Chiclayo
Sunday, November 15, 2026
______________________
Good morning. Very good morning!
Thank you all for the welcome.
We want to thank God for these days.
We will impart the blessing of the Lord, that the Lord may strengthen them all in their faith, that they may always walk together.
May Chiclayo always be the “capital of friendship”, but also a city, a province, a land of faith, devotion and fidelity.
(Apostolic Blessing)
Thank you!
"I doubt that the promises made by (Leo) in that encounter will be fulfilled,” wrote José Enrique Escardó Steck, president of the Red de Sobrevivientes Peru (Survivors' Network Peru), on X in Spanish, saying that Leo had yet to make progress on abuse since Escardó last spoke with him in January 2025. "The church (is) always destroying and revictimizing. They could have said two weeks ago that they already had victims ready to meet with the pope, but no, they let hundreds of victims be worried, anxious and frustrated.:
Last year, Pope Francis suppressed Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a powerful lay Catholic society founded in Peru as a conservative reaction to liberation theology, after a Vatican investigation found "sadistic" abuses, including sexual and spiritual misconduct. Earlier this year, the Vatican held a ceremony seeking forgiveness and acknowledging harm suffered by Tallán Indigenous communities, who suffered "persecution, land expropriation, and harassment" at the hands of the society, according to the Vatican.
Sodalitium survivors credited Leo, then-Bishop Robert Prevost, with playing an "extremely important role" in supporting victims and with triggering the eventual intervention of the Vatican. Prevost became bishop of Chiclayo in 2015, a year after Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas' investigative book, Mitad Monjes, Mitad Soldados ("Half Monks, Half Soldiers"), made waves after describing sexual, physical and psychological abuse within Sodalitium, and he was serving in the Vatican curia when Sodalitium was suppressed.
When he became pope, several Sodalitium survivors publicly cheered him on, though not all abuse survivors were thrilled. Ana María Quispe Díaz told reporters Leo had mishandled her case after she reported Diocese of Chiclayo priests "who were not tied to Sodalitium" had sexually abused her as a girl. Quispe Díaz was briefly represented by a canon lawyer with ties to Sodalitium, though she has more recently said he did not intend to help her and other victims.
"The suppression of Sodalicio is very important worldwide because it's the biggest congregation with an extensive presence in many countries that has been suppressed," said Véronique Lecaros, theology department chair at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
But survivors of the group and other anti-abuse advocates say that Sodalitium's suppression will remain simply a declaration, not a reality, without concrete follow-through by the Vatican to dismantle the group.
"The only thing they've done is take away the name Sodalitium," Escardó told RNS in Spanish. Escardó has said that, as a teenager, he was physically and sexually abused by Sodalitium co-founder Germán Doig, who died in 2001.
"The same leaders have stayed in the same places, the same priests in the same places with the same names, the parishes with the same symbols, the same activities, inviting the same members of Sodalitium who have been expelled to continue doing exactly the same with the same financial support that they had before," Escardó told RNS.
He and other Sodalitium survivors have called on Leo to ensure that the Vatican's dissolution process makes a real difference in diminishing Sodalitium's power and making reparations for survivors.
"There continue to be actions that revictimize those of us who believed that this process would bring truth, justice and reparation," according to a statement Escardó signed.
Another group of survivors signed a separate statement thanking Francis and Leo for suppressing Sodalitium before enumerating a list of concerns. Among those concerns, they said that four Peruvian bishops allegedly cooperated with a group tied to Sodalitium to allow the group to own cemeteries, that an allegedly abusive priest continues to be pastor at a former Sodalitium parish and that a man who was allegedly a former secretary for Luis Fernando Figari — Sodalitium's co-founder who the Vatican expelled from the group after sexual abuse allegations — is continuing to give classes at that same parish.
That parish, Nuestra Señora de la Reconciliación, is in one of the most affluent areas of the city and country, where many of the houses sit behind their own gates. Many in Sodalitium are in the upper class, Lecaros said. "If you think of the upper class, in Peru it's a relatively small group, but they are all connected, even family ties."
The parish did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the diocesan offices for the four bishops named in the statement.
The Asociación Civil San Juan Bautista (Civil Association of St. John the Baptist), which owns the cemeteries, did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement after the suppression of Sodalitium, they said that though they have cooperated in the past, there are no legal ties between them and Sodalitium. The cemeteries they own have run ads during television coverage of the papal trip and sponsored at least one billboard welcoming Leo.
Renzo Orbegozo Benvenuto, a Sodalitium survivor who led the creation of that statement, said he wanted to make sure to thank Leo and Francis and express support for Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu Farnós, who was appointed as the pontifical commissioner to lead Sodalitium's dissolution. "I don't think this is a moment to accentuate differences," Orbegozo told RNS in Spanish about the two different statements, saying they have the same goals.
Escardó has been less publicly supportive of Bertomeu and more critical of communication from the Vatican. "Now, at this moment, there is not much confidence in the Vatican process that Jordi Bertomeu is going to carry out. There's a lot of silence."
Bertomeu did not respond to requests for comment relayed through the Vatican press office.
As Sodalitium survivors express anxiety about Sodalitium's dissolution, one of the journalists whose investigation helped lead to the group's dissolution is facing yet another challenge. Ugaz, who has faced repeated defamation lawsuits that carry the threat of jail time, had yet another case accepted by a judge less than a month before Leo arrived, this one filed by the Civil Association of St. John the Baptist.
"The Peruvian system, which is a system that is very fallible to ties between friends, wants to teach a lesson through all these lawsuits against me," Ugaz told RNS in Spanish. "It's a lesson for journalists who are going to investigate powerful organizations."
She feels that she, too, has unwittingly become a victim of Sodalitium's power and impact, amid the lawsuits and as her family experiences pervasive harassment. "It's incredibly hard. I can't cry in front of my family," she said, becoming emotional when she got a moment away from them. But she sees the impact on her oldest daughter, and her parents have witnessed harassment and disinformation against her.
Leo signaled support for Ugaz by sending an anti-abuse message to be read at a theatrical production in Lima called "Proyecto Ugaz" that honored the journalist. "Wherever a journalist is silenced, the democratic soul of a nation is weakened," Leo wrote.
At a press conference in Lima on Nov. 5, Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the U.S. watchdog organization BishopAccountability.Org, called on Leo to condemn the persecution of journalists who had exposed Sodalitium, and shared two other demands: to instruct Peru's hierarchy to publish the names of credibly accused clergy and to push the Peruvian government to create a truth commission to investigate religious sexual abuse of minors.
She was joined byEscardó and Reinhold Nann, the former bishop of Caravelí, Peru.
At the press conference, the case of Quispe Díaz came up. Barrett Doyle said she didn't think Leo intended to mask any crimes, explaining, "The character of Pope Leo seems to be genuinely kind." She explained, "I think he simply didn't do enough because the system does not require him to do enough to deliver justice to the victims."
"He also is a canon lawyer who devoutly believes in canon law, and the problem there is that canon law is an extremely warped and distorted system," said Barrett Doyle.
