By AC GRAYLING, GUARDIAN
Added: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Linda Ward Selbie for the link.

Reposted from:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2007/11/rome_playing_politics.html

The Vatican is doing its utmost to frustrate him, but the Spanish PM's reforms are marching on, and they're going to be taught in schools.

Those who are indifferent to, or sceptical about, the degree to which the churches still work to exercise political influence need only look at the unsubtle battle that the Catholic church is at this moment waging against the Spanish government.

Spain's prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero has instituted a bold reforming agenda in his country, diluting church-state ties, ending direct government subsidy to the church, introducing same-sex marriage, easing divorce laws, and encouraging greater participation and opportunities for women in Spain's society and economy. He has also openly condemned the fascist Franco regime and honoured those who resisted it, something that beforehand was regarded in his country as too contentious and divisive to attempt.

None of this pleases the Catholic church either in Spain itself or in the Vatican, showing by this (if iterated showing were needed) the reactionary, rightwing, backward colouration of church politics. In a deliberate and crude gesture of opposition to Zapatero, the Vatican has conducted its largest ever mass beatification, honouring 498 pro-Franco "victims of religious persecution" during the Spanish Civil War. Those victims were fascists and their church supporters, and included 7000 members of the Catholic clergy killed between 1931 and 1939 in an uprising against the staggering oppression by church and state that had kept the population poor, benighted, ignorant, trapped, exploited and suffering. Look at most Catholic countries until the 1960s and beyond, in South America or Ireland or Spain: the picture of the social, political and economic effects of Catholicism is in its essentials the same. Women enslaved to child-bearing, over-large families perpetuating ignorance and poverty, backward social policies and the iron grip of a clergy acting like the Stasi in controlling the minutiae of private lives through the confessional and the influence of fear - fear of hell, among other things. The small and in the end ineffectual "liberation theology" rebellion among some South American clergy was quashed by the church hierarchy, not interested in salvation for anyone in this life except for the church itself as an institution whose principal aim, like the politburo of the Chinese Communist party, is to stay in control at any cost.

The savagery of 1930s anticlericalism in Spain, with its deplorable murders and violence, is a mark of how bitterly the oppression was felt. Anticlericalism had been running strongly in Catholic Europe ever since the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, when priests did the murdering, and Spain was not the only example of an anger-prompted murderous response to priestly oppression. Some might think that murder by priests is worse than murder of priests because priests are most particularly not supposed to murder, and if murdered (in the right circumstances, that is; not in bed with their mistresses or - more usually of late - choirboys) can claim martyrdom. But obviously murder by anyone of anyone is flatly wrong, and the Spanish revolution of the 1930s would have been better effected, per impossibile, without the mayhem. Anger towards the church explains but does not excuse the violence unleashed on it; from this perspective of history, the reason why the church provoked such violence is the significant point.

Typically, learning nothing from this history, the Catholic church is trying its same tricks again, though beatifying Franco fascists as a way of rousing opposition to Zapatero's liberal policies is an uncharacteristically crude way of doing it.

The immediate reason for the Church's action is that in Spain's schools this autumn new civics courses are beginning, explaining and discussing the Spanish constitution and the rights of the citizen. Because of what the constitution accords to gay people and women, the church is bitterly opposed to it, and to children knowing about it. The Catholic nun who is the church's liaison to the education ministry in Madrid told the press that the new civics course is "a frontal assault on the Catholic religion" and "part of a clear persecution...of the Catholic faith". One's response to her first complaint is "good," and to the second, "so: a bit of your own medicine; and salutary medicine at that - for everyone else".

The Catholic right in Spain, with Vatican assistance, is determined to recapture influence for the church and thereby to reverse the social gains that Spain has made under Zapatero's premiership. Their hopes are high; by law Catholicism is still taught in Spain's schools (though this has to be a target for Zapatero reforms too) and the church remains a large presence in the country and its life. So the battle lines are drawn, and one of the last major conflicts of the Counter-Reformation appears ready to be played out there, as if in a corrida between the future and the past, freedom and oppression, sanity and superstition - or, to put the matter more graphically perhaps, between matador Zapatero and a load of bull.

TAGGED: POLITICS, RELIGION