Luis Argüello (Meneses de Campos, 1953), archbishop of Valladolid, is the new president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) and takes over from the cardinal and archbishop of Barcelona Juan José Omella. He arrived at the plenary assembly of bishops as the preferred candidate of the Spanish prelates, although he was not the man identified with Pope Francis and will emerge as president of his governing body. He has a political past, he collaborated with the PSOE in the transition and a photo from a rally of the Communist Party of Spain that has haunted him for years, although he does not appear.
Bishop since 2016, today Argüello is associated as a conservative prelate, although moderate in form and far from the rhetoric of other Spanish bishops such as Jesús Sanz (Oviedo) or José Ignacio Munilla (Orihuela-Alicante). He was the right hand of Cardinal Emeritus Ricardo Blázquez, of whom he was auxiliary bishop and whom he succeeded in the archdiocese of Valladolid, where he has developed his entire ecclesial and civil life. Likewise, he coincided with him in the EEC, when the now president was general secretary and spokesperson from 2018 to 2022 and Blázquez was president for the second time of the governing body of the prelates, from 2014 to 2020.
However, if we look back, Argüello was active in anti-Franco political activism in his youth. He himself explained it shortly after being named archbishop of Valladolid in June 2022, in statements to Alfa y Omega. He collaborated with the PSOE in the first municipal elections that the socialist party won, in 1979.
"At the end of the 70s I had a close relationship with the so-called Christian Democracy Team due to a friendship with Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez. Then I collaborated in the municipal candidacy of the PSOE when it won the elections for the first time, and also due to a personal relationship with the delegate of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters," explained the now president of the CEE two years ago.
Before being ordained a priest in 1986, ten years earlier, he graduated in Law with distinction and became a young university professor of Administrative Law, all in the city of Pisuegra. It was at that time that he frequented anti-Franco political circles. "I was there between 1971 and 1983. It was a time of great interior and spiritual transformation. My stay coincided with the Transition and the approval of the Constitution. It was the time of the first university revolts, and that world provoked in me a kind of revolution that it put a little distance from the religious experience," he acknowledged in statements to the Catholic weekly.
"Between 1975 and 1980 I fooled around with some political activities in the first democratic elections and collaborated with some of the parties without firm militancy. I had previously participated in the Democratic Junta of Spain and in the Democratic Convergence Platform of Spain. The experience with the parties politicians caused me disappointment," added the bishop, who entered the seminary shortly after.
But that is not all. Argüello is haunted by a photo from the Municipal Archive of Valladolid in which he does not appear. It is from Santiago Carrillo's first legal rally, which was held in Valladolid on April 23, 1977, a date that commemorated the defeat of the community members in Villalar. Behind the leader of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), who is accompanied by Anselmo Hoyos, Javier Fernández and César de Prada, is a young man who many have identified as Argüello.
In 2011, when he was going to be named vicar general of the diocese, in some pages of religious information Argüello was associated with the PCE. Some traces remain of this on the Internet, although the information on the portal that spread the rumor has been deleted. As if it were a boomerang, the image of the rally pointing to the bishop has returned several times.
In April 2016, Alberto José Blanco, the then mayor of the Palencia town of Meneses de Campo, his town, denied that it was him in statements to El Norte de Castilla just after it emerged that he was going to be a bishop. A few weeks later, just after he took office, so did the digital religious media Infovaticana, citing Argüello himself as a source. Yesterday ABC did it in the profile it published of the bishop, also with his words: "It's not me, he is Carrillo's son, although I was in the audience." It also states that he told Minister Félix Bolaños during a discussion that he was the only one who had run in front of the grays. "Here, the only one who has run before the grays is me," he quotes.
The fact that he does not appear in the photo has not prevented Argüello from being attacked in recent years due to the snapshot from the most ultra-conservative and radical sectors. The matter moved again in forums and on social networks when the remains of the dictator Francisco Franco were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen, in October 2019. Also in 2021, when, as spokesperson for the EEC, he supported the position of the Catalan bishops with pardons to the leaders of the process. But those have not been the only occasions and Argüello has been labeled as a "Marchist-Leninist" in some ultra portals, considering that he was soft on the Government of Pedro Sánchez.
In 2019, Miguel Menéndez Piñar disfigured that photo, coinciding with the exhumation of Franco's remains on social networks. He is the grandson of Blas Piñar and president of the conservative Higher Institute of Sociology, Economics and Politics (ISSEP), a training center close to Vox that has received promotion from the government of the Junta de Castilla y León, in which the training of Santiago Abascal. "The worst thing is not that Luis Argüello was at an event by Santiago Carrillo many years ago. The serious thing is that today, as a bishop and spokesperson for the Episcopal Conference, he is on his knees in front of the enemies of the Church," he noted on Twitter.
Menéndez Piñar is now close to Vox and was a regular at the concentrations in Madrid's Plaza Oriente on November 20. His brother Rodrigo – although he is not the protagonist and is not the one making the controversial statements – is one of the priests who appear in the gathering broadcast on the YouTube channel 'La Sacristy de La Vendée', which is defined as a "counter-revolutionary priestly gathering." ". In one of the broadcasts, in February, several priests pointed out between jokes and laughter that they were praying for the death of the Pope, which is why the archbishopric of Toledo called them to order. "I pray a lot that he can go to heaven as soon as possible," one of the priests said about Bergoglio, to which others joined.
The ISSEP has the French politician Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of Marine Le Pen, among its founders. It should be said that Argüello has been a teacher in the classrooms of that organization, of the subject 'The Church in today's world', and that the institution's profile on Twitter congratulated him without hesitation yesterday on his new appointment.
