Spanish Catholic Church campaign against Socialist government policies
Relations between the Spanish Catholic Church and the Socialist Government could hardly be worse. Spanish bishops have criticised government policy on several issues. In July, the country's highest archbishop, Cardinal Rouco Varela, declared that the Socialist proposals were taking Spain back to the medieval ages when it was under Muslim rule! And in September, Juan Antonio Martinez Campo, spokesman for Spain's Episcopal Conference, described gay marriage as a "virus," threatening Spanish society.
The Catholic Church's new campaign will center around three main issues:
- Religious education (the Church favours compulsory religious education in all schools)
- Family values (the Church is against gay marriages, the right of gay couples to adopt, research with embryos, reform of the divorce law)
- The right to life (the Church opposes abortion, embryo research and euthanasia).
In a press conference held yesterday, the Episcopal Conference spokesman said that the main objective of its campaign is to "mobilise the conscience" of all Christians. In an unprecendented move, it has published more than 7 million leaflets in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician, explaining the Catholic doctrine about life and death. One of the sentences from the leaflet reads as follows "Euthanasia is always a form of homicide, because it involves one man giving death to another".
The campaign, which also includes advertising on television and in the media, posters, billboards, conferences etc. will continue until the Summer. No information has been given about the overall cost (in terms of euros) of such an elaborate campaign.
Related links:
Gay marriages in Spain
Pope receives Zapatero in the Vatican
Divorce in Spain - reforms
Labels: religion spain
1 Comments:
One of the (many?) bad consequencies of the re-election of Bush is the suppport it will give to reactionary and doctrinaire religion. If - as seems likely - it was guns,gays and God who won the votes, the future for rational attitudes to sexual politics is bleak indeed. An obsession which seems near to fascination with what men and women do with their bodies and how they physically relate to people of the same sex is indeed 'medieval',and the fear it reveals is morbidly primeval. There are problesm on all sides. People should be properly warned against but surely one of the things we have learned is that minorities deserve understanding and that certainly this one is hardly a major threat to the vast majority of hetrosexual people.
One problem is the emotive word - 'marriage'. I believe there should be oppotunity for a legal bond within a gay relationship, but that can never be a marriage nor can it in any way threaten the marital state, which is more likely to be sidelined by the many loving but non-legal partnerships that now exist rather than by any relationship between two people of the same gender.
Another problem is the Church's assumption ( or some branches of it)that sex is one of God's lesser gifts to humanity and needs to be kept in strict control and that the Church has to be the controller.
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