There is a temptation, in seasons of alarm, to mistake vigilance for virtue. The two are related, as cousins are related; they are not the same, and the confusion of them has cost the Church — and the Kingdom — more than one generation of her better instincts.

Vigilance is the ordering of the door: who comes in, who is turned away, whose papers are in order, whose are not. It is proper to the state, and in its proper place it protects the weak. Charity begins where vigilance ends. Charity is the cup of water that passes through the door after the papers have been checked, and passes again when the papers are wanting, because the thirst is the same in both hands.

This week the Kingdom has been vigilant. The port physicians have done their work; the Council has sat in emergency session; the Ministry has spoken in the measured cadences that measured men prefer. I have praised the swift and measured response, and I praise it again. It is not nothing to order a door well.

But we have also buried three of the boarding team of the Estrella de Llevant, and we have eleven injured of the Passeig, and we have three correspondents of whom we have heard nothing for nine days. The offertory on Sunday will name them. It will also name the seven contacts of the Poniente, who are not yet ill, and the one in isolation, who may not become so. The naming is the work. When a name is spoken at the altar, the door of vigilance has been passed through; what waits on the other side is the cup.

I have been asked, in recent days, whether the Church ought to speak more loudly on the fuel vote, on the corridor, on the tariff. I have not, and I will not. The Church's voice in the Chamber is the voice of her citizens, who are many and variously minded; her voice at the altar is her own, and it is for the naming. To confuse the two is a clerical vanity, and I have been guilty of it before, and I hope not to be guilty of it again.

One last thought, for the season. The patience of the sea is not the patience of the shore. The shore waits for the tide; the sea does not wait at all. We who live between them are asked, in contagious seasons as in calm ones, to keep the door well and to pass the cup often, and to know, when we speak, which of the two we are doing.

— Esteban, Cardinal Marín, Primate of the Almarian Church