SPAIN
Draft reform of the law on religious freedom
A reform of the law on religious freedom that cannot pass unobserved: that’s what’s happening in Spain where the Government is working on a draft reform. According to anticipations published by the daily El País in recent days, the new law would abolish exclusively religious state funerals, the display of crucifixes in public offices, in schools and in hospitals, and the swearing in of public officials before the cross. Religious symbols would be removed, with the exception of those with historic or artistic, architectural and cultural value. Only private schools and hospitals of religious inspiration, even if they have an agreement with the State and receive public funds, would be able to maintain such symbols. Moreover, again according to the draft published by the Spanish daily, the public authorities, if they participate in strictly religious functions or events, would be obliged to do so in such a way that no violation of the principles of neutrality and non-discrimination would be caused.Pointless law. “The only positive aspects for religious freedom that are underwritten by the new law are those already protected by the Constitution or by the laws in force” or those developed by the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. That’s the opinion expressed by Rafael Navarro-Valls, secretary of the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and professor in the Faculty of Law of the Complutense University of Madrid, speaking to the “La Mañana” programme of the COPE radio network with regard to the planned reform of the law on religious freedom. According to Navarro-Valls, this law “is pointless” because “advancing the claims of secularism does not mean curbing religious freedom, but quite the reverse”. “The point of secularism or non-confessionalism – he added – is not to emancipate us from religion, but officially to make us free to practice it”. According to Navarro-Valls, “a law of religious freedom only has sense in dictatorships” to guarantee religious freedom or to conclude the work previously begun in countries which have experienced a dictatorship. Therefore, at the present time, observed Navarro-Valls, “a law on religious freedom does not have much sense, because the things presupposed by true religious freedom are already safeguarded” by the Constitution or the law. Navarro-Valls pointed out that the new law has far more articles that the previous one (almost forty compared with the eight of the law now in force), some of them restrictive. The existing law, according to the secretary of the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence, is more ample in scope, whereas the new law “seems more a law contra than pro religious freedom”.A problem we cannot minimise or ignore. A warning on the “pernicious tendency of excluding God and the religious in the social field” on the part of a “radical secularism”, which would like to convert religion into a “parody”, has been given by Archbishop Carlos Osoro of Valencia in his weekly pastoral letter. According to Archbishop Osoro, the draft law on religious freedom proposed by the government would be “the most important fracture” to be attempted in Western society, given that “the human being has an inalienable desire for the God who was revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and who cures all the injuries we suffer in human life and in human history”. After drawing a distinction between “radical secularism” and “the lay conception that is the outcome of religious neutrality or indeterminacy”, the Archbishop emphasizes that the former regards religion as “intrinsically negative and something that belongs to an obsolete epoch in the history of mankind”, and this leads in turn to the wish to “expel the very idea of God and religion from the public arena and reduce it, at best, to the private sphere”. In this scenario, religious life “would be a parody or a pure fiction”. According to Archbishop Osoro, we find ourselves faced by “a central problem of our time which we cannot minimise or ignore”.Fracture in our view of man. The Archbishop of Valencia points out in his pastoral letter that the “Church was born to be public by her very nature” and, therefore, “cannot be relegated to the private sphere, nor be turned into a kind of private club or secret society”. In Mgr. Osoro’s view, “if God be excluded, a fracture in our view of man would be produced”: a fracture whereby man would “claim to modify human nature itself” through biology and the law. All this leads to an inhumane and dehumanizing materialism, without the light of respect for the human being himself and for human society”, which is on the contrary the consequence of “moral and religious considerations”. There’s “a political idolatry” at work, according to which “a particular party, nation or state are presented as if they were superior values to which everything else, even the religious sphere, must be subjected”. All this, observes the Archbishop of Valencia, is a consequence of the “society of disassociation”, whose “greatest aspiration is individual self-determination, understood as satisfaction of all the individual’s impulses, tendencies and desires”, even if this “may involve grave consequences such as the conviction that there cannot exist any constraint imposed by any religious or philosophic belief, or any tradition or history”. This leads to a “terrible degradation” because we need “identity, and identity is supported by traditions, by history, by common laws and by morality”.
