Still Running Off at the Keyboard

The Pope considers that the secularism in our country - a phenomenon which, it must be said, is not at all a recent one, and extends to other nations around us - is leading to restrictions on religious freedom, while also encouraging contempt for religion. However we interpret these words or contrive to tone them down, they are excessively harsh, and even a little unfair, if we remember that relations between the Holy See and Spain are guided by a Concordat, signed in 1979, which has not been renounced by either side.

"In Spain a mentality is spreading based on secularism, an ideology which gradually leads, in a more or less conscious way, to the restriction of religious liberty, to the point of fostering contempt or ignorance of religious things, relegating faith to the sphere of private matters and opposing its public expression," the Pope proclaimed yesterday, before calling on Spain not to tear up her "deep and living Christian roots." John Paul II had already delivered a stern reprimand to the head of the government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, when he visited him for the first time last June, to the prime minister's embarrassment.