The Bishop, The Politicians And The Gays

If you fancy being a bishop, then having a Christian name of Jesús is probably no great disadvantage. And so it is with the Bishop of Mallorca, Jesús Murgui. But neither his status as bishop nor his Christological appellation absolve him from criticism; he gets it in not inconsiderable amounts.

Jesús Murgui became bishop in 2004, succeeding Teodor Úbeda, who had been Mallorca’s bishop for 30 years and who had cultivated a reputation for being progressive. It is a reputation that Monseñor Murgui appears not to share. He is said to be a confederate of the archbishops of Madrid and Barcelona and formerly of the late archbishop of Valencia (Agustín García-Gasco who died in May); these three archbishops have been described as the most reactionary and conservative in the Spanish church.

Monseñor Murgui has another type of reputation, a less than wonderful one among the local Spanish media and also among his own priests.

When the press claims that a typical reaction towards the bishop among Mallorcan clergy is one of sarcasm, this may well serve the press’s agenda. Sections of the media are suspicious of him, to the point of being antagonistic. And partly, this is because he never speaks to them. In his seven years as bishop, he has given not one interview to the press. Where his reticence is excused, it is not on the grounds of shyness, but on a wish to avoid getting too political.

The problem for the bishop, though, is that, despite his reluctance to engage with the media, his views are known and they are political (in the current social climate of Spain), while he represents an institution, the Catholic Church, which is anything but indifferent to politics.

The First Estate of the Catholic Church is heavily politicised and seeks to influence the political process, and this is especially so in Spain, despite Roman Catholicism having been abandoned as the official religion and despite also a dramatic fall in church-going. It is this seeking of influence that makes the Fourth Estate of the press so ready to leap onto what emanates from the Church. And much has been emanating, much that will be espoused from pulpits this weekend.

The Spanish Episcopal Conference, its president is Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, the Archbishop of Madrid, has recently met. As is customary prior to a national election, it has had something to say for itself, as has Monseñor Murgui. There is little difference between the sentiments of the Conference and those of the bishop, which are being shared with the faithful, three weeks or so before the election.

It will come as no surprise that the bishop is not exactly supportive of issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but what has really stirred things up is that his letter, due to be read out in churches on the island, points to the “danger” of voting for politicians who support gay marriage and to “impositions” by the State. By politicians, he really means political parties, and by implication he lends his support firmly to one party – the Partido Popular.

The PP doesn’t need the Church’s support to win the election. Though as a party it is identified closely with the Church, it would probably prefer that the bishop, and the Episcopal Conference, in fact kept quiet. Social issues are unlikely to be prominent at hustings for an election that is all about Spain’s economy, but they may not be overlooked by much of an electorate which, dissatisfied with PSOE’s handling of the economy, has nevertheless broadly agreed with its social policies and with its attitude towards the Church.

For example, an investigation last year by the Mallorcan research organisation Gadeso into religious attitudes found that a majority between the ages of 16 and 59 supported gay marriage. A surprisingly high 35% of those over the age of 60 also supported it. The Church is out of step with social attitudes, just as it has become increasingly out of step with society as a whole and offers waning influence.

One suspects, however, that it sees the election of a PP government as a chance to grab back some influence, hence its pronouncements ahead of the election. For the PP though, it would be a huge mistake if it were to try and turn the clock back. There are unquestionably elements within the PP who would want to do just that, and there is always the suspicion that lurking somewhere in its background is the influence of the mysterious Opus Dei. But as a government it will have enough on its plate without seeking to send Spain back to a reactionary age.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Losing Their Religion: Attitudes towards the Church

The Fundación Gadeso is probably an organisation you are unfamiliar with. But much of the information about social and economic issues in Mallorca comes from the foundation.

Gadeso (Gabinete de Estudios Sociales – office of social studies) was formed in 1975 and became a foundation in 2002. It has been an important source of monitoring social and economic activity since the collapse of the Franco regime. It is an uncontroversial organisation, but it does consider controversial issues, such as corruption. One of the few links from its website – http://www.gadeso.org – is to a blog called the observatory of corruption which lists everything that is currently happening in respect of corruption allegations in Mallorca.