Quispe Díaz did not comment after several attempts to reach her for comment.
As for the Sodalitium case, Elise Ann Allen, a Vatican journalist who conducted the first public interview with Leo after his election, told RNS that the Vatican chose to pursue a quicker investigation that limited its ability to unravel Sodalitium financially. "They didn't do the investigation well to begin with," she said.
Allen said the Vatican pursued a quicker investigation to "get victims what they can and let everybody move forward." She said, "If they'd wanted to pursue in a serious way the financial aspect of this, from the beginning they should have entrusted this to ASIF," or the Vatican's Supervisory and Financial Information Authority, though that investigation could take years and have political implications with the Peruvian government.
Sodalitium's victims "would have been unhappy the other way as well," she said of a longer investigation.
One group of Sodalitium victims from the Tallán Indigenous community, whom the Vatican recognized as suffering land expropriation due to Sodalitium, planned to arrive in Chiclayo Nov. 13 in the hopes that Leo will hear and amplify their demand for justice.
"We are hoping for a message of justice, dignity and solidarity with the people who fight for their rights, because there can be no true peace without justice, nor reconciliation without recognizing the historic wounds of our peoples," Luis Inga, a representative of the San Juan Bautista de Catacaos community, responded in a statement.
The voluntary organisation is facing a “significant financial risk” that the cost of settling a large number of legal cases, taken by people allegedly abused as children by former scout leaders, could push Scouting Ireland into liquidation, the internal paper advised.
Documents setting out a plan to raise several million euros, seen by The Irish Times, show the organisation hopes to sell off vacant properties and secure a sizeable bank loan to help meet the growing cost of compensating past victims of sexual abuse.
Local scout groups will be asked to voluntarily advance between €10,000 and €20,000 each to the organisation’s national office – an ask that volunteers said would require significant fundraising efforts by local groups to come up with the money.
The internal documents warn that the wave of legal cases taken by survivors of abuse, and the number of those civil proceedings expected to progress towards the settlement stage over the next two to three years, created a serious risk for Scouting Ireland’s finances.
The organisation has spent the last number of years grappling with a historical child sex abuse scandal, which emerged following reporting by The Irish Times in 2018.
More than 350 people came forward to disclose they had been abused as children in legacy scouting associations.
The abuse took place over decades at the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland and the Scout Association of Ireland. The two predecessor bodies merged to form Scouting Ireland in 2004.
A report by child protection expert Ian Elliott concluded that predators had operated from senior positions of power in the legacy scouting associations for decades, molesting children and covering up the abuse for years.
In the wake of the scandal, more than 70 survivors took legal cases against Scouting Ireland seeking compensation.
An internal November 7th briefing warned the “timing and quantum of claims creates a significant financial risk”. The organisation would need to raise €8 million to make sure it had enough resources to cover the cost of settlements.
“If Scouting Ireland cannot meet its liabilities as they fall due, then, absent a credible financial restructuring, the board’s duty will be to commence a liquidation,” the paper circulated to senior volunteers said.
Emergency measures, such as the sale of vacant property, were necessary, as other avenues to source funding had been “exhausted”.
The document said the Government had “firmly closed down” any suggestion the State held vicarious liability for the past abuse.
Several long-running civil cases have been settled this year, in each case as the proceedings got closer to a trial date in court. It is understood a number of other cases are at a similarly advanced stage.
The average cost of settlement in such historical abuse cases, including legal fees, can be close to €250,000.
Latest financial accounts said Scouting Ireland had enough money to operate until the end of next year, beyond which point additional funds would be needed to cover all its liabilities.
In a statement, Aidan Magner, chair of Scouting Ireland’s board, said it is “operationally solvent” and focused on expanding.
“Scouting Ireland in that context is to implement a financial resilience programme aimed at rebuilding its cash reserves, bringing certainty to the membership and, most importantly, deliver on its scouting values and our duty of care to survivors,” he said.
Scouting Ireland has 40,000 members – between juveniles and adult volunteers as leaders – across 400 local scout groups.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed the law in April, and it is set to take effect in January, banning municipalities from hosting “DEI events.”
The city of Delray Beach, near Fort Lauderdale, was therefore forced to announce its hugely popular St Patrick’s Day parade will not take place next March.
Restrictions imposed by the new state law, the city said in a statement, “include certain programming and activities designed or implemented with reference to ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
Delray officials determined they were “legally prohibited from organizing, funding, or promoting” the St Patrick’s Day event as well as its Pride event in 2027.
Residents have been left confused and frustrated by the move. Local business owners have also expressed anger over missing out on what has historically been one of their most lucrative weekends of the year, the Guardian reported.
Tom Carney, the Delray Beach mayor, shared a Facebook post addressing the outrage and assuring locals that he is working “feverishly” with city officials to find a way to restore the March celebration with private funding.
“I’ve read your social media posts, received your emails and it is clear that the parade means as much to you in the community as it does to me. With that, I’d like to announce that the city is working feverishly with multiple entities to ensure the 2027 St Patrick’s Day parade goes on as scheduled!”
The DEI law, formally known as Florida Senate Bill 1134, was one of several passed by Florida’s Republican majority in the final full year of DeSantis’ tenure as governor.
Other extremist measures passed during DeSantis’ eight-year run include efforts to ban drag shows, restricting LGBTQ+ rights, and ending DEI programs at state colleges and universities.
On social media, people responded to the news that Delray’s parade might be a thing of the past.
An X user wrote, “The numbskulls in that county are claiming that an annual St. Patrick's Day Parade that has been happening for 60 years is a DEI initiative and thus is prohibited…”
“St. Patrick's Day parades began as a way to honor a saint who brought the Gospel to Ireland, not just a party,” one user pointed out. “Sad to see it go.”
Another user pointed out, “It's literally a huge money maker for the town,” questioning the logic behind the law.
Another wrote, “So now we’re attacking the Irish???” while someone else echoed this, writing, “DeSantis hates the Irish!”
Kevin Kijewski, a Michigan attorney and former superintendent of Catholic schools in Detroit and Denver, said the directive was delivered to his home on 26 October, the day before a meeting organised by the Parish Preservation Alliance, an organisation seeking to defend parishes threatened by the Archdiocese’s restructuring plans.
The document, dated 22 October, specifically identified the meeting, which brought together more than 600 Catholics from over 120 parishes in suburban Detroit.
According to Kijewski, the directive prohibited him from offering “canonical advice or guidance” to Catholics within the Archdiocese, raising money for any canonical cause or working with a canon lawyer who had not received the Archbishop’s approval.
Later that evening, the Archbishop’s vicar for the Archdiocese warned him that by attending the gathering he “will knowingly be in violation” of the directive. Kijewski attended the meeting regardless, saying that he was challenging the directive through the Church’s own procedures.
He subsequently set out these circumstances in a feature for Catholic World Report, arguing that the restrictions raised questions about the rights of Catholics to organise independently and discuss the future of their parishes.
