This is what our popular wisdom says. This month arrives, suddenly wavering between the winter that is reluctantly fading away little by little, and the spring that discreetly wants to start showing its ways, making room in our calendar. And the days of strolling sun come, as well as those of fog with bone-chilling cold. It may happen to us that, peering into the social and political reality of these days, we perhaps recognize this strange instability that the crazy February tells us about. And unlike what happens in the famous other play by the Álvarez Quintero brothers, titled precisely “Febrerillo loco” (1919), not only is the routine of the mediocre life of its characters not changed, but we can plunge perplexed into the thickness of these days, becoming accustomed to what, no matter how repeated every day, is still excessive.

Thus, we still have some ruthless terrorist who claims public pity or sits in the parliamentary seats with airs of honesty, and who did not hesitate to cut short others’ lives and celebrate with sarcasm the tears of the victims, now arousing clemencies before his ideological diets. Who understands it? Or the scurrying of interviews to justify the unjustifiable, trying to smear anyone just to emerge unscathed from one’s own irresponsibility, or from the unforgivable parliamentary and judicial evasion, while calculating the wear and tear of political, social, and media adversaries. Who understands it? The resort to open lies as a way to manage public affairs is not lacking, confusing the noble exercise of just and prudent government with the partisan haggling of attachment to power, at any price paid to the cronies who keep you in the chair. Who understands it?

To promote (and even subsidize) everything that isolates, confronts, confuses, and ridicules the rewritten history, the religious tradition in general and the Christian one in particular. Who understands it? It is the obsessive and systematic secularist roadmap, sparing no means or occasion, which uses provocation or good will to continue cornering the Church, which does not bend nor will it bend when life, dignity, truth, or freedom are in question due to unconfessed interests.

Thus, this crazy February serves as a backdrop to a confused and ambiguous moment, which almost seems like a pre-electoral period already. We as Christians cannot stand aside nor look on with passive indifference at what is falling. But neither is our vocation simply to be “loyal opposition” before the challenges and abuses that overshadow or harm our society. Christians who work in politics, in healthcare, in education, in social services, in the media, must know what and how to convey the just, creative, and beautiful position that derives from Christianity. Therefore, along with respectful denunciation of what is deceptive and inadequate for the common good, we must exercise the joyful proclamation of what it means to bet on what God and the Church bet on when we speak of life in all its stages, of the true family, of freedom in education and religious expression, of justice and peace, of the independence of powers that complement each other for adequate governance.

We are not in a hurry for temperate spring to arrive, nor do we curse the constricting winter, but we want to live things with serene passion, so as not to stumble in this loony February with its incomprehensible ups and downs that deceive us. Thus, without special upheavals, we look at reality and manage to denounce it for what it has of excess and defect, while we cradle it gratefully to also know how to proclaim in it what it has of more true, more beautiful, and more consoling, all that which is recognized when we make room for the same God among us who sustains the hope of all his children.

+ Fr. Jesús Sanz Montes, ofm
Arzobispo de Oviedo