Also on its website there is, at present, a reader poll inviting responses to the significance of Christmas. The possibilities range from a religious festival to signifying nothing. Gadeso has just undertaken a survey of religious attitudes in the Balearics. This survey, unsurprisingly enough, finds a divergence in opinion across age groups, but it is one, were attitudes not to change as Balearic youth enters adulthood, which highlights the waning dominance of Catholic religious orthodoxy: well under a half of those in the 16-20 age group say they are believers.

Religious belief is one thing, another is the attitude towards issues with a religious dimension. On every issue, a majority of the youth group agrees with divorce, sex outside marriage, passive euthanasia (meaning the refusal or withdrawal of treatment), gay marriage and adoption, and abortion. Only one of these issues, divorce, gets almost unanimous support across different age ranges, but there is a further, more obscure issue which receives very little support, regardless of age. A mere 27% of all those surveyed agree with the system of financing the Catholic Church.

In theory, the Church is meant to depend upon funding through the tax system, i.e. from a percentage of income tax that taxpayers opt to donate to the Church (0.7%). It does of course have sizable assets, being the second largest land and property owner after the state, but its, if you like, working capital comes from this percentage. Or does it?

As long ago as 1987, when the so-called “church tax” was introduced, the Church agreed to be self-financing within three years. It never happened. In 2006 the Zapatero administration announced, belatedly perhaps, that government subsidy of the Church would come to an end, but that the Church would benefit from an increase in the tax to the current level, so it was still not to be self-financing.

Another research organisation, the nationwide Europa Laica (Secular Europe), estimated last year that the Church receives, via different means, some six billion euros of funds from different governmental bodies. The organisation supplied a caveat to its estimate, owing to what was described as a lack of transparency on behalf of both the Church and the government. But its estimate included 3.8 billion euros for private schools that follow the national curriculum and which have Catholic religious education. It also included some 100 million euros that came from taxpayers who had opted not to pay the church tax but to divert the money for social and charitable purposes; there are a large number of Catholic charities. There was also the matter of some 900 million euros of lost tax income because of exemptions.

On this latter point, however, there may well now be a tightening of the tax noose. Three parish churches, those of Son Servera, Felanitx and Pollensa, were recently presented with a combined IVA (VAT) bill of 344,000 euros for building works, following a decision by the Balearics’ Supreme Court.

What this all suggests though is that, despite other confrontations with the Church, the Zapatero government hasn’t been as aggressive when it comes to funding. The implication of the Gadeso survey, however, is that perhaps it should have been. Whether it has the opportunity to be so in the future depends upon whether there is a future. The Partido Popular (PP) has vowed to turn back the secularism of Zapatero, and this may also include instituting a more favourable financial regime.

Though the Gadeso survey reveals differing attitudes among age groups, they show broad support for many of the government’s social policies in the Balearics and echo support elsewhere in Spain. Gadeso is important in that it acts as a barometer of attitudes. Politicians, especially those from the PP, might do well to take some notice of them.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

These Words: The Pope and Spanish secularism

The Pope’s favourite two words. Aggressive and secularism. Combined, they come out like a knocking-copy comparative advertising slogan. Marketing people know of the dangers of knocking the competition. The Pope should know of the dangers as well.

The Pope levelled the aggressive secularism charge against Britain. He has now done so as well in Spain. It’s one that carries more weight in a Catholic country, more so than it did in Britain where it should have been shrugged off with a so-what.

The charge carries weight and danger because it is an overtly political statement, one that is explicit in its criticism of the socially liberal, anti-Church policies of the current Zapatero government. The danger is immense. While it may be a reassuring message for a moderate Catholic right, there exist more extreme elements. The added danger of the Pope’s words can be seen in the context of his expression of contemporary secularism. He compared this to the “strong and aggressive (that word again) anti-clericalism” of the 1930s.

Playing the ’30s card resonates with all manner of alarm bells. The anti-clericalism of that time was just one factor that contributed to the rise of Nationalism and of Franco. And strict Catholic orthodoxy was to become an important strand of Francoism.

The Pope is referring to the efforts of the Second Republic from 1931 to undermine the privileged position of the Catholic Church and to introduce reforms such as secular education. The circumstances are nowadays quite different, with regard especially to education. They also differ dramatically in another way. The Republic attempted to address social problems and issues in the first part of the 1930s, but did so against a background of what was a shaky political structure. This is not the case today.

