1976 The international Catholic weekly 25p
TABLET The world is for its people: Arthur McCormack The abortion issue: Desmond Sullivan Li iving wor ship 2: J. D. Cloud Village reli gion in India: Bede Griffiths Reviews: The Auden generation: Neville Braybrooke The emergent George Eliot: Terry Eagleton
The Spanish evolution Last week the King of Spain sent by special emissary a letter to the Pope in which he voluntarily relinquished a privilege dating back to the 16th century (updated and revised in 1941 and in the concordat of 1953) regarding the appointment of bishops. Pope Paul had himself in fact proposed to General Franco some years ago that the procedure was hardly appropriate in the circumstances of today. The reply was a courteous but firm refusal to alter the arrangements. Now the secretary to the Spanish Bishops’ Conference has been able to salute the King’s gesture as “opening a new chapter in church-state relations,” which have been under considerable strain in the last decade. A free Church in a free state is at least on the horizon, although the going is bound to be very rough.
What sort of candidates could the King hope for from such a sponsorship as this? Whatever may have been his own views about the man most likely to carry out the pledges of his speech at his accession and recently in Washington (on his record that man would seem to be Sr Areilza) he was not offered this possibility. Within the narrow limits of his options he selected from the Council’s trio the man who had the fewest of its votes and was the least compromised by a political past.
The King’s renunciation of his ecclesiastical privilege was not echoed in another part of Spanish constitutional procedure. Having dismissed his Prime Minister earlier this month, the King found himself in a position analogous to that from which he has now released the Pope. The Council of the Realm, according to the Constitution, presented him with three names from which he had to choose a new prime minister. The Council is an invention of General Franco’s regime, working on the blueprints of a structure conceived under the earlier dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera and basically designed to maintain the status quo through a self selecting oligarchy limiting the Crown’s prerogatives and virtually governing the country at one remove. The Council is a formidable “establishment,” comprising powerful banking and industrial interests, what has come to be known as “national Catholicism,” the bureaucracy of the Movimiento, as well as Opus Dei and its sympathisers.
The new Prime Minister was only three years old when the Civil War broke out. He belongs to that “generation of silence” that has not fought its battles over and over again in articles and speeches during the Franco regime and in this way continued to keep going the ugly conception of two Spains. Inevitably, of course, he is one of those sons of the regime who has yet to make his independent future. He comes from a modest middle-class background like the vast majority of his countrymen. He is not in league with any particular power-base and his qualities and patent integrity should earn him widespread confidence. In the secretariat of the movement he worked quietly towards easing rigidities and he was the sponsor, although not the originator, of the recent law legalising political parties—the most significant step forward taken by the Cortes in the last 40 years. An immediate amnesty for political prisoners, a referendum about constitutional reform in the autumn and the general elections next year are all in his domestic programme and in foreign affairs he is firmly a European Community man and a nato supporter.
So far so good, but the basic trouble is that both he and the King are perforce acting within a structure which is no
