Spain: Breaking the moral monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church With the new school year starting in September, children in Spain will have a new secular civics class that has the Roman Catholic Church up in arms. “Education for citizenship” will include ethics, civics and human rights. Based on the values enshrined in the 1978 Constitution, it is designed to prepare students in public elementary and junior high schools to become self-determined, responsible and tolerant citizens of a modern, pluralistic democracy. The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) has taken the course as a challenge against its moral monopoly and launched a furious campaign against it. The Episcopate alarmed Catholic parents that the civics classes violated their constitutional right to decide about the “moral formation” of their children and had to be fought by all legal means. The archbishop of Madrid threatened to appeal to the Constitutional Court of Spain to stop this “ethical-moral educational program that negates religion". But the government is not impressed. “No faith can impose itself on the law”, said Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in a speech on a youth congress last month. "Spain is a lay country, and its lay principles guarantee pluralism and tolerance". Most explosive about the new program is for the bishops the fact that it includes – among many other things - issues of gender, sexuality and family. One of its stated goals is to teach children to reject "existing discrimination for reason of sex, origin, social differences, affective-sexual, or whatever other type" and to exercise a "critical evaluation of the social and sexual division of labor and racist, xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic social prejudices.” According to the bishops, this is “indoctrinating children with the sexual ideology and social agenda of the left” – in short: “Sodom and Gomorrah!” When the socialist government took office in March 2004, it changed – much to the chagrin of the RCC - the social climate in Spain with a series of new politics. It scrapped plans for compulsory religious classes in public schools, cut down government subsidies for Catholic institutions, eased the laws for divorce and abortion and recognized gay marriages. Despite the archbishop’s outcry that Madrid had now become “Sodom and Gomorrah”, Zapatero's liberal social model enjoys wide support among the people. In a July survey by the Center for Sociological Research in Madrid, more than two thirds of respondents welcomed, for example, the legalization of gay marriages, though 77 percent described themselves as Catholics (of which, however, only 16 percent said they went to church every week, while 55 percent almost never). The influence of the RCC is waning in the once most Catholic country in Europe. The education system is still one of its strongholds: about one quarter of the country's children are educated in Catholic schools that get about half their funding from the state and the other half from non-government sources. But even among students and parents represented by the Catholic Association of Private Education Companies in Madrid, 94 percent don’t have any objection to the civics classes. In fact, the furious resistance of the Catholic bishops against the new syllabus threatens to backfire. The government seems to wait that time ripens to put the RCC in its place. The man behind the new civics program is Gregorio Peces-Barba Martínez, Professor of Legal Philosophy at Madrid University and one of the authors of the Constitution of 1978. In an article in the Spanish daily El Pais, he warned the noisy bishops not to “pull so hard on the rope”. Criticising them for their “extreme arrogance, a sensation of impunity and an insufferable sense of superiority, derived from the fact that they administer 'superior truths'”, he accused them of “defying the legitimate authorities, the Constitution and the law, attempting to impose their criteria before the common good and the popular sovereignty residing in the Parliament” and held them “responsible for the agitation that impedes social peace”. If the RCC was not able to adjust itself to the new social climate in the next legislature, he concluded, “it would be necessary to address the topic of the actions and situation of the Church and establish a new status, that puts them in their place and that respects the autonomy of the civil authority.” Prof. Peces-Barba's statements are considered significant because of his influence in Spain's government. |