Spanish prosecutors probe Bishop José Ignacio Munilla for alleged anti-LGBT hate crime over radio remarks criticizing conversion therapy bans.
Newsroom (21/11/2025 Gaudium Press ) The Spanish state has officially declared war on the Catholic Church’s sexual teaching. The national Hate Crimes and Discrimination Prosecutor’s Office – the same unit that has spent years hunting “homophobic” priests – has opened formal criminal proceedings against Bishop José Ignacio Munilla, 63, for the outrageous act of explaining on a Catholic radio station why the Church accompanies people with same-sex attraction who freely ask to live in chastity.
The “crime”? Criticizing the Orwellian laws that brand any voluntary spiritual or psychological help offered to homosexuals as forbidden “conversion therapy” – while the same regime pumps taxpayer millions into puberty blockers and mastectomies for confused teenagers.
The denunciation was cooked up in July by an obscure Alicante activist outfit calling itself “Tu pueblo y el mío” (“Your Town and Mine”). Their 27-page complaint zeroes in on an 18-minute segment of the 3 May 2024 Radio María program Sexto Continente, quoting the bishop verbatim:
«Today any psychologist who, at the explicit and free request of an adult, helps him redirect his homosexual inclinations faces ruinous fines or prison. The instant a priest offers the exact same spiritual direction for chastity that we give to every other Christian, the rainbow police scream “conversion therapy!”»
Munilla went on to expose the grotesque double standard now enshrined in law: the Spanish state celebrates “gender-affirming” hormones and surgeries (even on minors), yet threatens jail for any professional who dares assist an adult who wants to align his life with two thousand years of Christian anthropology.
Because the program was broadcast from Madrid, the file bounced from Alicante to the capital and landed on the desk of the national Hate Crimes unit – the ideological shock troops who have made a cottage industry of dragging bishops and priests through the courts.
As of today, Bishop Munilla has received exactly zero official notifications. He found out the state is investigating him for hate speech the same way the rest of Spain did: when activist-friendly media splashed the story across front pages this week.
His response was volcanic.
“Obviously this has no legal basis whatsoever and only seeks to intimidate the Church so that it does not dare to preach the Good News of Christian love, in order to impose on the whole of society a state anthropology based on gender-LGBT ideology.”
He then demolished the accusation in four devastating points:
- He never attacked LGTBI persons – he attacked totalitarian laws. If criticizing legislation is now a hate crime, half of Congress should be in the dock for voting against those same laws.
- The same ideologues who shriek about “bodily autonomy” when cutting off healthy breasts cheer when the state bans adults from seeking help to live according to their faith.
- The Church will never stop proclaiming the Gospel of chastity and accompanying – with full respect for freedom – anyone who asks for help.
- The fact that no judge has bothered to notify him months after the complaint was filed proves this is a media lynching, not a serious judicial process.
This is hardly the first time Spain’s rainbow commissars have gone bishop-hunting:
- Archbishop Juan Antonio Reig Pla (Alcalá) – dragged before prosecutors three separate times
- Archbishop Javier Martínez (Granada) – 2022
- Priests in Valencia, Toledo, Getafe, and beyond – all for the sin of repeating what the Catechism says about homosexuality
Every single previous case was eventually archived for lack of crime. But the point was never conviction; it was intimidation. Force the Church to self-censor or face years of legal harassment and public vilification.
Legal observers on the left insist that any ecclesiastical speech that “delegitimizes” LGTBI identities automatically qualifies as hate speech under Article 510 of the Penal Code. Traditionalist jurists retort that Spain is shredding Articles 16 (religious freedom) and 20 (free speech) of its own Constitution – and trampling European Court of Human Rights precedents that explicitly protect the right of religious communities to teach doctrine that clashes with secular fashions.
The file now sits with the Madrid Hate Crimes prosecution squad. Within weeks they will decide whether to bury it quietly (as always) or escalate the persecution.
Meanwhile, one of Spain’s most fearless bishops is under criminal investigation for the crime of believing – and saying out loud – that chastity is a path to holiness open to every human being, gay or straight. In the Spain of 2025, that appears to be a thought crime too far.
The Gospel, Bishop Munilla promised, “will continue to be proclaimed – with or without permission from the gender ideology police.”
- Raju Hasmukh with files form Infocatholica
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