It was the apparent persecution of the Church by Republican constitutional change that was to become a theme of the political and then military struggles of the 1930s. To draw a comparison with anti-clericalism and secularism then and now is not completely without foundation, given the emergence of policies related to abortion, divorce and homosexuality. But the dynamics are very different, as indeed are the issues.

A generation or more has grown up knowing both increased secularism and democratic stability. The Church’s influence has been reduced significantly in a country where only around a seventh of the population now attends mass regularly. And education, one of the battlegrounds of the ’30s, is a further factor in a society that now enjoys better standards of education than before. The Pope might reflect on the fact that the reinstatement of the Jesuits under the Nationalists, alongside the Falange’s control of universities, did not contribute to making a population that much better educated than it was in the ’30s. It certainly did nothing for anything that might have approximated to a liberal educational tradition. Which was really the point of the Church’s opposition to anti-clericalism under the Republicans. And remains so today.

One of the great ironies of Spain and of all the problems it faced from the nineteenth century until Franco died is that Spain gave the world the concept of liberalism. It has taken an enormously long time from its inception as an ideal in the early 1800s for it to have finally taken hold in Spain. The word and the concept have come to be wrongly abused, hijacked by a right wing that has misappropriated it through – further irony – its own politically correct dogma. In today’s Spain liberalism is portrayed, by the Catholic right, as the creation of what it sees as social evils. But this is a stance unshared by and rejected by a majority of the population.

For the Pope, there is more history. It is that of Spain at the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, when Spain was the perfect example of a Catholic “state” and, moreover, was crucial to Catholic imperialism. For the Vatican, there is much riding on Spain’s ongoing Catholicism, but much which is historical symbolism. The danger in what the Pope has said lies in stirring up that symbolism and giving it political succour. Whether aggressive or not, secularism – and liberalism – have come to define Spanish society. That of today. And it’s only taken a couple of hundred years for it to get there.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Losing Their Religion – religious study in Mallorca

Good news for Mallorcan agnostics. Religious education is less popular than it was. The Balearics have fewer students taking religion than any other autonomous region in Spain. And for religion, read Catholicism. There is a vast discrepancy between private and public educational institutions and between primary, secondary and the higher level of the Baccalaureate, but the trend for religious education is downwards. Less than 15% of those in public secondary schools undertake such study.

There are various reasons being advanced as to this growing irreligiousness among the youth of Mallorca and the islands, such as other courses and a growing cosmopolitan population, but the findings of the ministry of education seem indisputable – religion, Catholicism, is in retreat, at secondary school anyway.

Is this so surprising? Why the Balearics might be less religious than elsewhere is curious, but the islands are subject to the same dynamics as elsewhere in Spain, these dynamics – for the young – being what you might expect: youth culture, normal adolescent rebellion, and the like. The findings might be good news for agnostics, but they don’t necessarily mean that religion and Catholicism are in a freefall of disinterest. However, there are other dynamics, not least of which are political. Spain, and the Balearics, have been kicked into greater secularism on the back of social reforms, those that have caused outrage among the conservative, Catholic right – itself a natural target of rejection for the young. These reforms – liberalised abortion, gay rights, easier divorce, assisted suicide (possibly) – sit unwell with that conservativism, but they are in tune with a modern societal impulse propelled by the Zapatero administration which has, some say, been hell-bent on a collision course with the Church.

While attitudes of the young may well continue into adulthood, there is – perhaps – one factor that endures and which favours an essential religiosity, and that it is the family. Religious studies may be in decline, but the traditions that surround families’ rites of passage – from baptism through the communion to marriage – do not necessarily show signs of being undermined. Nor does the power of the family, despite the liberality of gay marriage or termination.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that strong criticism is reserved for the Church, especially among younger Mallorcans, those into adulthood. It is seen as an obstacle and even anachronistic. It has also, thanks to the publicity surrounding the law of historic memory and the rejection of all things Franco, been exposed – for many – as a reactionary force, supporting nationalism and authoritarianism during the Civil War and its aftermath.

