Catholicism, the historical rock of Spain, showed cracks and breaks this last few weeks. In this it displays some of the challenges faced by Churches during these years of a resurgent Ultra Right.
The Spanish Bishops’ Conference publicly criticized the efforts of the Ultra party VOX in Murcia to ban Muslims from celebrating public prayers or ceremonies in order to protect the heritage and traditions of Spain.
VOX then criticized the Church for its position on immigrants and accused it of timidity given how mired it is in the latest reports on sex abuse in the Church.
Now, the Archbishop of Tarragona, and president of the important Tarraconense Bishops Council, Joan Planellas, is striving to build a nuanced wall between the Church and the claims of the Nationalists of VOX while also providing pastoral council to the Catholic base of VOX, a group opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and increasingly to the immigration of Muslims which VOX paints as antithetical to Spanish traditions.
“A Xenophobe cannot be a true Christian,” Planellas strongly asserted. A true Christian must “love. To love deeply is the message of the gospel. To love your neighbor is to try to make others happy” in evident contrast with hatred of Muslim immigrants.
While he hoped to draw the distinction between ideas and the changes they take on when they become political slogans, the line between love and xenophobic hatred became the headline.
Within the Church the issue is not always so clear. El País reported that the Bishop of Asturias, for exsmple, called muslims “moritos”, a troubled and dismissive term. The Archbishop of Taragona insists this opinion is simply not in line with the majority of Spain’s Bishops. He asks political leaders to stop polarizing the issue of immigration lest it lead to problems such as in France.
Yet, Santiago Abascall, the head of VOX, sees an opening and is likely to continue to pick at it it for political advantage even if that means disagreeing with and challenging publicly Spain’s clerical hierarchy although with certain gentleness.
Behind this conflict is the old idea that Spain and Catholicism should fit together like hand and glove. In truth they never have, yet Spain has lived centuries of political and religious projects to make them so.
In the Franco period, the Church was one of the main props of the dictator’s state marginalizing the religious left from power in the Church and to innoculate Spanisard against cultural modernism.
After the coming of democracy. before the pederasty scandal, that alignment contributed to the Church’s loss of popular support. Within the Church, however, the political right and the support of the state have not always been accepted. The Church is a very complex and varied institution.
I am learning about Spain given my background as a Latin Americanist. Let me give some examples from there—especially since the contemporary nationalists, the Hispanists, insist that Spain’s American domains were never colonies but part of Spain and given that Spain and Latin America are historically interconnected over and over again.
In the sixteenth century, the Dominican Bishop of Chiapas, the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas, strongly and publicly criticized the colonial secular order and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. His suits ended up in the courts of Spain and have left a legacy, from within the Church of support for less privileged and non-Western people that still have an impact today.
Another more recent Dominican articulated the Theology of Liberation while a professor at Peru’s Catholic University, Gustavo Gutierrez. This movement took off, and not solely on the basis of his influential work, it gave a heart ache to the anti-Communist and hence anti-Left Pope John Paul and the Catholic right more generally including to Spain one of the major suppliers of clerics to Latin America.
Specifically, the Cardinal of Lima, Juan Luís Cipriani of the very powerful and very Spanish Opus Dei, saw Liberation Theology as a barbarism and attempted to destroy it. Father Gutierrez proved untouchable, in part because of the institutional separation of the Catholic University from the ordinary hierarchy of the Church. Gutierez survived until age took him, while Cipriani suffered a less fortunate demise.
The much celebrated Cardenal of Opus Dei, Cipriani, supported a very right wing religious organization that caused his downfall, the Sodalitium of Christian Life. It grew up among privileged young people in Lima and spread to become very powerful and numerous.
It was created by Luís Fernando Figari. among others, in 1971. Figari, though Peruvian, leaned strongly toward the Spanish Falange, the Fascists, and over the decades came to be taken as a charismatic and almost untouchable religious hero and political influence.
In El País, sociologist Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio wrote last year “My hypothesis is that the Sodlitium belongs to a political project. It is the resurrection of fascism in Latin America using the vertebral connections of the church.”
Figari’s power continued until the Vatican intervened and gave credit to reports of his sexual abuse of youths within the Sodalicio. Figari was not alone in this use of sexual power. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican did what had seemed impossible earlier. It closed Figari’s Sodalitium and excommunicated him. This was a double blow: both against pederasty and also against the powerful right wing of the Church.
While Opus Dei, founded in Spain by José María Escrivá may indeed maintain some untouchability, its first Cardinal, Cipriani, was undone by Sodalicio, and his years of creating enemies from his rabid capitalism and more general opposition to popular movements in society and in the Church.
Indeed Francis moved to bring Opus more directly under Vatican authority and reform it. Still, it and its related groups, is very strong among the American Catholic Right Wing, including the Supreme court and members of the Administration and congress. The US Catholic right has been a strong force of opposition to the reformist Francis as well as one of the most important supports for the regime of Donald Trump.
The Church, as led now by the Agustinian Pope Leo, faces this difficult political terrain of a still powerful Right Wing in the Church in the Americas and in Spain, while also containing a progressive Church.
VOX sees this and is, I believe, deliberately pounding crack lines in the Church it to see if it can splinter the left from the right and from Church legitimacy despite the Archbishop of Tarragona’s hasty denial of such a possibility. The hope for VOX would be for the right to gain ascendency within Spain and within the Church.
After all, Spain and Catholicism should go together, I expect he feels, like hand and glove which unity is supposed to be a key of Spanish tradition.
No comments:
Post a Comment