What is the religious situation in Spain and what are the tasks for the new evangelization?Some time ago I heard a mother laugh when she told me that her teenage son would tell her from time to time that he wished they were a "normal family". By this she meant that she would like to be able to come in whenever she wanted on the weekend, use the mobile and things like that, typical of his age. This led me to think that those "normal families", as the boy imagined them, do not exist. In all of them there are, to a greater or lesser extent, problems, joys, sorrows, mistakes, successes, greatness, meanness, diversity of characters, temperaments, life situations, crises, etc., that is what real families are like.
Thinking about this figure led me to a vision of Spain as a big family, but not that utopian family, but a real family: with its history, with its successes and its mistakes, with its diversity of approaches to life, with its saints and its criminals, its miseries and its greatness, and also its life situations and crises. Like families, if they want to move forward and not to be blown up and end up slapped in the face or in court, people must try to think of the common good and see the positive in others, recognize their own mistakes and correct with affection and at the right time those of others.
Spain has a long history that sinks in the depths of time where there has been everything: this family has been Celtic and Iberian, Roman, Visigoth, Muslim, Sephardic and Mudejar and, already monarchic and Catholic, reaches west, south and east to America and the Philippines reaching its maximum influence, being the mother of the great Hispanic family. Meanwhile, in the north and east, the struggle for independence from the French neighbors (as they say, that united this family a lot) left us independent in the house and not so much in ideas; and so came the Enlightenment and the French revolution that here was rightly called "liberal", from whose echoes the family became two republics, in two short-lived experiences, with their attempt to "modernize Spain", interspersed between the dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco. Those changes were not bloodless, kind or civilized, and there were many internal wars, the one that has left the biggest mark on the family we are today, the so-called civil war.
Already in peace since then (without forgetting the decades of ETA terrorism, although the current forgetfulness towards its victims) and with a transition that other families admired and admire, the family has lived in these last 45 years of democracy where culture and education has been designed by the so-called progressives, with the brief parentheses of governments of the so-called conservatives, the latter dedicated more to the family economy and assuming in practice the cultural leadership of those who sat down to eat on the left at the common table.
I think that all Spaniards could try to do, today and in the future, an exercise like the one I recommended at the beginning to the members of any family, trying to recognize our own mistakes and those of others, and try to correct them equally, seeing the positive in others and trying to seek the common good.
I will give it a try (not without risk and without the intention of being exhaustive):
We can recognize that in the centuries of Catholic monarchy there were great successes and errors. Among the successes, I would highlight the expansion of Christianity and the vision of human dignity proper to this religion throughout the world, as well as the creation of the university, the cathedrals and so many artistic marvels, the transmission of culture through the codices, the works of mercy, etc. Among the errors, clearly the mixture of politics and religion, the persecution and elimination of dissidents and heterodox, the wars for religious motives, clericalism, the cover-up of abuses to preserve the prestige of the institution, etc.
In the liberal progressiveness, among the successes I can see noble desires for social justice and equality and healthy secularism. Among the errors, their belief that the end justifies the means, the religious persecution of the Second Republic and the civil war, the consecration of the right to abortion of thousands of unborn people, suicide through euthanasia of the seriously ill and incurable, to the so-called gender self-determination (which is causing so much irreversible damage in young people and adolescents), the continuous decline in the quality and demands of our education, the coexistence and even complicity with terrorists of different eras, the colonization of public institutions, ideological sectarianism, the waste of everyone's money, etc.
On the liberal conservative side, among the successes I think that they have managed the economy with more austerity and understand better that income must be balanced with expenses for the sustainability of the system and since the Constitution they are more respectful with the religious freedom of the citizens, as well as they believe more in the rule of law and the laws. Among the mistakes, leaving behind the 36 years of Franco (with his executions, post-war exiles and persecution of dissidents), I think it is fundamentally not having been sufficiently firm in the defense of their rightful convictions (the defense of the life of the unborn and terminally ill, the quality of education, the equality of Spaniards without regional or economic privileges, etc.).
In the nationalists, I see among their successes the defense of their own language and culture. Among their mistakes, obviously their sympathy or equidistance with ETA terrorism and their lack of collaboration and sensitivity with the innocent victims (all of them) of so many years of assassinations, kidnappings and extortions, their insistence that former murderers have the right to participate in the political life of their people (something different from reinsertion), their erroneous exclusionary conviction of being superior to the rest of Spain and the world, their obtaining of unjust privileges from the different central governments (guilt shared by conservatives and progressives, of course), etc. We could also include here Spanish nationalism in what it shares of excluding the virtues of other countries.
In the Church, along with the immense good that so many pastors and lay faithful and so many religious institutions have done over so many centuries, we must recognize abuses and sometimes a deficient use of the great educational potential of so many schools and universities of the Church that have not known how or have not been able to fully transmit to their students a true Christian formation with the capacity to transform society for the better.
We could go on with the kings, the various governments, writers, artists, bishops and all those who are part or have been part of this "normal" family that is Spain. But it seems to me that this small summary is enough for the pretension of this modest article.
And now we find ourselves in the present, with a rather hopeless Spanish society, as indicated by our mental health indices, especially among young people (and this is something not only due to the pandemic but to a deeper cultural problem, it seems to me) and once again polarized into two very poorly matched halves.
Maybe we could try to see ourselves more as a real and big family, with its problems and its happy and hard moments, recognize our mistakes and try to see the virtues of the others. We could try to ally ourselves with all honest people of all ideologies to work together for a better Spain to leave to our successors, who do not seem too happy with the country we are leaving them. It is not a question of making laws of memory but of true concord.
I think of St. Augustine when he said in his very current "The City of God" that "among the pagans there are children of the Church and within the Church there are false Christians". It does not matter what labels we put on ourselves or others. The important thing is the union of all the honest people who live in Spain and want to make it truly better for everyone. We must not tire of doing good and fighting evil, in ourselves and in our society. We must ally ourselves with all those who still consider that pluralism is healthy as long as we share a common ethical minimum: we cannot kill, lie or steal.
