The Cathedral of Toledo hosted this Tuesday, November 10, the funeral mass for those killed in the train accident that occurred on October 28 on the Madrid-Andalusia high-speed line, near Urda and Los Yébenes. The celebration, conceived as a joint funeral for all the victims, followed the mass that the archbishop himself celebrated on October 31 at the parish of San Juan Bautista in Urda.
Presiding over the temple was the image of the Cristo de la Vera Cruz of Urda, brought for the occasion. Cerro Chaves expressly thanked “the generosity of the people of Urda” for allowing the image to be present, and returned to it at the close of his homily, addressing the “beloved Cristo de Urda” directly.
Three certainties in the light of the Gospel
The archbishop structured his preaching around the passage of the resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain (Lc 7,11-17), from which he drew three “fundamental certainties.” The first, that pain and mercy go together: Jesus is moved before the mother before performing the miracle. “God’s mercy does not consist in preventing us from suffering, but in ensuring that we never suffer alone,” he affirmed.
The second, that death does not have the last word, because Christ has overcome it with his resurrection. The third, that “the night of pain glimpses the dawn”: the prelate compared the moment the families are going through with a Good Friday and invited them to present their questions before God “so as not to fall into loneliness.” Faith, he specified, does not consist in pretending strength, but in trusting that God remains by our side even when we do not understand his ways.
Cerro Chaves supported each of these ideas with texts from Leo XIV: the vigil of the Jubilee of Consolation of September 2025, the homily of the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, and the general audience of September 10 of the same year.
A call for justice before the State authorities
The passage of greatest public reach came at the end. After highlighting the presence of the Kings, who had already visited the injured the day after the accident, the archbishop warned that unity and solidarity “must also translate into a firm commitment.” “Faced with this terrible accident, it is legitimate to ask that the causes be clarified, that the corresponding responsibilities be assumed, that justice be done to the families of the victims, and that all necessary means be put in place so that another tragedy like the one we have suffered never happens again,” he declared.
The protocol greeting included the presidents of the Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, the vice president of the Government, several ministers, and the president of Castilla-La Mancha, but not the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, whose absence had been reported in advance by the press.
The archbishop thanked the work of emergency services, health workers, security forces, military personnel, volunteers, Cáritas, and the staff of the El Buen Pastor retreat house, and had specific words for the injured still hospitalized. To the families he repeated: “You are not alone.” Citing Gabriel Marcel, he asked that the tragedy not fall into “the worst of deaths, which is oblivion.”