Should we follow Spain?

José Rodríguez Zapatero is not a man of half measures. He has demonstrated that ever since to took over the reins of the Spanish government. And the Spain over which his government has ruled is a country that in a very short space of time began to glitter with colours very different from those that had characterized it over the centuries. Christianity – it’s no secret – is no longer on its agenda as the inspirer of values, indeed it has become a terrain on which it is easy to lift one’s voice and win votes.Now, the 37th Federal Congress of the Spanish Socialist and Worker Party (PSOE) has taken a further step forward in the pursuit of a form of secularism that is no longer in the tradition of a healthy secularism, as a guarantee of rights and duties for everyone, believers and non-believers alike, but is more akin to a belligerent secularism that wants to root out, eliminate whatever there is that is Christian, and more especially Catholic, in the country’s social and cultural panorama. The error of calculation, if so it can be called, is undoubtedly not that of being consistent with a political programme voted by the majority of electors, which Zapatero will undoubtedly pursue to its fulfilment, but an attitude, or prejudice, of opposing progress and freedom to religion. It also forgets that there are also Christians in the Socialist electorate who voted him to power (Christians for Socialism, for example, one of the associations within the ruling party). Above all it forgets that certain political decisions that have to do with bioethics are not unequivocal, still less are they the sign of progress. At the last congress of the PSOE the secularist tendency succeeded in neutralizing religion, not in tolerating it or even understanding the good that flows from it. And it lost the positive and critical secularism that has now been reduced to a minority within the ruling party.The Socialist Congress recently held in Spain wished to “consolidate” secularism. The socialism of Zapatero, as political expression of workers and intellectuals, scientists and men and women of culture, has as its aim a society characterized by equality, liberty and fraternity. ‘Laicity’ (the human face of secularism), a concept rather new in the Spanish socialist vocabulary, does not form part of its project: it is more accustomed instead to the concept of what has always be called the visceral “anticlericalism” in the spirit of the Iberian country.The socialist majority tends to identify ‘Christian’ with backwardness: thus the struggle against religious education in schools is clear, as is the mentality according to which monotheist religions are sources of conflict and are of no benefit to people. Religious symbols are clearly at variance with these new policies: policies that may be able to vanquish the external signs, but not the most genuine religious sense that survives, because it forms the very foundation, the deep roots of countless Spaniards.While European laws are becoming increasingly repressive in terms of immigration, Zapatero has said he will grant the vote to immigrants in municipal elections. Is this a mere provocation or is it a signal to Europe? Spain is now a country in turmoil: full of possibilities, but also full of risks. Is Spain an example to be followed, or not, for other European countries, and for the European Union?