According to Kijewski’s account, the Archdiocese projects that the number of active priests will fall from 224 to approximately 130 by 2034. Its director of parish renewal has said that the Archdiocese “simply can’t continue to serve the 209 parishes” with the number of priests expected to be available. Kijewski argues that the shortage does not, in itself, justify closing churches or merging parishes out of existence.
He points to a 2020 Vatican instruction on parish restructuring, which provides for neighbouring parishes to be entrusted to a single pastor where there are insufficient priests. This is the arrangement being pursued through Detroit’s new pastorates.
The instruction, he argues, distinguishes between sharing a priest and suppressing a parish. A shortage of clergy may justify placing several communities under one pastor, but it is not automatically sufficient grounds for eliminating a parish.
He also questions the practical implications of the Archdiocese’s assurance that churches will not necessarily be closed. Without Sunday Mass, he argues, a church can effectively cease functioning as a parish community even without a formal decree of closure.
The restructuring also involves the reassignment of almost every parish priest in the Archdiocese during the summer of 2027, with only nine priests exempted.
Kijewski acknowledges the Archbishop’s authority to reassign clergy but argues that the same Vatican instruction calls for pastoral stability and consideration of the relationship between a priest and the community he has served.
The 27 October meeting was organised independently of the Archdiocese, with the Parish Preservation Alliance bringing parishioners together to hear a canon lawyer explain their rights under Church law. Under the current timetable, Catholics are expected to learn the final decisions on the weekend of 17–18 April 2027.
Kijewski also challenged a 28 October statement from the Archdiocese warning Catholics about “outside organizations and individuals” seeking donations while claiming that canon law could prevent or control the restructuring.
Following discussions with the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Clergy, the prohibition was withdrawn as “too restrictive of the rights of the faithful”. Rome subsequently reversed several of the proposed closures. Kijewski argues that the Detroit directive goes further because it concerns not simply the use of parish property but the ability of a layman to participate in an independently organised gathering in a rented hall.
Kijewski concluded by calling on the Archdiocese to honour its original commitment to an open restructuring process, including allowing Catholics to meet independently, seek canonical advice and determine who will assist them in making their concerns heard.
Speaking at a Nov. 12 press conference in Salzburg, Lackner said Austria’s bishops had agreed to revise the conference’s statutes, which currently require the general secretary to be a priest or bishop.
The revision will require Vatican approval.
The bishops faced pressure to make the change after longtime general secretary Fr. Peter Schipka announced Sept. 14 that he was stepping down to serve as a professor of education.
The Austrian Catholic Women’s Movement, the country’s largest Catholic women’s organization, called Sept. 15 for the bishops’ conference statutes to be amended so the office can also be held by a lay person.
The bishops elected Fr. Simon Weyringer as Schipka’s successor at their Nov. 9-12 plenary meeting in Salzburg, in accordance with the current statutes.
Weyringer is chairman of the priests’ council and a member of the synodal team in the Archdiocese of Salzburg, which is led by Lackner.
The 46-year-old teaches biblical studies at the University of Salzburg and the Hochschule Heiligenkreuz.
Speaking at the press conference, Weyringer said he would retain his current posts, but likely in reduced form because of the additional workload from serving as general secretary.
Bishop Kevin Doran, who is chairman of the Catholic Bishops' Council for Life, challenged what he described as attempts to "do away" with the three-day waiting period for women seeking abortions in Ireland.
Under Irish law, the three-day waiting period is a mandatory delay between the initial doctor's consultation and the beginning of an early-pregnancy termination.
Bishop Doran said the three-day wait was being presented as "a threat to women’s health and an imposition on their freedom".
However, he said that since the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Act became law in 2018, more than 10,000 women who had registered with a doctor for an abortion, did not return for a second appointment after the three-day period had elapsed.
"A great myth" had been perpetrated that "abortion is a type of healthcare", he said.
Last week, the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) backed "renewed criticism" of Ireland’s abortion law at the fourth cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) by the UN Human Rights council.
Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland called on Ireland to take action to strengthen access to abortion care.
Canada and Sweden called for the removal of the mandatory thee-day waiting period.
Healthcare Professionals for Life has said that figures show approximately 10,600 abortions were notified in Ireland last year, while 54,125 live births were registered.
The figures, it said, formed part of a broader picture of demographic change and raised important questions about the experiences of women, the supports available during pregnancy, and the factors influencing family formation and reproductive decisions.
An Independent Review of the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Act by Marie O'Shea BL in 2023 found that the mandatory three-day delay, combined with appointment wait times, pushed some women past the 12-week legal limit for early termination, resulting in them travelling abroad for terminations.
A Sinn Féin Private Members bill which seeks to remove the three-day waiting period is currently being scrutinised at committee stage in the Oireachtas.
St Margaret's Church in Wolstanton said its clock had chimed since 30 September 1889 without any issue, except during the two world wars and maintenance periods.
However, it said it had been instructed to silence the clock following a complaint from a local resident to Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council.
Council leader Jonathan Gullis said he wanted "common sense to reign supreme" and would take personal responsibility to resolve the situation.
The church said it was unfeasible for the clock to be switched off manually each day, but Gullis told BBC Radio Stoke it might be possible to install a mechanical solution.
"I don't want to promise the mechanical solution can work yet because we haven't even found out what technology is needed, how easy it is to install, and what the cost of that comes to.
"But if I can do it, and if I can afford it, 100% will do that," he said.
"I will make sure that I personally take control of this situation, look into what's happened, come back and give you a full update."
He said council staff had simply followed statutory guidance and the rules.
"All I can say is no councillor was involved in any decision-making part of this process," he said.
Jennifer Machin, who has been bellringing in the village for 63 years, said her thoughts about the silencing were "very unchristian" and that she was missing the regular chimes.
"The village lives with the church and the clock," she added.
"We're not pleased, not best pleased at all."
Another resident, Robert Poole, who has lived in the area for about 50 years, said the bells were part of the character of the village.
"For it to be stopped for one person complaining, I think it's outrageous," he said.
"I think they should've left it as it is – deal with the complaint and then decide.
"People don't buy houses next to a church if church bells are going to bother them.
"It's part of the history of Wolstanton."
Meanwhile, resident Dom Daniels, said it was "quite disheartening".
He added that, since the age of seven, he has been helping his dad wind the clock, he said.
"To have to stop the chimes that the public absolutely love, it's quite sad."
Bishop Peter served as Bishop of Aberdeen from December 2003 until his retirement in August 2011. He will be remembered with great affection as a devoted priest, a gifted teacher and scholar, and a bishop of exceptional humility, kindness and integrity.
Born in Glasgow on 13 April 1935, Peter Moran was educated at St Aloysius' College before proceeding to the Pontifical Scots College in Rome. He studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University and was ordained to the priesthood in Rome on 19 March 1959.
Following his ordination, he served at St Paul's, Whiteinch, and St Peter's, Partick, in Glasgow. He continued his academic studies at the University of Glasgow, Jordanhill College of Education and the University of Aberdeen.
He had a particularly long and distinguished association with Blairs College, where he taught from 1964 until 1986. Generations of students, both those who went on to become priests and those who followed other paths in life, will remember his distinctive teaching style, formidable intellect and lifelong commitment to education.
