subject, confirmed that prostitution yields far higher economic returns than many other jobs. The guest was able to lay out her doctrine without anyone citing another: “It’s our yes is yes, it’s our body, it’s our decision.” Vocabulary correction was included and went unchallenged: “We are not prostituted women, we are prostitute women, even if it hurts them.”
Cristina clarified to listeners that abolition “would be in the minds of many of us.” She objected, toward the end, that serving “man after man” is “something we cannot call work; at bottom it is a moral position.” She signed off by referring to a “marketing coup.”
At noon, the news bulletin took over. For nearly a minute and a half it reported that “sex workers have burst” into the pre-campaign with a video accusing Sánchez of “pathological cynicism,” reviewed the fifteen venues that, “according to them,” Begoña Gómez’s family managed, gave the floor to the spokesperson, and closed with a phrase the platform itself could have written: “In short, they demand rights and not clandestinity.” No rebuttal. On the bishops’ radio news, prostitutes are already sex workers, and their demands are the story’s punchline.
On September 16, during the general audience, Leo XIV read number 27 of Gaudium et spes, which places “prostitution” alongside “slavery” and “the trafficking of women and young people” among things that “offend human dignity,” and called for evaluating “today’s social and political projects” according to “the criteria of human dignity.” In March 2025, Luis Argüello, president of the Episcopal Conference, devoted a pastoral letter to trafficking and wrote that “prostitution has spread in a surprising way, giving rise to the exploitation of persons.” Neither the one nor the other appeared in the ten-minute interview or in the minute-and-a-half news item (the Pope had been on the program shortly before, just as he was about to board the plane to Paysandú).
The explanation for the enthusiasm is not in the Catechism. It is in the father-in-law’s saunas. The video hits Sánchez where it hurts most, three weeks before the elections, and that is enough for a platform that wants prostitution treated as just another job to walk through the front door of the bishops’ radio station. The host had announced it before the commercial break, with a candor that is appreciated: the guests reproach the president that, “being related as he is by family to the brothel business,” he has “no sensitivity toward them.” The enemy of my enemy, on COPE, gets ten minutes and appears on the noon news.
By the way. At five fifty-eight that same morning, the station’s editorial had presented Uruguay, the Pope’s first stop, as “the most secularized country in the region,” and had proved it with its euthanasia law and its legal drugs. It forgot one detail. Uruguay has regulated by law since 2002 what they there call sex work. There was no need to add it: almost five hours later they had it on air, registered as self-employed.
“COPE, the bishops’ radio station” is a daily section of InfoVaticana. We listen attentively to our bishops’ radio and tell you what we find: advertising, guests, language, what is said and what is left unsaid. COPE is 75% owned by Ábside Media, the company the Episcopal Conference created in 2020 with its own shares and those of most dioceses. Jesuits and Augustinians are also shareholders.
Everything that is broadcast on it is the personal responsibility of each of the Spanish bishops.
Read also
- Leo XIV calls for evaluating political projects according to human dignity, social justice and the common good
- Bishop Argüello denounces that the May 1968 revolution has boosted the consumption of pornography and prostitution
- The bishops’ radio station, in its editorial: it would be “a disaster” if Spain ended up like Meloni’s Italy