The Infovaticana note about the conference to be given by Andrés Torres Queiruga at the Santiago de Compostela seminary is not news; it is an ideological auto-da-fé disguised as news. The operation is transparent: to mark the most important Galician theologian – and one of the most recognized in the Spanish and international sphere – as “heterodox” and to turn the normal and brave decision of Archbishop Francisco José Prieto into a supposed “doctrinal confusion.” We are not dealing with zeal for the truth, but with nostalgia for the Inquisition.
The method: hanging the label before listening
The kickoff tag says it all: “The heterodox theologian Andrés Torres Queiruga.” There’s no argument; there’s stigmatization. There’s no entry into the work; the author is placed outside the Catholic field from the first line.
It is also alarming that the theologian’s conference on the feast of Saint Thomas has “institutional backing” and is framed “in a church celebration, not in an academic forum alien to the Church.” As if Queiruga’s theology could only be tolerated, at best, in a secular faculty and isolated from the people of God.
The denouement arrives with the most serious accusation: it is said of a “well-known speaker for holding theses incompatible with the Catholic faith” and the act is qualified as “a serious case of doctrinal confusion promoted from within the diocesan authority itself.” Again, without a single serious quote, without a single page discussed, without the slightest effort to faithfully expose what Queiruga thinks. It is the old inquisitorial scheme: generalities, insinuations, gratuitous accusations, and anathema.
Queiruga and his high-level theology
Faced with that caricature of the aforementioned portal, which produces secondhand embarrassment, it is fitting to remember who the invited speaker is at the seminar party. Andrés Torres Queiruga is not a marginal figure of religious thought, but the best contemporary Galician theologian and one of the great Spanish theologians, with a solid, systematic work recognized beyond our borders, especially in Germany and in other international spheres.
He is an author who has rigorously dialogued with modern philosophy, biblical criticism, and the sciences, attempting to ensure that Christian faith can be thought without renouncing either tradition or intellectual honesty.
Of her work, her colleagues have said it is “a theology of high spiritual and philosophical density,” a relentless pursuit of “a believable God for women and men today,” a reflection that “avoids the shortcuts of fundamentalism and the refuge of fideism to take seriously both the Gospel and reason.”
His insistence that “God does not send evil nor need suffering to ‘test’ us,” his effort to rethink Revelation as “loving self-communication of God in history,” and his reading of the resurrection as “fullness of life and not as magic of corpses” are, precisely, attempts to do justice to the heart of faith in the face of childish or cruel images of God. **It is what he calls ‘Recovering Salvation’.**
Are your approaches open to discussion? Of course. As with any other theologian. Because that’s what theology is: a search, a debate, a contrast. **The inadmissible thing is to use that discussion as an excuse to demonize it and try to erase it from ecclesial life**, as if the only acceptable theology were to “repeat on your knees” what is already known, without thinking, without risking, without asking questions.
The courage of Monsignor Prieto: forming adults, not subjects
With its brutal attack on Queiruga, Infovaticana is trying to put Archbishop Francisco José Prieto of Compostela in the crosshairs, “under whose episcopal governance” the conference is allowed.
Therefore, he holds him personally responsible for this “serious case” and emphasizes that he himself will preside over the previous mass. Translated: what he is reproached for is having taken his pastoral mission seriously and having bet on the best theology available to train his seminarians.
Prieto does not limit himself to tolerating; he explicitly and warmly invites, and this is not the first time. At the beginning of his Compostela mandate, he called Queiruga to give a conference. That’s not absentmindedness, it’s an option. It is the conscious decision of a bishop who understands that forming priests for Galicia implies putting them in contact with those who have thought and written best about the faith in this context.
Or, put another way, it’s preferring good theology to “armchair theology”: that which is done only on your knees and only with the backpack of Doctrine on your back, without going through the head, without taking charge of history, suffering, science, and contemporary culture.
Far from “endangering the faith of seminarians,” invitations like these prevent them from a future head-on collision with the real world. A priest who has listened to, read, and discussed Queiruga will be better prepared to accompany the questions of intelligent believers living in a secularized, plural, wounded world; he will not be left without words when facing the problem of evil, the experience of God’s silence, doubts about prayer or resurrection. A priest trained only in armored manuals, yes.
The age of the Inquisition has passed (although some may long for it)
The tone of the Infovaticana piece exudes nostalgia for those ecclesiastical times (not so distant) when a mere hint of suspicion was enough to silence a theologian.
It’p as if the Church had learned nothing from the mistakes made with figures like Congar, de Lubac, Rahner, Boff, or so many others, first persecuted and then rehabilitated, and even some of them becoming experts of the Second Vatican Council.
Fortunately, Pope Francis put an end to that era. Today, at least officially, there is no longer an Index of Prohibited Books, nor are theologians placed on the pyre by blogs or portals turned into disseminators of blacklists.
That some yearn for the Inquisition reveals their ultracatholic and rigid essence, but their attitude cannot be ecclesiastically binding. The post-conciliar Church has recognized that it needs theologians, even those who cause discomfort, to “progress in the understanding of Revelation.”
This implies accepting that there will be debated works, proposals that require nuances, even corrections; but the path is not a witch hunt, but serious dialogue and patient clarification.
On that path, an archbishop who opens the major seminary to the best theologian in his land is on the side of the adult Church; those who shout “scandal” from a web that distributes symbolic excommunications on their own, are not.
In the end, the contrast is sharp. On one side, a diocese that, on the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, patron of theologians, invites a thinker who has dedicated his life to asking how to say today “Jesus of Nazareth, pioneer and culmination of faith.”
On the other, a platform that turns that invitation into a crime and that, under the guise of orthodoxy, transmits fear of thought, distrust of reason, and allergy to any attempt to update the language of faith.
Msgr. Prieto advocates for a training that goes through Scripture, tradition, the magisterium… and also through the best current theological reflection. He advocates for future priests to learn to dialogue, to discern, to separate gold from dross, rather than living in a bubble where only echoes of slogans are heard. That is not “doctrinal confusion”; it is trust in the Gospel and in the intelligence of the Church.
True confusion arises when faith is equated with rigidity, fidelity with fear, and orthodoxy with inquisition. In that sense, Queiruga’s conference at the Santiago seminary is good news: because it normalizes that great theologians return to ecclesiastical classrooms, and because it reminds us that thought is not the enemy of faith, but one of its best allies.
Whoever does not understand this, like the rigid people of all kinds and conditions, will continue to see heretics everywhere. The vast majority of the ‘holy people of God’ will appreciate that, in Compostela, theology continues to be done standing up, with an alert mind and a heart in the Gospel.
José Manuel Vidal
Religión Digital 21 Jan 2026
English version translated with AI