He subsequently served as priest in charge and then parish priest of St Mary's, Blairs, before becoming parish priest in Inverurie in 1993. He was appointed a Canon of St Mary's Cathedral, Aberdeen, in 1995.
Following the appointment of Bishop Mario Conti as Archbishop of Glasgow in 2002, Canon Peter served as Diocesan Administrator during the vacancy of the See of Aberdeen. He was appointed Bishop of Aberdeen on 13 October 2003 and ordained bishop on 1 December that year. He served for almost eight years before being succeeded by Bishop Hugh Gilbert OSB in 2011.
Paying tribute to his predecessor, Bishop Hugh said: "Bishop Peter was one of the most genuinely humble men I have ever met. He was a priest to his fingertips, utterly dedicated to his vocation and to the service of the Church. He was a man of great integrity, extraordinary diligence and unfailing goodwill.
"The words of Our Lord about Nathanael come very readily to mind: 'Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.' That was Bishop Peter. He was a thoroughly honest, upright and good man, without pretence or self-importance.
"He brought tremendous care and attention to everything he undertook, whether preparing a homily, teaching a class or making decisions as bishop. He had a great desire to be fair to everyone, and his kindness and charity shone through everything he did."
"He was a man of immense gifts, but he wore them lightly. He was loved and respected as a priest and bishop, and he will be remembered with enormous affection by his family, fellow priests, former students and so many people whose lives he touched."
Bishop Peter was an accomplished classical scholar, with an exceptional command of Latin and Greek. He spoke Italian and Spanish and was particularly fluent in French. He was a co-founder and chaplain of the French-speaking Catholic community in Aberdeen, regularly celebrating Mass for its members.
A natural academic and teacher, he was also a preacher of great clarity, who devoted considerable time and care to preparing his homilies.
His interests extended well beyond theology and languages. He enjoyed building and sailing boats, was a fine pianist with an extensive knowledge of classical music and shared a particular enthusiasm for music with his great friend Fr Bill Anderson. He also had a remarkable command of Doric and greatly enjoyed reading Doric poetry.
As a bishop, he took a close interest in the work of SCIAF and was deeply committed to ecumenical relations. He served as Bishop Promoter of the Apostleship of the Sea, the Church's ministry to seafarers, and also represented the Scottish bishops on the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union.
He is survived by his three sisters, including Sr Elizabeth Moran, a Columban Sister, who lived alongside him at Northcote Lodge Care Home.
Funeral arrangements will be announced in due course.
Bishop Hugh asks the priests, religious and faithful of the Diocese of Aberdeen and beyond to remember Bishop Peter in their prayers and to pray for his eternal repose.
"May the Lord, whom he served so faithfully throughout his long life, welcome him into the joy of his Kingdom and reward him for his many years of devoted service to Christ, his Church and his people. May he rest in peace."
The trial is scheduled for 2027, and her defense, supported by ADF International, maintains that the proceedings constitute an abuse of process.
The new charges replace the single one brought against her by the prosecution on December 17, 2025, the first filed under the safe zone regulations that prohibit influencing the decisions of those entering an abortion facility within a 150-meter radius.
Judge Tan Ikram warned at the hearing that the original charge was poorly drafted, because the law requires an «act» that had not been included, and allowed the prosecutors to correct it; the prosecution chose to charge one count for each occasion Vaughan-Spruce stood praying.
The judge: «Standing is not a crime»
At the same hearing the magistrate stated that «standing is not a crime» and that «no matter how many times you do it, mere presence is not enough.» He added, according to ADF International, that the courts «are not there to judge people’s opinions,» and pointed out that what will be decisive is whether the accused had the intent required by the statute.
Vaughan-Spruce herself has maintained that «standing in silence and holding certain beliefs in a public space should never be a crime.»
Her defense argues that the prosecution violates Articles 9 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, concerning freedom of thought, conscience and religion and the prohibition of discrimination.
From the 2022 arrest to the £13,000 compensation
The case has dragged on for almost four years.
In December 2022 she was arrested in Birmingham for praying silently outside a clinic that was closed at the time, and in February 2023 the same court acquitted her of all charges, as reported by InfoVaticana.
In March 2023 she was arrested again for the same reason, and in August 2024 West Midlands Police paid her £13,000 for the wrongful arrest and the violation of her rights, according to details provided by ADF International.
The pressure did not stop.
In February 2025 an officer asked her to leave a public area, claiming that her «mere presence» could constitute harassment, and in August of that year the police confirmed a new investigation pending the Crown Prosecution Service’s opinion.
It was then that the formal charge arrived in December, and at her first appearance on January 29, 2026, she pleaded not guilty.
Vaughan-Spruce warns that «there is no place for Orwellian ‘thought police’ in 21st-century Britain.»
She also encourages Christians to speak the truth with charity and assures that faith is followed «because it is true,» not merely for the comfort it offers.
British legislation on safe zones has already been criticized by the Catholic hierarchy: InfoVaticana reported that Cardinal Müller compared the ban on praying outside abortion clinics with Nazi persecution.
The most horrific thing Jesús Higueras has heard in thirty-six years in the confessional is not a murder, though he admits he has heard one. It is the abuse of children. The parish priest of Santa María de Caná said so in those words, “I am very clear about it,” in the conversation of more than two hours he held with Adrià Solà Pastor on A Una Palabra, and from that certainty hung the hardest part of the interview: there is no room in the Church for cover-ups or for the consolation of statistics. “That business of covering up, moving people around, ‘nothing happened, we’re wonderful,’” he listed, mimicking the defensive reflex of his own, and dismissed it in a single phrase: “Well, there shouldn’t be any at all.”
The interview, the 48th of the program, was recorded at the castle of Santa Florentina, in Canet de Mar (Barcelona), and was published under the title “An unfiltered conversation with a priest about the Church, God, abuses and the devil.” The setting is not ecclesiastical. Solà Pastor is a popularizer of public speaking and personal development whose YouTube channel, according to his own website, has more than a million and a half subscribers, and in recent months his table has hosted experts in non-verbal language, protocol or financial freedom, as well as an exorcist. To that audience he presented his guest as “one of the most recognized priests in Spain,” with “the Pope’s authority to forgive the gravest sins.” Higueras, ordained in 1990, has been parish priest of Caná since 1995 and a missionary of mercy since 2016, presides over the foundation for people with disabilities born in the parish and lends his voice to Palabra de vida, a daily three-minute reflection that, according to his own figures, reaches between 30,000 and 50,000 people.
A society that believes it can live without God
The first question was what he would say to a society that believes it can do without God. Higueras answered with another: who am I, why am I here, who has called me to a life I could not give myself. The dilemma, he posed, is whether man is “a highly evolved animal” or whether there is in him a qualitative leap, a dimension that touches the transcendent; if the latter is true, doing without God “would in some way dehumanize us,” and whoever believes he does not need Him is missing one of the most specific dimensions of the human, that of knowing oneself called to life with a mission and not being “a mere biological fact.”
