c. 2006 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ Barely a year has passed since Pope Benedict XVI, in a famous speech prior to his election, issued a call to arms that decried moral indifference in Western culture as a “dictatorship of relativism.”
Next week (July 8-9), Benedict will travel to the front lines of that battle when he visits Valencia, Spain, to celebrate the fifth annual World Meeting of Families.
Spain, once a European stronghold of Roman Catholic teaching, has seen the church’s influence dramatically wane in recent years.
Since the election of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in 2004, the Spanish government has overhauled laws affecting nearly every hot-button issue in the country. Gay marriage and adoption have been legalized. Laws on divorce, in vitro fertilization, embryonic stem cell research and euthanasia have been loosened. State subsidies to the church have been questioned, as has the place of religious instruction in public schools.
The changes have left local church leaders staggering and caused alarm among officials at the Vatican, including the pope himself.
Upon presenting Spain’s new ambassador with his diplomatic credentials to the Holy See in late May, Benedict invoked the Vatican’s special treaty with Spain, known as a “concordat,” to reaffirm the church’s right to “free and public exercise of its activities,” adding that “none of those rights must be violated or denied to either individuals or institutions.”
Benedict’s participation at Valencia, he told the ambassador, would be an occasion for the church to exercise its “human rights” and re-energize the Spanish faithful’s support for “the beauty and fertility of the family, founded on marriage.”
The meeting will no doubt be a politically charged event. The diocese of Valencia is organizing the conference with the Pontifical Council for the Family, headed by Vatican hard-liner Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo. In early June, his office released a document equating gay marriage, abortion and contraception to an “eclipse of God.”
Although the Vatican appears to favor a more confrontational approach to Zapatero’s government, the response among Spain’s Catholic leadership has varied.
Last June, an umbrella organization of grass-roots Catholic groups mounted a public demonstration in Madrid against the reforms that drew hundreds of thousands, including some of the country’s most prominent bishops and cardinals. Many bishops, however, stayed away.
Josep Miro i Ardevol, director of E-Cristians, a grass-roots organization that helped organize the demonstration, said many of Spain’s bishops are reluctant to engage in open political debate because church-state disputes during the Spanish Civil War often led to widespread bloodshed.
But Miro i Ardevol said the “anthropological rupture” caused by Zapatero’s reforms has spurred many bishops to rethink their approach and has prompted some to mobilize their flocks.
“The mobilization and raised awareness among wide swaths of Spanish Catholics must evolve into better political organization and practice,” Miro i Ardevol said in an interview.
Church organizations, however, are not the only groups gearing up for the pope’s visit. Last week, Spain’s Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Transsexuals and Bisexuals (FELGT) and the National Union of Family Associations (UNAF) hosted a conference in Valencia that promoted its own vision of family life _ one that is based on gay marriage and adoption.
In a statement, FELGT director Ruben Sanchez said the conference, which received funding from the government, demonstrated that “the church has to accept that it doesn’t have a monopoly on family.”
KRE/PH END MEICHTRY
Editors: Josep Miro i Ardevol and E-Cristians in 11th graf are CQ.
