Laying down the law

In Spain laws are enacted not because the pope wants them but because the parliament and the citizens decide on them, Prime Minister Zapatero said on Sunday in response to criticism from the Popular Party (PP) concerning his scarce presence at the events during the recent visit of Benedict XVI.

But three days after the pontiff left Spanish soil, the prime minister shelved his promise to strengthen the lay character of the Spanish state with a new Religious Freedom Law, which the ecclesiastical hierarchy rejects.

The commitment to reform the law was withdrawn at the last moment from the Socialist electoral program in 2008, but was revived months later. At the same time, however, the government approved an upward revision of the existing economic agreements with the Church, which it subsidizes to the tune of some ¤6 billion a year - forgetting the principle, included in the 1979 agreements between Madrid and the Holy See, that the Church was to advance towards self-financing.

The plan for reform, far from really strengthening the lay character of the Spanish state, tended toward what might be called a multi-confessional state. Not without reason, then, some have said that it is better not to touch the existing law than to introduce a reform that falls far short of a real separation between Church and state.

But by withdrawing the plan for reform, the government also cuts off the very possibility of debating it and modifying the draft. The government's main arguments for withdrawing the proposal are, firstly, that no parliamentary consensus concerning it exists, consensus being advisable as a general principle in connection with legal measures that affect the ethical sensibilities of the average citizen. And secondly, that, in the middle of the economic crisis, this is not the time to open up new fronts of contention in the social arena.

These are weighty enough reasons, provided they do not turn into a mere excuse for granting a right of veto to those political parties that expressly defend the continuance of the privileges that the Church now enjoys. But these privileges depend not so much on the existing law, limited but reasonable, as on the agreements with the Holy See; that is, with a state whose chief, Benedict XVI, has just gravely offended Spanish society with his remarks on the present existence of a supposed "aggressive" laicism comparable to that which in the 1930s fanned the flames of the Civil War.

The point of all this is not that there cannot be agreements with the Vatican, but that the terms of the existing agreement, negotiated in 1979 during the transition to democracy after Franco's death, ought to be adapted to constitutional principles. The logical respect for a religion to which a majority of Spanish citizens belong cannot justify the fact that the Socialist government has maintained and even improved the situation of privilege enjoyed by the Catholic Church, in a supposedly non-confessional state.