There has been no surprise at the plenary assembly of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) held this week in Añastro (Burgos). The archbishop of Valladolid, Luis Argüello from Palencia (Meneses de Campos, 1953), arrived as the man with the most support among the prelates and was elected this Tuesday first time as the new head of the Spanish bishops with 48 favorable votes. Yesterday's initial poll, with a non-binding vote, already showed the way.
Argüello, 70, was appointed archbishop of the Valladolid diocese in June 2022 and had previously held the position of secretary general of the EEC for a period of five years. His first gesture, together with the cardinal of Madrid, Juan José Cobo, vice president of the governing body of the bishops, was to greet the victims of sexual abuse who gathered in front of the place where the EEC meeting was held. .
He has developed his entire pastoral life in the diocese of Valladolid and is associated with the conservative profiles of the Spanish Church, although with a softer tone than other prelates such as Jesús Sanz (Oviedo) or Juan Ignacio Munilla (Orihuela-Alicante).
Between 2018 and 2022 he was the secretary general and spokesperson of the EEC and was appointed auxiliary bishop of Valladolid on April 14, 2016 by Pope Francis. On June 17, 2022, he was named archbishop of that same diocese. He was ordained a priest on September 27, 1986 for the archdiocese of Valladolid, where he has held the following positions: formator at the diocesan seminary of Valladolid (1986-1997); episcopal vicar of the city and member of the episcopal council, during three stages: (1986-1997, 2003-2009 and 2010-2011).
The new president of the EEC also trained in Valladolid, at the La Salle Brothers school and then at the University, where he obtained a degree in Civil Law. Likewise, he completed ecclesiastical studies at the Augustinian Fathers center in Valladolid.
"It must have this capacity to weave relationships, to be an instrument for the communion of the bishops and at the same time to push us all together towards the missionary outing that the Church and the Pope are asking of us at this synodal moment," he said a few years ago. weeks in an interview Argüello himself about what the profile of the new president of the House of the Church should be.
Just after the agreement between PSOE and Junts per Catalunya for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, in the presentation of an act of his diocese, Argüello assessed the current political moment and said about the possibility of the Amnesty law being approved that is now being processed by the Congress of Deputies, and that has given rise to some divisions within the Church, that what is considered the four pillars on which coexistence is based - freedom, equality, solidarity and legal security - "are in question."
“It ends up being the expression of some underlying cultural currents that we have been supporting in recent decades: an excessive praise of autonomy at all levels, a praise of individualism with a loss of appreciation of the ties that occur personally, in the family and the social,” he added.
A few days before, on the social network Twitter, he noted that "the amnesty could be valuable if it were reciprocal and those granted amnesty renounced an illegal and unilateral process, if it were the result of an agreement with a qualified majority, if it did not protect violence against people ". "If not, it threatens the coexistence it claims to serve," she concluded.
In relation to the controversy that has aroused in recent weeks the Declaration Fiducia supplicans on the pastoral meaning of blessings, from the Vatican, by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, Argüello has pointed out that there is "confusion ", unlike other bishops such as Munilla or Sanz who have openly attacked the document that endorses the possibility of blessing couples in an irregular situation in the eyes of the Church and homosexual couples.
"The document has two key points of reference. One, that the blessing of God, the love of God is for all people. And another, that the blessings of a ritual nature that in some episcopates were being proposed and prepared, also that document He clearly says no. I believe that the problem has come from contextual issues," he said in a recent interview with Religión Digital. "It has been accepted that African bishops live in a context and sometimes I think it has not been taken into account that in the West we also live in another context, with legitimate gender studies, gender ideologies... more complicated, pressures from lobbies. even more complicated, which also make their underlines when interpreting one way or another," he added.
Likewise, he points out that "the document often insists on spontaneous blessings and the blessing of people" and believes that "the interpretation of the word couple in both contexts has generated this confusion."
He also reveals that he refused to bless a couple who asked him to do it along with a photo, understanding that "they were trying to use the possibility of a blessing to instrumentalize him in that context of ideologies and so on."