On the causes of disenchantment he was less predictable. He cited the twentieth century, “the century of horrors,” with its world wars and genocides, and the question he left hanging: “But where is God in the face of so much evil?” He mentioned in passing the philosophical roots, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, and Marxism, in which the State was to cover what had previously been left to Providence. And he added a third factor that forced him, he said, to throw stones at his own roof: the role of the institutions that have to represent God since the second half of the century. “I don’t know if we have got it right. I don’t know if we have known how to be in our place and have known how to give what could be expected of us.” The result is not, in his view, an attack: “No one attacks God, no one attacks Jesus Christ.” It is indifference, that of a relative of his who, invited to pray, replied that he did not need it. Nor did he want to read it as a condemnation of people, but as an examination of those responsible: “I don’t think we have done it well.” To that omission he added the ideologies of consumption and of success at any price, those of a world in which each person is worth what he has, in contrast to the Sermon on the Mount that calls blessed those who mourn and the poor in spirit.
The consequence that worries him most is “the systematic contempt for weakness.” The elderly, who are parked because both parents work and the children must be raised. Children with disabilities: he told the case, which he said he knew by hearsay, of parents compensated by a hospital that had not warned them that their child would have Down syndrome, “as if it were a disease and not a way of being as legitimate and human as any other.” He linked it to the “throwaway culture” of which Francis spoke and to chapter 25 of Saint Matthew, from which he drew that the Christian God “is not the God of the winners, not the God of the powerful, not the God of the strong, He is the God of the weak.” He recalled one of the directors of Atapuerca, for whom the sign that there was already humanity there were the bones of a sick girl, a burden to the group, who nevertheless lived for years because everyone cared for her. And from there he moved to gratuitous love, with Saint Bernard, for whom love is its own reward, and with Josef Pieper, and with the mothers who every Saturday bring a baby to be baptized who does nothing but cry, eat and keep them awake.
To the question of what this society has that leads to that apathy he answered with individualism, that of the person who becomes the center of the universe and uses others as stepping stones. He attributed to Higinio Marín the idea that “desires have become rights” and took it to the absurd: wanting to be rich, to be handsome or to have seven girlfriends does not generate any right. From the frustration of those desires he derived addictions and what he called “a kind of social anesthesia,” that of leisure as escape, and repeated a borrowed definition: “Immaturity is intolerance to frustration.” The question that matters, he concluded, is what gives value to a life, and the answer cannot lie in having, because then greatness would be the privilege of an elite. What defines a person is how he responds to what life puts in front of him.
God, in that scheme, enters without forcing. “God is a very elegant gentleman,” he said: He does not impose or invade, He knocks at the door and asks if they will let Him in. The first thing He brings is light, and that is why baptism was called illumination; he paused on Saint Augustine, who sought outside the truth he carried within and which is fashionable, he joked, now that there is an Augustinian Pope. From truth he made freedom depend, “without truth there is no freedom,” and he specified that he was not speaking of a scientific or axiomatic truth, but a relational one, of those that are only known by experience, like being in love or floating in the Dead Sea. He recalled a boy who asked him to pray that he would do what he wanted and not what he felt like doing. The second thing God brings is company, and he placed it within: He is not in the stars, “where I find God is inside me.” That God, he admitted, does not change the course of history or make Hitler or Stalin die before their time: “mysteriously He allows that,” but He leaves each person an interior freedom and a grace to respond. He recommended La libertad interior, by Jacques Philippe, and summarized its thesis: I do not choose what is going to happen to me, I choose how I respond, and that is why one can be free in prison or in a wheelchair.
It was there that the word that structures his discourse appeared. Between the “caricature” of a God who is in heaven, punishes the sinner and sends him to hell for having failed the exam of the Ten Commandments, and a God who says “I want you to be happy, I want to accompany you,” Higueras chose the second, and made Him say: “I cannot avoid the mystery of evil because it is not in my hands to avoid it. Because the Achilles heel of God is the freedom of man. But I can accompany you in the experience of evil.” Solà Pastor then asked him how a religion whose central message is love can have a God who punishes and sends to hell. The answer was that that is precisely the caricature, the result of the Church having allowed each age to project its cultural elements onto the transmission of the Gospel: the faith was not explained the same way in the medieval Church as in that of the early twentieth century or in that of artificial intelligence, he said in allusion to the encyclical of Leo XIV. Only the saints, who “had no filters,” announced the nuclear message cleanly, that of a God who sent His Son not to condemn the world, but to save it. Whoever does not want to be saved, he summarized, “is his own problem.” But he warned of the opposite distortion with the same energy: man fabricates a God in his own image, and as false is the one of the sword that cuts off heads as the one of the feeling with which “I can do whatever I feel like” because everything is justified. “We must let God be God.”
The interviewer wanted to know if the Inquisition was an example of that use of God to dominate. Higueras conceded that in the history of the Church “the methodology of the evangelical announcement has been equivocal” many times, recalled John Paul II’s request for forgiveness in the jubilee of the year 2000 and listed the ordeals and trials of popes’ corpses, which he placed vaguely between the ninth and eleventh centuries; the documented episode is that of Pope Formosus, exhumed and tried in 897. He said that none of that scandalizes him, because “in the civil world they did the same and worse,” and applied the same reasoning to the tribunal that had prompted the question: “The Inquisition is not an invention of the Church, it is an element that already existed,” he maintained, referring to the museum of Santillana del Mar. “Let us not think that the Church is a machine for inventing evils”; what happens is that some of its members are inoculated with a worldliness that is not proper to it, like that of the Roman cardinals of the sixteenth century and their palaces. The double condition, human and divine, helps him to believe, and he illustrated it with a joke he asked to be understood as such: the most evident proof that God is in the Church are the priests, because there is no company with worse employees, “I start with myself,” and people keep coming closer to God after two thousand years. Opposite he placed the silent Church of parents, cloistered nuns and missionaries that does not appear anywhere.
The majority of abuses, in the family
The step to abuses was taken by Solà Pastor, who lamented that the first thing projected when the Church is mentioned are cases of pedophilia. Higueras began with the defense. Those news items, he said, “are very ideologized”: one reads one newspaper and another and they seem to be talking about different continents. “No one denies that there have been miseries in the Church,” but “we cannot blame the collective for the sins of an individual,” and he resorted to football: if a group of Barça or Madrid fans burns cars after a defeat, no one says that the entire fan base is scum. That is, in his view, “the great injustice” that is committed today with the Church. He admitted that there may be ten priests who are “disturbed, perverted or disgusting,” “and unfortunately there are,” but that beside them there are a hundred or a hundred and twenty who are not. And he accepted as good a figure without citing a source: “It has already been sociologically demonstrated that, unfortunately, the issue of abuses in 97% of cases is within the family.”
He supported it with his experience. “I have been hearing confessions for 36 years, and a lot,” he said, and what he has heard in that time are above all domestic abuses: “An older brother, an uncle, a cousin.” Almost always men. Families that keep silent because they are not going to denounce the other son or make a fuss. Of those victims, he affirmed, no one wants to speak, and some have reproached him indignantly: only the abuses of certain groups are spoken of and never of them, “who are the great majority.”
