CNS STORY: Three minutes changed Spain's history, church-state relations

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CNS Story:

SPAIN-CHURCH Mar-11-2005 (840 words) Backgrounder and analysis. With photo. xxxi

Three minutes changed Spain's history, church-state relations

By Julius Purcell
Catholic News Service

BARCELONA, Spain (CNS) -- The course of Spanish history changed in just three minutes in the early morning of March 11, 2004, the day known by Spaniards as "11-M."

This was the time it took for all 10 al-Qaida bombs to explode on rush-hour trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and triggering the series of political events that led, three days later, to the surprise election defeat of the Conservative government by the Socialists.

Aside from the vanquished Conservatives, the Spanish institution most affected since the arrival of the Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been the Catholic Church.

In the year since "11-M" and the subsequent change in government, Cardinal Antonio Rouco Varela of Madrid has led the church into a battle with Zapatero over his government's plans for radical social reforms.

But Cardinal Rouco's loss of the bishops' conference presidency in March suggests to some analysts that not all bishops have been happy with his style or the Spanish church's direction over the last year.

Supported by Pope John Paul II, who in January said the Spanish government's secularist policies could threaten religious freedom, Cardinal Rouco spent the last 12 months organizing information campaigns against the government's plans to legalize gay marriage, allow scientific research on embryos, and relax abortion and divorce laws.

Cardinal Rouco certainly scored a hit on the issue of Catholic education, which the government wants to remove from the compulsory school curriculum. In a move that suggested the government was out of step with public opinion, Catholic organizations collected more than 3 million signatures from parents opposing the legislation. The bishops claim that some 80 percent of parents support the church's position.

But there also has been bad news for Cardinal Rouco. Over the past year, a report has shown that the percentage of young Spaniards who attend Mass has nearly halved in four years, from 28 percent in 2000 to just more than 14 percent in 2004. The Spanish church is also dogged by a poor record of trust: Two-thirds of Spaniards polled in the last 12 months regard the church as an "untrustworthy institution."

But while such Spaniards tend to see the church as monolithic, some say that unity among the bishops is not as clear-cut as it might seem.

On March 8, three days before the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Cardinal Rouco failed to be re-elected for a third term as head of the bishops' conference.

If this was something of a surprise, so, too, was his replacement. Bishop Ricardo Blazquez Perez of the Basque Diocese of Bilbao was handed a narrow victory by a voting block of Catalan and Basque bishops. The vote suggests that these regionalist bishops were unhappy with Cardinal Rouco's strong line against attempts by Basque and Catalan politicians to win greater autonomy from Madrid.

Bishop Blazquez is noted for his tact and diplomacy in working with fellow Basque clergy to unite against Basque extremism. While it is just these qualities that will serve him well in the ongoing wrangles with the government, some church watchers say that his victory has revealed how split the bishops have become over the way to deal with Zapatero.

Antonio Duato Gomez-Novella, editor of the Spanish theology journal, Iglesia Viva, told Catholic News Service that "ultraconservative" candidates had secured almost as many votes as the "more moderate" Bishop Blazquez.

"The bishops' conference has been divided down the middle into a moderate sector and a sector that is ultraconservative," the editor said.

He provided a stark diagnosis of the Spanish church's state of health one year after the Socialists' victory.

"Its unresolved problem is in accepting modernity. The Spanish church took an important step forward during Spain's transition to democracy in the 1980s ... but a sector has since grown within the bishops' conference that rejects any change at all."

Eulogio Lopez, director of the Catholic think tank Hispanidad, agrees that the Spanish church is divided.

"But it is not the bishops who are divided. It is divided between other members of the clergy -- those who are faithful to Rome and those who are unfaithful," he told CNS.

Lopez dismissed as "ridiculous" the notion of a split among the bishops, attributing Bishop Blazquez's election to the bishops' respect for democratic processes.

This he contrasted with the attitude of government officials, "who continually refuse to take notice of the more than 3 million signatures of parents who support Catholic education."

Bishop Blazquez's first task at the helm of the Spanish Catholic Church may seem uncontroversial enough -- to participate in acts to remember the 191 victims of the Madrid bombings. But prior to the March 11 anniversary, some families of victims had objected to any Catholic tone in the ceremony, including the pealing of church bells.

It is a sign of the difficulties this once all-powerful institution now faces in wider Spanish society. The new conference president will need all his famed gifts of diplomacy to resolve those difficulties.

END

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