All right, I know I’ve posted a lot about religion the past few days, but here’s a follow-up to The Politics of Sainthood.
Yesterday the Vatican beatified 498 priests and nuns killed during the Spanish Civil War era (1936-39), which means the church considers these men and women martyrs.
The church says the priests and nuns, as well as a handful of lay religious people, were killed decades ago by pro-leftist forces because of their Catholicism - “heroic witnesses of the faith,” as the pope called them yesterday.
Many in Spain’s Catholic Church sided with the Fascists led by General Francisco Franco, who overthrew the elected leftist government, eventually won the war, and ruled as a dictator for nearly four decades, granting wide power and influence to the church. Spain remains deeply polarized today, and the nation is struggling to come to terms with its past.
Coincidentally, this week the Spanish Parliament will vote on a “historical memory” law. The law will acknowledge Franco atrocities, fund the exhumation of mass graves and pay reparations to victims. But the Vatican insisted that yesterday’s beatification ceremony, the largest in church history, was simply not political.
“To beatify a martyr, or a group of martyrs, has no political meaning, but only exclusively a religious one,” Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, a member of the ultraconservative Opus Dei organization, which is especially dominant in Spain, told an Italian newspaper.
Just like that, like Moses parted the Red Sea, does Harranz separate religion and politics. Miraculously. Those Opus Dei guys are something else, I tell you.
Protesters fought, and Benedict, although not attending the Mass, appeared at the end to bless the audience.
Spain was once one of the most Catholic countries in Europe. The current government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has trimmed Catholic Church budgets in public schools and pushed a liberal social agenda that includes the legalization of gay marriage and making it easier to obtain abortions and divorces.
It’s obvious that this beatification is a political statement, a ringing endorsement of right-wing power, conveniently timed to rally the political right and deflate the political left. For Cardinal Harranz to deny the politics is a…what’s the word…a Lie. Yes, that’s it. Completely disingenuous.
Ray Dubuque can explain better than I why politics and religion cannot be so easily parted.