For outside observers, such as myself, one from an irreligious background, the trappings of some local religion seem bizarre, such as the zeal of aspirants to the role of Santa Margalida’s Beata, young-ish girls lining up for a public, fiesta statement of modern-day sainthood and devil rejection. It’s easy to see such a tradition as oddly quaint, but tradition does still pervade – up to a point. The fiesta, and its religious basis, has undergone a transformation. There is a debate in Palma regarding the San Sebastià fiesta – whether it should actually be held in summer, rather than winter, and also whether it has gone too far in the direction of being some youth-fest of rock bands and DJs. For the Mallorcan young, many of them, fiesta is not a religious celebration, but an opportunity to get off their face and to dance to the pagan of the turntable and mix. Ironic, but the religious justification of the fiesta in its current-day party guise may have actually done as much, if not more, than Spanish politics to have diminished religious studies and religion – period.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Matters Of Life And Death

The anti-abortion rally that took place in Madrid on Saturday attracted, depending on whose figures you believe, anything between a quarter of a million and a million and a half demonstrators. The rally, as much as it was a pro-life proclamation, was also a direct attack against the liberal social policies of the Zapatero government. Since taking office, Sr. Zapatero’s socialist administration has sought to slacken the shackles of conservative Catholicism by, for example, legalising gay marriage and now seeking to introduce abortion on demand and, moreover, abortion for 16 and 17-year old girls without their having to gain parental consent. Until now, abortion has been sanctioned only in extenuating circumstances, but it has also not been unknown, under these circumstances, for termination to be performed as late as eight months. The most usual justification has been the psychological or physical risk to the mother. The government wishes to see abortion on demand up to 14 weeks and no later than 22 weeks in certain instances.

 

As ever, this is a tough issue. The conservatism of the Catholic right makes it an even tougher one in Spain. The Zapatero government has sought to take on this conservatism – it is, perhaps, the single most important socio-political question that the country faces. Yet the power of the church has waned. Less than 20 per cent of the population now attends church on a regular basis. There are those who will quite openly denounce the obstructiveness of the church, while there are also those with memories of the church’s role in the Franco era. 

 

Nevertheless, abortion is a subject that goes beyond either religion or politics. It is, or should be, a moral issue, divorced from religious doctrine or political dogma. Personally, I struggle with it. Like, I would imagine, most people, I abhor the notion of abortion, but the moral argument goes further than the rights of the unborn child. Also like many people, I have had experience of abortion, if not directly but through the experiences of friends, such as one who terminated her pregnancy because the baby would have been born with Down’s Syndrome. I also know people with Down’s children, but was she wrong to have terminated? I don’t believe she was. And one edges into the quality-of-life question. It is tough, and no-one can say that it isn’t.

 

If abortion is a morally tough call, there is less agonising when it comes to assisted suicide. Or, put it this way, I do not have a moral struggle with it. This is also something that the Spanish are toying with. But it has been nuanced as a political issue, quite inappropriately in my opinion. In September last year, the health minister stated that a decision to opt for assisted suicide was in line with socialist ideology. The argument is laughable. The avoidance of “unnecessary suffering”, the more humane justification that the ministry has proposed, is the key and not dogma.

 

I know someone who has a highly aggressive form of multiple sclerosis**. I will not name her, but there are many in Alcúdia and around who will know who she is. The disease has progressed rapidly; total incapacity and loss of control of functions are inevitable. There is no cure of course. Let me stress that I am not for one moment suggesting that assisted suicide is a solution that has been mentioned in her case. But it should surely be an option were she, or anyone else with such an awful condition to consider it, just as Debbie Purdy – also an MS sufferer – has fought for it to be in the UK. Any change to Spanish law to permit assisted suicide has yet to be agreed, but it is on the table. They should do it. 

 

Inevitably, as with abortion, the assisted suicide argument runs up against the same opposition – that of the Catholic right. However much one may find repugnant or support abortion and assisted suicide, the decisions do ultimately reside with secular politicians. And it is this that traditional Catholic conservatism cannot accept. Politicians may make the winning of the arguments more difficult by styling them in terms of a particular political philosophy, but it is they who are the moral arbiters and not the church. Both issues will continue to arouse the passions of the traditionalists but, rather like Margaret Thatcher embarked on a change in British culture through her confrontations with the unions, so Zapatero has made this traditionalism his battlefield in advancing the cause of a socially liberal Spain and neutering the conservatism that historically has been the state’s undoing. But there’s a difference: cultural change in Spain is a matter of life and death.

 

No-one said this was easy.

 

** Multiple sclerosis is relatively uncommon in Mallorca, which may support a view that lower doses of sunlight can be influential in its development. In the case above, the person concerned is not originally from Mallorca and also has a condition against prolonged exposure to sun.