Think of it: hundreds, maybe thousands of smiling Catholic nuns
with guitars, ready to use them at the slightest provocation, like a
still from the casting of The Sound of Music.
If you think that's a scary sight, Madrid was not the place to be this torrid August.
I'm talking about World Youth Day,
an event that, somewhat disconcertingly, lasted for six days, was
organised by the Catholic church and had gathered hundreds of thousands
of youngsters and one old man – the pope – in Madrid.
What has surprised many outside Spain is the hostility
with which this has been met by a large part of Spanish society.
Yes,
there have been daily marches protesting at the pope's visit, scuffles
between the saints and the sinners (let's call them that), arrests,
police charges.
But that is because people tend to forget that while
Spain is a traditionally Catholic country, it is traditionally
anti-clerical too. The refrain the demonstrators were singing is almost
200 years old: "If the priests and friars knew/ the beating they are
about to get…".
As the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once said:
"Spaniards are always trailing a priest, sometimes with a candle,
sometimes with a stick." He himself did both.
Even Spain's
reputation as a Catholic country is deceptive, considering its history
and many exterior manifestations of popular culture, from Easter
processions to the ubiquity of the name "María".
But that is tradition,
not belief.
In the course of the last 40 years, Spain has rapidly become
a secular country
and today is no different from other western societies in this respect.
Most couples shun religious marriage, with only a minority opting for
it.
Less than 15% of the population ever attends mass. Same-sex
marriages were recently legalised with ample popular support (and that
great form of tolerance that is indifference), and polls show that
general views on abortion or euthanasia are hardly those of the church.
That's
why those who rant at every preaching of the church miss the point.
The
church in Spain no longer determines how people live their lives.
Catholics may listen respectfully to what the pope has to say about
contraception, but they will stick without hesitation to their favourite
brand of condoms.
Sex, the obsession of both the church and its
critics, is not the issue here.
The issue is power, and the
Spanish church has an awful lot of it, but it lies somewhere else.
Its
kingdom is of this world.
As a reaction to secularisation, the church
has become an American-style political lobby, which no longer shepherds
souls but votes.
With its radio and TV stations and its vast network of
schools and universities, it shapes the conservative political camp.
It is its ability to deliver busloads of school children to Madrid that makes rightwing demonstrations possible and massive.
It's
not by influencing the public, but by lobbying the government, that the
church operates nowadays; to such success that the amount of money it
receives from the state has actually increased under the current
Socialist government.
By some estimates, it stands at around €6bn per year.
The church says it provides essential health and education services.
Others point out that the money comes from the state anyway, through
this funding and tax exemptions.
This is the crucial
argument: public versus private.
Instead, the government made the
mistake of turning it into "secular versus religious".
That was easy,
because Spanish society is secular.
But in this way the government only
succeeded in angering the church
without reducing its privileges.
A hard nut to crack, admittedly, but
there won't be another chance for quite a few years.
Now the government,
which is set go after the next election, has hosted the pope for a
second time this year, and listened politely while he went about
lambasting legislation passed in parliament; the man had a field day –
no wonder he looked happy and relaxed.
And this is what
World Youth Day was about: the joy of triumph and the anticipation of
more concessions to come from the next government.
Journalists
scrutinised the long and repetitive speeches of the pope as if they were
all about theology, but they weren't.
The message is the massive presence, like a seraphic version of the International Brigades, of the Catholic church on the streets of Spain, the old faithful country gone astray.