25/11/2013
José Luis Restán, journalist. Director of Socio-Religious Area, COPE radio station
Ramón Jáuregui has said that the PSOE announcement that it will denounce church-state agreements once it returns to government is not mere wishful thinking. He is the one who also promoted an attempt to rectify the PSOE's radical secularism and protected the low portion of Christian socialists in his party while Aznar was in office. Now Jáuregui seems loaded with reason: "the Spanish Church has truly earned it".
The truth is that during Zapatero's terms on office, the Church emerged as the only effective barrier seeking to obstruct the social engineering promoted by the political power. Only historical perspective will allow us to properly assess this contingent function arising from the Church's essential mission of proclaiming the Gospel, which it developed at a crucial time, when a Government which emerged as a result of the March 11 trauma decided to go for a true cultural revolution that would seek to break the Transition Pact.
The PSOE's leadership has been unable to digest two things from '78. That Spanish society has not been as secularised as it hoped and that the hierarchy of the Church in Spain has not accepted the dumb ox role. Beyond the aesthetic staging of secularism, Jáuregui's words indicate a truth. That when the PSOE returns to power it will raise a complaint of the Agreements, and this will be done in terms of a substantial reduction of the meaning of religious freedom. The key of the melody will follow French secularism, the goal of some socialist groups as culturally emaciated as demagogically inflamed. Obviously, they have not read Jürgen Habermas.
The Church in Spain has to see this is the scenario looming before it. Because, in addition, it is not only an atavistic PSOE that's showing its anticlerical drives. There's also a low intensity secularism nesting in some layers of the PP. Actually both arise, in their own way, from a profound process that affects the whole of Spanish society. The peripheries of which the Pope speaks are already in the middle of our cities, and that is where the future of the mission is played. In order to do this some things are required: realism, humility, intelligence, and above all a passion to communicate the Christian experience without taking absolutely anything for granted.
The '78 pact of coexistence gave a good answer on religious freedom and secularism. Unfortunately, the PSOE is determined to demolish it and the PP could muster more efforts, warmth and reason to effectively defend it. For Spanish Catholics this means a challenge to our creativity, our ability to offer the reasons for our hope, which also entail a civil and political braveness because they strongly contribute to the common good. It is very possible that in not too long a new institutional framework will need to be negotiated, and it will have to be done with the cunning of which the Gospel speaks. But what is truly significant is that people from all walks of life may once again be surprised by the human novelty of faith.