February 19, 2024 / 08:49 AM
This Saturday, February 17, the Bishop Emeritus of San Sebastián, Mons. Juan María Uriarte, whose actions and pastoral positions on ETA terrorism were controversial, died at the age of 90 in Bilbao (Spain).
Ordained a priest in July 1957, in 1976 he achieved episcopal dignity as Auxiliary Bishop of Bilbao, a diocese in which he remained until 1991, when he was commissioned to assume the Bishopric of Zamora. Nine years later, in January 2000, he took the reins of the Diocese of San Sebastián for almost a decade, until Pope Benedict XVI accepted his resignation for reasons of age in 2009.
In the early years of the 1980s, when the terrorist group ETA murdered one or two people a week, Bishop Uriarte, then in Bilbao, condemned these acts. He also criticized the response outside the law through the so-called Antiterrorist Liberation Groups (GAL) that operated during the first government of socialist Felipe González.