The turn came without anyone asking for it. There is a culture of denunciation that is important, he said, and thanks to it “the things that are not going well in the Church must be denounced.” What came next was this: “That business of covering up, moving people around, ‘nothing happened, we’re wonderful’; ‘no, no, no, all this is bad people who don’t like us.’ Well, there shouldn’t be any at all.” And against the argument he himself had just used: “Sometimes we think we console ourselves by saying: ‘No, but we are the 3%.’ It is a horror, it is a nightmare that that happens.” He described the destruction of a child as one of the gravest sins that exist, because of the “feeling of dirtiness, of indignity, of existential shame” that the victim drags through life: “It is as if you have killed him while he is alive.” He half restrained himself, “I, if I weren’t a priest, I’m not going to say what I would do to those people,” and took a position: “If it has to splash on us, let it splash.” The guilty members of the clergy must pay, submit to legislation and justice, “and they must not be covered up or hidden by anyone.” He recalled that “zero tolerance” is the watchword of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis and now Leo XIV, and that as long as it is not clear the Church will remain exposed. He believes that today there is a great deal of care and that cases are becoming less and less frequent.
The other side came next, and it was also opened by the interviewer when he said he understood the insecurity of priests. Higueras endorsed it twice, “the presumption of innocence has been lost,” and added: “It’s that we are sold out.” It would be enough, he said, for someone from his parish to claim that Father Jesús did something to him when he was little. He recounted that when he built the church, inaugurated in 1999, he imposed a rule: “all glass doors,” because “everything that happens must always be seen.” Even then he was afraid, he explained, because there are people who have suffered abuses, “but there are also people who have wanted to confuse things there, and sometimes it is not clear.” Of false accusation he said that it is “a death in life” and cited the proverb: calumny, something always sticks. He reproached part of the press for passing sentence before the trial and “regardless of the evidence of a process.” He offered the consolation of the beatitudes for whoever suffers an injustice, and immediately set a limit that portrays his style: one thing is to be persecuted for Christ and another to be persecuted for having done wrong. If a priest takes 50,000 euros from a parish and says he is being persecuted for the Gospel, the answer is different: “They are persecuting you because you are a fool.”
Suicide and euthanasia
The conversation then entered the confessional. Have sins changed between 1995 and 2026? Yes and no, he answered. The capital sins are the same as always, and he verified it, he recounted, hearing confessions in an international seminary from young people from Japan, China, India, Africa and America: all brought the same ones. What has changed is the gaze. When he was ordained, in 1990, he perceived “an excessive moralism” that declared things sins without analyzing them: “Lying, sin. Shouting at a person, sin. The whole sixth commandment, sin. Sexuality, sin.” That moralism, he affirmed, “has been maintained practically in the Church until recently, or is maintained in some priests.” By the law of the pendulum it has later fallen into psychologism, in which every behavior has an explanation and the explanation is taken as an excuse. He gave the example of the husband who justifies the mistress because of how unbearable his wife is: “I understand you, but I don’t have to approve of you.” The error of the age is that people identify “understanding with approving,” and they come to confession giving explanations. His formula: “Neither moralism nor psychologism.”
As an example of the middle point he chose suicide. Until shortly before his ordination, he recalled, the suicide was not buried in a Catholic cemetery because it was presumed he had died in grave sin, something he called “an aberration” and which today is unthinkable. “Everyone knows it is an illness,” he affirmed, a chemical matter of which the person is not master: “You do not choose to die.” The Church of the last third of the twentieth century, he said, was intelligent enough to listen to neuroscience and psychology and recognize that “there are acts that are not free.” And he formulated the rule: “We will never say that suicide is good, how could it be good? It is a horror. But we will never condemn the person who has done it.” The reverse, he added, is euthanasia, and he mimicked the sentimental reaction to a recent case, “‘oh, how cute this girl is that they are asking to be killed,’” before pronouncing: “That is a suicide of a lifetime.” He did not name her; the description points to Noelia Castillo, the 25-year-old who received euthanasia last March 26 in the province of Barcelona after the lawsuit undertaken by her father to prevent it. When someone loses the vital instinct, he reasoned, there is a serious and deep illness, and what is appropriate is to cure it, “one must not take away his life.” Asked whether Spain is heading toward a slippery slope, he answered yes, cited the Swiss clinics where one pays to die and closed the argument: “If we believe the desire for death is not an illness, then we are lost.” It is, he said, a century of shadows and lights, with more social sensitivity than ever and, at the same time, with the weak being eliminated because they are in the way.
The most common sin in the confessional
And the most common sin? It depends, he answered: “the ladies from the waist up and the gentlemen from the waist down.” Of the male he described the sexual impulse, an expression he prefers to “lust” for being less derogatory, as something natural and good, since God made it, and that twists when it ceases to be lived with love and becomes satisfying oneself by using another. He pointed to pornography as one of the worst addictions of young people, which they reach, according to the studies he mentioned without detailing, from the age of nine or ten, and which appears “a great deal” in the confessional. He explained it with a crudeness for which he apologized to the audience: before one heard the word “ass” and had to imagine it; now one presses a button and they all come out one after another on the mobile. The result is slavery, self-contempt and lost hours, and the conversion of the person into an object: “My body is not part of me, my body is me.” Of women he said that their terrain is the sentimental, that of temper, envy and criticism, and he cited a parishioner: “Criticizing is a sin, but it unites a lot.” He assumed that the generalization could sound sexist. And immediately he deactivated it, because those are not, he maintained, the sins that worry him most. What worry him are greed, which breaks families as soon as the parents die, and anger that does not reach the punch but turns a house into hell. A sin of sexuality, he compared, is like fireworks: it explodes and it is over. The ones that rot are the daily ones, the discontent and the reproach drop by drop, and those do “much more damage.”
The change begins by realizing, he said, because what is habitual is to justify oneself by saying that everyone is like that. He returned to the question about the value of a life with a funeral scene. He usually meets with the family beforehand so they can tell him about the deceased. Once he gathered the five children of a well-known man, the kind who appear in magazines, and the response was this: “We don’t remember any positive thing about our father. He was never there.” Higueras summarized it with a stock phrase: “He was a man so poor, so poor, so poor, that he only had money.”
Pozuelo: Money, wealth and austerity
Pozuelo gave rise to talk about money. Higueras qualified the cliché: the municipality has around 90,000 inhabitants and not everything is rich, although three footballers are enough to skew the average. To the question of whether one can be an entrepreneur, want to make money and follow the Gospel he answered yes, as long as the company generates jobs and well-being and is just. “Wealth is not for oneself, it is to place it at the disposal of others,” he summarized as the social doctrine of the Church: it is not bad that there are rich people if they know they will have to give an account of their management. He avoided pronouncing on whether public or private management should weigh more, which is what separates conservatives and social democrats, because they are, he said, two debatable positions, and he gave as an example of well-understood wealth Amancio Ortega, whom he referred to only by surname, for the jobs created and the donations against cancer. The gifts of God that one keeps for oneself rot, he warned, and referred to the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus.
