"Nowadays we see no reason for questioning the current Spanish legal regulation of the relations between the Church and the State; actually we must respect and improve it to serve the common good". It was said tonight by card. Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, archbishop of Madrid, during the academic appointment as a member of the Royal Academy of the Doctors, which gave him medal number 41 for the Theology Section. The cardinal spoke of the relation between the Church and the State as of an ever-open issue which, "because of its very nature, belongs to an order of permanent realities", which "have to do with some essential aspects of the human being", as "its religious dimension" and "its social dimension" do. As to the form "in which such relations" between the religious and the political spheres "have developed, will develop in the lively reality of history, it changes and varies at a pace with the way the factor of individual and social freedom configures them" in existential and community terms, legally shapes them, and offers them doctrinal or ideological grounds. The cardinal went over the history of these relations since the beginning of the Church, highlighting that defending religious freedom has been one of the greatest pastoral tasks for the Popes of the first millennium. (continued)
