The Right and the Church, a Very Spanish Challenge

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.  

In these Times: Roses in Spain

A sign blocked my path as I was out walking this morning.  

Ask about “miguelitos de la rueda” it informed in loud letters. 

So, I opened the little grocery store, went to the register and asked the matronly woman with graying hair about them. 

I am out.  We won’t have any more until Friday.

Hum.  I had to ask what they were.

A donut sized bit of puff pastry filled with chocolate or cream,  They are from Madrid.

To my ears, that all sounded pretty ordinary but I can’t opine until I actually try them. Still, this reminded me of another sign I saw on my walk today. It simply said, the best cookies in Alicante. 

This one was in the door of a little cookie and coffee shop on a much frequented small street a block from the major Alfonso el Sabio Avenue. I know the people who own it and run it are from the US, the midwest, and used to celebrate that fact in their signage.  The man is large and bearded and often wears a full man-dress. 

To my tastes, their cookies are only so so, but without even remembering that, I thought “how would you guys even know yours’s are the best. Have  you tried all of them or did some one do a comparative taste and quality test.

Then I remembered how in the midwest it seems every small town claims to have the biggest or the best something or other as a draw to get people off the freeway. PR speak, the claims are their’s to make and no one should call them out to check on it, unless maybe its a neighboring town and they can make an event of it at, maybe, the state fair. 

Thinking about naming, advertising, and claiming, I remembered reading earlier about Spain's ultra party, the very right wing, authoritarian and nationalist VOX led by the apparently sleazy Santiago Abascal. He's from the Basque region, the industrial and Port city of Bilbao, specifically,  which claims the majestic Guggenheim. 

Abascal grew up during the time of guerrilla violence for Basque independence and in a city where I heard lots of basque spoken. 

In Utah, there are Basques, many who came to herd sheep and who stayed.  Last year at Salt lake’s Living Traditions festival I asked the delightful woman who was selling churros--pieces of extruded and fried dough--if many people still spoke Basque now that they have been in the Great Basin for a couple or three generations.  She insisted they do and that young people take classes in the language. 

A Spanish nationalist, whose history I only know from reading two or three newspaper articles and--gasp--Wikipedia, Abascal challenged Basque nationalism as a young man in the University. He argued instead that in Spain there should be only one language, Spanish (what many people here in Valencia call Castillian).

When asked about death threats he had received and whether he was afraid to continue arguing against the Basque guerrillas ETA and the Basque language as an official language of the Basque region, he boasted he was not afraid. 

Abascal, in both his corruption and presence seems like a macho in the Tumpian PR tradition. His image is of defiance. 

I further read that his party VOX is deliberately, as a strategy, attacking journalists. Activists have received recommendations from the party to look for when media journalists are in the middle of filming or broadcasting a live broadcast. They should seek the right moment, interrupt, and knock the microphone out of the journalists' hands, as Spaniards are growing accustomed to seeing. 

The strategic point, evidently, is to challenge the idea of press neutrality while breaking even constitutional protections of a free press. They claim you can only know the truth from within their party and their party's media and channels. 

Note, I actually wrote the meta point but remembered that Zuckerberg has claimed this useful word as the name of his business, one that supersedes his Facebook and Instagram. Sigh, he has made this term private and indeed protected by law. Even in legitimate external usage, such as I was going to write, where the term means that which is above, Zuckerberg’s oligarchic power can be felt. 

He is in the news this days for removing fact checking from Face book, allowing people to say what they wish. He along with Musk of Once-Twitter, now X, are indirectly claiming truth is related to power and not to facts. 

This is the marketing of we are number one, or America f… yeah! Even facts become suspect in this powerful and possibly proprietary speech. 

The residue of arguments like these--in the dictatorial antecedents of VOX, the Franco regime’s tactics as dictator and even during the Spanish civil war--are marked in the streets and soil of Alicante. Monuments to martyrs murdered by the fascists are found, such as in the middle of the Dr. Gadea Avenue or to the side of the Seneca Plaza, and so on. You can also visit bomb shelters set up to protect the population from Facist air raids. 

I can only imagine the fights advocates had to get these recognitions on buildings, in parks, and in streets. Even today, fifty years afterwards, there is still resistance to recognition of the Republic and its martyrs. 

I guess the poetry of Shakespeare from another time, retelling a story of the Italian Renaissance would be false.

 A rose, by any other name, would not smell as sweet. 

The name, it seems, should make the rose and not the petals, the thorns, or the perfume. 

Let me end by actually citing from Mr Shakespeare Juliet’s challenge to hereditary authority--such as Mr Abascal likes or even the Great Man Randian authority preferred by Messrs Musk and Zukerberg .

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. 

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection…without that title...