A cultural "battle" ” “

The Spanish Parliament, in a vote on 30 June, approved the new law that legalizes homosexual marriages, according them parity of rights with traditional marriages and permitting homosexual couples to adopt children. The law, approved with 187 votes in favour, 147 against and 4 abstentions, prescribes that “matrimony will have the same requisites and effects if both contracting parties are of the same sex or of different sex”. But on the same day Spanish families took to the streets again – after the big demonstration of 18 June – to protest in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid against the new law. The Spanish Forum of Families (www.forofamilia.org) has also delivered to the Central Electoral Junta over a million signatures against the law. SIR asked the editor in chief of the Catholic review “Alfa y Omega”, MIGUEL ÁNGEL VELASCO , for the significance of these popular protests in Spain. A PUBLIC RESPONSE. “The mobilization of Catholics in Spain may be seen as a cultural battle of the Church, in the sense that if a faith is not transformed into culture it is a dead faith”, says Velasco. In the view of the journalist and writer, the last demonstration in Madrid was a “public response to the needs of the faith of those who took to the streets, applied in the specific case of the family and of all the values it presupposes”. “I am very concerned to emphasize the value of the ‘public’ response – insists Velasco -, given that the problem of Catholics in Spain has for too long been to reduce the faith to the private sphere, to a lethal schizophrenia: faith on one side, life on the other. Thank God, the Catholic Church in Spain is beginning to emerge from this schizophrenia”. In the view of the editor of the Catholic magazine “Alfa y Omega”, the demonstration was not the end of something, but the beginning”. “Now the problem – he adds – is how to articulate those convictions and that strength in life and in our response to everyday problems”. To do so, the means of social communications “are essential”, and just as the need to demonstrate one’s own faith in public was created, so “we need to continue to create the consciousness of what cannot be done today without appropriate and differentiated means of social communication”. “It is probable that the political and social authorities realized that Catholics in Spain were taking their ‘siesta’, but perhaps not in the way they thought”, maintains Velasco, emphasizing that the recent phrase of the Pope, namely that “the future of humanity passes through the family”, is “far more than a simple phrase”. “The risk consists in forgetting that the defence of the family is not a one-day event, but something we need to conduct everyday, at home, in the schools of our children, in the media, in Parliament, in the courts, in politics and at the ballot box”. SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. “The demonstration of 18 June in Madrid was a milestone”, declared DANIEL ARASA, chairman of the Group of Catalan associations of the family (), in a comment to SIR. Married, a journalist and father of 7 children, Arasa says that “a social movement of very broad appeal, cutting across party political divides, is being created”: a movement that “may even in many respects overcome the parties”. In Arasa’s view, “It was high time that the rules were dictated not just by relativism and by the politically correct”: “Those who have demonstrated in favour of the family over the last few weeks has demonstrated an enormous esteem for the common good; they did not do so for their own advantage. On the other hand, their demonstration means bringing into public life a little fresh air in a relativistic world where only the politically correct holds sway, so long as it is far from the truth and from the natural law”. “In Spain it will no longer be possible to introduce policies that concern the family – he underlines – without taking into account the views of organized families, even though it is probable that the Government will try to do so. I am convinced that what has happened in Spain will also have an influence on other countries”. As for the law on gay marriages and the possibility of adopting children, “I don’t deny that is very probable that the law will be approved by the Congress of Deputies in spite of the opposition of the Senate”. “In any case – he concludes – we will continue to fight to defend genuine marriage, and the right of children to have a father and a mother. Perhaps one day, in the same way in which a parliamentary majority is able to impose some laws, another majority will be able to abrogate them”. OTHER VOICES. Other groups oppose marriages between persons of the same sex, such as “Make Yourself Heard” (Hazte Oir) or E-Christians, as well as Catholic associations and individual bishops. The danger of an “anarchic liberty” was emphasized by Archbishop BRAULIO RODRÍGUEZ PLAZA of Valladolid, according to whom “the pseudo-marriage between persons of the same sex is the expression of an anarchic liberty that people want to present wrongly as a genuine liberation”. The mayor of the same Castilian city, Javier León de la Riva, was among the first to declare that, if this law goes ahead, “he will neither exercise not delegate the power to marry homosexuals”. In this regard, he notes, “the clause of conscientious objection exists in Spain”.