Ever since the election of a socialist government in Spain in March 2004, this increasingly secular country has found itself on a collision course with the Catholic Church.
For a start, the new prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, became the first Spanish leader to swear his oath of office not on the Bible but on the Spanish constitution. His first cabinet—widely lauded for containing equal numbers of men and women—was similarly secular in orientation, reportedly containing just one practising Catholic out of 16 members.
However, what has drawn church and state into open conflict is the new government’s ambitious agenda of social reforms, a liberalising program encompassing laws relating to euthanasia, abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research for therapeutic purposes and plans to make religious education a voluntary subject in state schools.
That Spain is a Catholic country is something of an article of faith for the Catholic hierarchy. Indeed, without the unifying power of Catholicism, Spain might never have existed. In 1492, the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula. They did so by drawing together disparate regions and peoples, each with their own distinct history and united only by a common faith. Thereafter, Spain’s Catholic identity was secured, in large part because the reign of terror of the Inquisition drove adherents of other faiths to either flee the country or convert.
Under General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until 1975, the Catholic Church was an essential pillar of his power. As long as Franco paid lip service to the Church’s primacy in Spanish national life, the Church provided him with critical legitimacy.
The church’s support for the dictator did diminish during the later years of his rule as Franco’s repression of opposition spiralled out of control. Nonetheless, at Franco’s funeral in 1975 Cardinal Marcelo Gonzalez, then Bishop of Toledo and head of the Catholic Church in Spain, delivered the homily, in which he spoke of ‘the shining light of gratitude for the immense legacy’ that Franco bequeathed to ‘Christian civilisation, without which freedom is but a chimera’.
The Spanish Church, led by Cardinal Marcelo Gonzalez, even opposed Spain’s 1978 democratic constitution on the grounds that it failed to acknowledge the sovereignty of God and opened the path to divorce, birth control and a host of other social evils.
Although more than 80 per cent of Spaniards remain nominally Catholic, the Church’s influence