To the children of that abundance he dedicated a section of his own. Having everything does not do them good; what a child needs is to hear the word “no,” and without it they come out “monstrous children” who do not tolerate frustration. He recounted that the parish takes groups of one hundred and two hundred youngsters on the Camino de Santiago, to sleep on the floor and share water, and that what is gained in fifteen days is lost upon returning to a house where everything is done for them. “Suffering is part of happiness,” he maintained, although God does not want it, and “he is not happier who suffers less.” To the rich father he prescribed a word, “austerity,” a virtue he recalled as pre-Christian and already present in the Nicomachean Ethics. And another confessional scene: he asked a penitent what he gave his children, the man answered money and wanted to know if that seemed little to him. Very little, he replied: that the autonomous community can give.
The interviewer then brought up a detail from before the recording. The program serves coffee in porcelain cups brought from France and Higueras was, according to Solà Pastor, the only guest who insisted on a cardboard cup. He explained it without solemnity: the cup is pretty, but it can break and someone will have to wash it, and “if one can choose the simple, better.” He confessed that he is ashamed to enter a fancy restaurant with his clerical collar when a parishioner invites him, and that he prefers a set menu.
The next question came loaded: how does one reconcile a structure to which thousands of people come, with its own foundation and resources the interviewer called millionaire, with the “vow of poverty,” which diocesan priests do not take and which Higueras did not correct. He responded by describing the parish on three pillars: the announcement, the sacraments and charity, without which “prayer is a lie.” The charity of Caná is concretized in Cáritas, in the foundation for people with disabilities, with a day center and leisure activities that give respite to the parents, and in help to immigrants so they can find a contract “with dignity, without exploitation” and regularize their situation. None of that would be possible without the laity: some two hundred people among catechists, workers and volunteers, and only five or six employees. To measure attendance he gave a sacristy figure: the parish buys 38,000 hosts a month, which he translated into about a thousand people a day, and on weekends, he calculated roughly, about eight thousand pass through. In some Sunday Masses whoever does not arrive a quarter of an hour early does not get a seat, and there are loudspeakers in the street. He downplayed his own part with a biblical proverb, “God spoke through Balaam’s donkey,” and attributed the result to three things: that there are very good people, that “we are very normal, we don’t do extravagant things” and that there is always a priest available.
The seal of confession, before a murder
Available, above all, in the confessional, to which “many broken people” come who do not want to be judged, but understood: “Not approved, but understood.” He described it as a showcase of life where the same person enters a mentally ill person to whom Saint Michael appears ordering him to eat macaroni as a mother who does not know what to do with the son who consumes. Non-believers also enter who ask what they have to do to confess. “First get baptized,” he answers them, but if they want to tell their sins and have him ask God to forgive them, he listens, even if it is not the sacrament. From there he moved to the seal. A penitent can say he has murdered, “which could have happened to me, as is logical,” and the confessor could only recount the sin without ever linking it to a person, under penalty of excommunication. If someone confesses a crime, he is silent, but he tells him he must go to the police and incriminate himself if the matter is serious, or return what was stolen, because one cannot absolve where there is no purpose of amendment. Solà Pastor was direct: if someone had come to him saying “I have murdered.” “Yes, of course.” And before the interviewer’s astonishment: “It is part of the pact of being a priest.”
Then came the question about the most impactful thing he has heard, and the answer with which this chronicle begins: “The most horrific thing I can hear in confession, I am very clear about it, are the abuses.” More than a murder, more than an abortion, which also deprive of life, because an abuse “is to destroy a child forever, is to leave him broken.” He recognized that the confessional is not a place to scold and that, even so, before those penitents he becomes “very energetic”: he tells them they have done the worst a human being can do, that they be aware of the gravity, that it cannot be repeated and that they must go to a doctor. And if there is a denunciation underway, that they not deny it: “You must acknowledge what you have done.” Solà Pastor asked him if behind it is Satan. Not directly, he answered, and cited a definition he attributed to Pope Francis, sin is what destroys man, and the scene from Mel Gibson’s The Passion in which a pack of deformed children harasses Judas. He ended in the Gospel, in the sentence against whoever scandalizes a child, for whom it would be better to be thrown into the sea with a stone tied: “I have not heard in the whole Gospel a sentence so grave as that.”
Of what weighs on him as a priest he mentioned battered women, addictions and, above all, parents who have lost a child, for whom the parish has a group: it is “like a grenade thrown inside you.” Asked how all that affects him, he took the opportunity for a reproach to his brothers that he said he makes unwillingly: there are not many churches in which priests sit to hear confessions for hours and hours, in some one has to “submit seven applications” to get it, and the argument that no one comes has an answer: “No one comes because you don’t sit down.” His relief is the tabernacle, before which he places himself every morning. And his protection against success, a lowering of himself that he formulated without nuances: “Father Jesús is a lost fool. Father Jesús is worth nothing.” Eternity, he joked, is going to be like the universal ¡Hola!, because everyone will find out about everyone’s sins, and he dies of shame thinking about it. “The protagonist of my parish is called Jesus Christ,” he said. He, at most, gets in the way.
What is hardest for him to combat, he confessed next, is seeking himself: using others, and God, as a stepping stone to tell himself how well he is doing. Flattery embarrasses him, including that of those who listen to him every day, because the merit is not his, and he compared it with the pearl necklace that was once lent to a sister: “It is not mine, it has been lent to me.” The same with the money that passes through the parish, of which he said he is clear that none of it is his. He revealed his salary: he earned 800 or 900 euros when the pastoral council, whose members earned “at least 5,000, 6,000,” proposed raising it, and today a priest earns 1,200 or 1,300. He refused, he recounted, because he did not see why the priest of a village in the mountains or of a poor neighborhood should earn less than he does.
Solà Pastor raised a personal complaint: he feels judged as a bad Christian by people who, in his view, are the ones with the most disorganized personal lives. Higueras agreed with him and returned to moralism, this time as a method of evangelization. Giving doctrine without more, the interrogation of whether you have gone to Mass, confessed or eaten meat on Friday, seems to him an “suffocating” and counterproductive methodology: “If we are few and on top of that the few of us treat each other with kicks…” Many people go to church, he explained, who have not confessed in a long time, and he does not see himself with the authority to scold them, because he has the formation he has and no one has told him that the Church asks that it be done at least once a year. He applied the criterion to the interviewer himself, as a pastoral case: if he did not have that knowledge, he told him, he does not sin when he receives Communion. He invited him to try confession, explaining to him that to absolve means to unlink, that sin ceases to form part of one. And he finished against the alternative: to whom it is said that either he confesses or he goes to hell, the natural thing is that he sends everything to the devil. “That is the Church that does not interest me. That is the Church that does not attract, that frightens.”
