Guest Post by Morbo
I don’t know much about Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain, but he must be doing something right because a Catholic bishop is very angry at him.
“If Zapatero wants to become Caligula, it’s up to him,” Bishop Antonio Algora told reporters last month. The bishop is ticked off because Zapatero pushed for legalizing gay marriage.
Now come on! Caligula? That’s really going too far. As far as I know, Zapatero hasn’t tried to put his horse in the Senate, and he’s not having sex with his sisters.
Yet I can understand Algora’s frustration. The ground is shifting beneath his clerical robes, and he is powerless to stop it. I find the situation of the Catholic Church in much of Europe to be highly amusing. For centuries, church lived well on government subsidies and basically ran everyone’s life. There was a time when you didn’t dare oppose the bishops — unfortunately, that time was the 14th Century. These days, the church still gets government subsidies in many European nations but no longer runs people’s lives. Folks just don’t want to listen to the bishops any more.
Of course, everyone continues to respect the church as a traditional institution. That’s actually part of the problem. People in Spain respect the church like you would you respect your grandfather. You’d never diss him to his face, but that doesn’t mean you’ll do what he tells you to. After all, he’s kind of a crank, right?
The times are changing, and the church is flummoxed.
As the Washington Post reported recently:
Shortly after his election in 2004, Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero ended a quarter-century of cozy church-state relations by blocking mandatory religious classes in public schools. He then took wider aim, saying his government would relax abortion laws, ease restrictions on divorce, legalize gay marriage and permit gay couples to adopt children.
The Post quoted government spokesman Fernando Moraleda, who said, “This is a government that is deeply secular and reform-oriented. We can’t allow Catholic doctrine to be superior to the government and the government’s legitimacy.”
About 80 percent of the Spanish population is at least nominally Catholic, and the church receives $3.9 billion every year in government financing. Even that may change. Moraleda remarked, “The Spanish church should start a trend toward self-financing. It’s the best-treated church in Europe.”
It makes perfect sense to me. The government wants to get out of the religion business, and Spanish bishops are angry anyway because Zapatero’s government is pro-gay rights, pro-legal abortion and overall too liberal. What better way for the Spanish bishops to express their displeasure than to swear off funding from such a nasty government? They shouldn’t take a dime of that tainted money.
Once free from the state, the church could focus more of its energy on moral suasion as opposed to whining. Polls show that two-thirds of Spaniards agree with the decision to legalize same-sex marriage. How did that happen in a traditionally Catholic nation? Perhaps somewhere along the way the church got so used to living well on government handouts and so accustomed to having the use of state resources to force people to abide by its beliefs that it forgot how to convince people to adopt them voluntarily.
The Spanish church needs to understand that the days of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (whom, I understand, is still dead) are long gone. It’s time for the church to grow up, get out of the house and live independently. Bravo to Zapatero for showing the bishops the door.
I can only applaud recent trends in Spain and look at the situation there with longing — separation of church and state and secular government. If only we could get that here!