Those who are indifferent to, or sceptical about, the degree to which the churches still work to exercise political influence need only look at the unsubtle battle that the Catholic Church waged against the Spanish government when José Luis Zapatero was Prime Minister and instituted a bold reforming agenda to dilute church–state ties. His policies were aimed at ending direct government subsidy to the church, introducing same-sex civil unions, easing divorce laws, and encouraging greater participation and opportunities for women in Spain’s society and economy. He also openly condemned the fascist Franco regime and honoured those who had resisted it, something that beforehand was regarded in his country as too contentious and divisive to attempt.
None of this pleased the Catholic Church either in Spain itself or in the Vatican, showing by this (if showing were needed) the reactionary colouration of church politics. In a highly unsubtle gesture of opposition to Zapatero the Vatican conducted its largest ever mass beatification, honouring 498 pro-Franco ‘victims of religious persecution’ during the Spanish Civil War. Those victims were fascists and their church supporters, and included 7,000 members of the Catholic clergy killed between 1931 and 1939 in an uprising against the staggering oppression by church and state that had kept the population poor, benighted, ignorant, exploited and suffering.
Look at most Catholic countries until the 1960s and beyond, in South America and Ireland and Spain: the picture of the social, political and economic effects of Catholicism is in essentials the same. Women condemned to bearing large numbers of children, over-large families perpetuating poverty and ignorance, backward social policies and the iron grip of a clergy acting like the Stasi in controlling the minutiae of private lives through the confessional and the influence of fear – fear of hell, among other things. The small and in the end ineffectual ‘liberation theology’ rebellion among some South American clergy was quashed by the church, not interested in salvation for anyone in this life except for the church itself as an institution whose principal aim, like the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, was (and is?) to stay in control at any cost.
The savagery of 1930s anti-clericalism in Spain, with its deplorable murders and violence, is a mark of how bitterly clerical oppression was felt. Anti-clericalism had been running strongly in Catholic Europe ever since the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, when it was the priests who did the murdering, and Spain was not the only example of an anger-prompted violent response to priestly oppression.
Some might think that murder by priests is worse than murder of priests because priests are most particularly not supposed to murder, and if murdered (in the right circumstances, that is; not in bed with their mistresses or – more usually of late – choirboys) can claim martyrdom. But obviously murder by anyone of anyone is wrong, and the Spanish revolution of the 1930s would have been better effected, per impossibile, without the mayhem. Anger towards the church explains but does not excuse the violence unleashed on it; from this perspective of history, the reason why the church provoked such violence is the significant point.
The immediate reason for the church’s action in beatifying Franco fascists as a way of confronting Zapatero’s liberal policies was that in Spain’s schools that same year new civics courses were beginning, explaining and discussing the Spanish constitution and the rights of the citizen. Because of what the constitution accords to gay people and women, the church was bitterly opposed to it, and to children knowing about it. The nun who was the church’s liaison to the education ministry in Madrid told the press that this new civics course was ‘a frontal assault on the Catholic religion’ and ‘part of a clear persecution … of the Catholic faith’. One’s response to her first complaint was ‘good’, and to the second, ‘so: a bit of your own medicine; and salutary medicine at that – for everyone else’.
The Catholic right-wing in Spanish politics, with Vatican assistance, was determined to reverse the social gains that Spain made under Zapatero’s premiership. Their hopes were understandably high; by law the Catholic version of Christianity was still taught in Spain’s schools (though this was to be a target for Zapatero reforms too) and the church remained a large presence in the country and its life. So the battle-lines were drawn, and one of the last major conflicts of the Counter-Reformation appeared ready to be played out there, as if in a corrida between the future and the past, freedom and oppression, sanity and superstition. The question is: who has won?