The only non-negotiable for a believer
The interviewer then asked what the non-negotiables are for being a good believer. The answer is Higueras’s thesis in its pure state: “The only non-negotiable is that you never doubt that God loves you.” That is the base, he added, and if it is not understood everything else is useless: Christian asceticism becomes a pseudo-therapy for being good and one can be very much of Mass and doctrine with life broken behind. He invoked Benedict XVI to maintain that no one is Christian without a real relationship with Jesus Christ and asked not to confuse faith with morality. He illustrated it with the story of a Chinese saint, a doctor and opium addict, whose confessor denied him absolution for lack of purpose of amendment and who died a martyr in the Boxer Rebellion proclaiming his love for Christ; from the description it is Marcos Ji Tianxiang, canonized in 2000. “Did he have faith? All of it,” he summarized. Moral demands are not, in his approach, conditions for being good, but paths to love more, and being a good believer consists in treating Jesus Christ as the best friend.
Solà Pastor then brought up faith à la carte. Higueras portrayed it with an example: the one who cheats the Treasury, insults his wife and then receives Communion with all the holiness in the world. “Well, receive less.” But on the Eucharist he set a principle in the other direction: “Communion is not the prize of the just,” it is not received by the goody-goodies for their merits, but it is the remedy of the weak. He listed what is needed to approach it: to be baptized, to know oneself loved by God and, if one is conscious of having wounded someone, to be reconciled with him. He added no other condition.
Infidelity, matrimonial nullity and abortion
From there the talk drifted to infidelity. Should one tell the other? One must live in the truth, he said, but he distinguished. If a boyfriend has had a one-off slip at a bachelor party, of those he described as horrific, “I would almost tell you not to say anything,” because it would only succeed in embittering the girlfriend and loading her with his own weight: “An anecdote does not define a person.” If it has happened more than once throughout the courtship, it must be said, because the other has the right to know with whom he is marrying, and he recalled that deliberately concealing who one is is grounds for nullity.
On nullities he first dismissed the cliché that they were bought: it was “a bit of a myth,” although the processes were very heavy before the reforms of John Paul II and Francis. He said he had accompanied a great many people in that procedure without it costing him money, because what varies is the lawyer’s fee that each one chooses and whoever has no resources has a free lawyer. He compared a null marriage with a madeleine that lacks flour: an essential element is missing, almost always freedom. It is taken away by ignorance, when something relevant is concealed such as a known sterility, years of drug consumption or a psychiatric treatment; fear, of being left alone or of what people will say; and immaturity, which is by far the most frequent. There he gave a figure: “I don’t know in other tribunals, but where I am almost 70%, 80% is for immaturity of one of the two.” He defined it as the inability to assume conjugal commitments, that of the person who marries but continues going out for drinks or goes shopping in Paris and leaves the children to the other. And of marriages that last he said they have two things in common, believers or not: truth, being able to look the other in the eyes without lying, and the cultivation of love, which requires that the spouse come before work and also before the children.
What remained was to explain the title with which he had been presented. Being a missionary of mercy, he recounted, means being able to absolve certain grave sins that were reserved to the Holy See and carried excommunication; Francis, in what he called a success, distributed that faculty among some priests to save the trip to Rome. He calculated without certainty that in Spain there would be forty or fifty. He cited three of those sins: the violation of the sacramental seal, the profanation of the Eucharist and that of the confessor who absolves someone who has sinned with him or uses the confessional to obtain sexual relations, which he named in Latin as sollicitatio ad turpia and which lent itself, he said, to spiritual abuse. They are, he admitted, sins above all of priests, and if he committed one he would have to go to another missionary. On abortion he specified that it retains the penalty of excommunication, although its absolution, previously reserved to the bishop, now corresponds to any priest, and he described it as very grave: not letting live a child who is already alive. But he asked to qualify with a blunt phrase, “no one aborts for pleasure, everyone aborts out of fear,” from which he only excluded “some very frivolous people” and the men who pressure with abandonment. The women he has confessed, he said, have suffered a great deal and spend years calculating the age the child would have.
The devil exists, but illness does not come from him
The devil, announced in the title, did not appear until the final stretch. Higueras stuck to the classical definition: Satan is “a personal being,” a creature God did not create to be evil and who chose not to love, “he is not a myth, a personification of evil.” He is the instigator, but each man then positions himself before evil, which he defined as privation of good, and executes it or rejects it. To the question of whether there are bad people he answered that there are people who do bad things, because acts are judged and not persons. And when Solà Pastor wanted to know if he had ever felt the presence of the demon, he said yes, sometimes, and that he tries to minimize his dealings with him. In persons, very few. “I am not an exorcist,” he clarified; he only had to perform an exorcism once, with the bishop’s permission, and it was nothing particular. He placed himself between those who see the demon everywhere and those who deny he exists with a “neither so much nor so bald,” and he questioned himself: “Is he there? Yes. Have I experienced his presence? Yes. In a real way? Yes.” It has not been frequent, and when it occurred it was evident that it was he. He did not want to give an example: “It embarrasses me.”
He was categorical about what the demon does not do. The interviewer recalled that a previous guest on the program had explained how to distinguish the illness that comes from God, to learn something or draw closer to Him, from the one that arrives as a curse from the devil. Higueras denied both halves. Illness does not come from the devil, “I believe it does not,” and neither from God: “Illness never comes from God, because God can never want evil.” He attacked the pious phrase of accepting the will of God before a cancer or the death of a child: that is not His will, God does not want anyone to fall ill or die, and besides “He suffers more than you.” He grounded it in the cross. With Saint Thomas he distinguished the love of benevolence from that of compassion, which is to suffer with the beloved, and maintained that the pain of Christ was not the nails or the thorns, but having asked the Father to experience every instant of pain of every human being in history: “The cross of Christ is a cosmos of pain.” In the enumeration the matter of the whole conversation returned, “what a child has suffered when he has been abused.” From there his conclusion, which contrasts with what he himself had said at the beginning about Hitler and Stalin: “How can you say that God likes evil? Either God permits evil or God wants evil. If He suffers it Himself.” A God indifferent and unalterable before pain would be, he said, monstrous.
His last message was an invitation to know Jesus Christ, “the one of now,” without fear. He assured that in Spain an approach to the Church is taking place that is noticeable in the street and in the confessional, and that more and more adults are being baptized, people of 19, of 30 or of 43 years. He attributed it to the fact that the world is very empty and having does not satisfy. His advice was “to try it”: to approach Jesus, to speak with Him and to verify that He is nothing of what they will have told them, but much more.
The program ends with a roulette wheel that chose for him the question about the personal difficulty he is facing right now. The answer returned the conversation to its beginning: not letting “cultural intoxications” blur for him the true face of God. He asks himself in which God he believes, whether in the punisher, in the friend, in the one of the Old Testament, in the one of the New or in the one some groups present, and he lives it as a bet with consequences for eternity. “Whom do I trust?”, he asked aloud, because the Gospel is the same but each one tells him it wants to say something different. “I don’t want anyone to tell me what it means, I want to discover it without letting myself be intoxicated.” The farewell gift bore his name and a phrase the priest had said in another podcast and which he recognized as his own: “Hell is not letting oneself be loved.”