Valladolid (EFE).- The Archbishop of Valladolid, Luis Argüello, in charge this Good Friday of pronouncing the Sermon of the Seven Words, has warned of the technological “empire” that companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook-Meta, have woven worldwide. Amazon and Microsoft, with whose tools “the distinction between what is true and what is false, reality and fiction has been eliminated”.
In a crowded Plaza Mayor in Valladolid and before the passage of some of the masterpieces of Gregorio Fernández, Argüello has delivered his second Sermon of the Seven Words after that of 2005, now as the new archbishop, with whom they recreate and bring to today the seven sentences that, according to the scriptures, Jesus Christ pronounced on the cross just before he died.
With his text, Argüello has especially warned young people of the risk of entrusting their dreams and future aspirations to large corporations that control their tastes, interests and even their friendships, in the face of the Church’s prayer proposal and the “dream of God ”.
For the archbishop there are two paths: either that of the “good spirit” of God or “the bad breath of the Dragon and his Beasts” that will forge “individualism” and seduce with “a tricky proposal to ‘profile’ us so that we match with the project of exclusion and domination of the empire”.
“Offer our profile to the highest economic or political bidder. Thus, the ideal subject of totalitarian domination is going to appear, the one for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and between true and false no longer exists”, he has proclaimed, quoting Hanah Arendt and also Shoshona Zuboff in his concept of “capitalism of the surveillance”.
Argüello has made these allusions in the fifth word (“I thirst”), as a reference to the desire for water and the evangelizing dream that he has said he shared with Pope Francis through the missions and a “fraternal and careful society of the house common”.
Already at the beginning of his sermon, the archbishop has appealed that currently “words, networks and screens are no longer a representation of reality, to become an instrument of the will to power or political correctness”.
Faced with this reality, based on a “dominant technocratic paradigm” and on a “nihilism” that advocates that “nothing makes sense”, Argüello has prescribed for humanity “an anthropology and a culture that match their projects”.
gender ideologies
In this same sense, he has questioned a society “at the same time libertine and puritanical in which there is no room for forgiveness”, in which “mismatches often appear in the form of hatred and violence”, in an environment of “stories marked by confrontation” and “power struggles that weaken the current institutional order and make it increasingly weak in the face of enormous economic powers”.
Argüello has charged against the “radical gender ideologies” that are “key” in a process of “destruction” and “deconstruction” of the person, through expressions of “fluid sex and gender”: “The body has to stop be a reference or limit in ideological proposals that have reached the parliaments to become new and demanding norms” with “suffocating proposals that want to regulate all aspects of life and consciousness”.
He has also expressed objection to the concept of “empowerment” that he observes in the “dominant culture”, which in the current context “accentuates a logic of confrontation” because “the other always appears as a potential threat or rival to develop the claimed power and never fully granted”, as opposed to what he has proposed a commitment to “promotion” and help each other.
