Bishops Threaten Spanish Politicians With Excommunication

11/28/09-by Paula Brooks excommunication
The Catholic Church has announced it will excommunicate any members of the Spanish parliament who have voted in favour of a bill that will make abortion more readily available.

“This is a warning to Catholics, that they can’t vote in favor of this and that they won’t be able to receive communion unless they ask forgiveness,” Juan Antonion Martinez Caminohe , spokesman for Spain’s Bishops’ Conference said in a news conference on Friday.

The government-sponsored bill, which passed the first of a series of votes in the Spanish parliament Thursday, will allow abortion until the 14th week of pregnancy and, in cases of extreme foetal deformity, at any time in the pregnancy.

A controversial clause in the bill will also allow girls to obtain abortions from the age of 16 without parental consent.

Abortion are currently allowed in Spain only in cases of rape, a malformed foetus or if the pregnancy endangers the physical or mental health of the mother.

Spain has long had a higher rate of abortion than some countries with more liberal abortion laws, because of the willingness of many Spanish doctors to attest to the danger to the mother’s psychological health. Abortions have doubled in the past decade in the traditionally Roman Catholic country, from nearly 54,000 in 1998 to 112,000 in 2007, the most recent year for available data, according to Spain’s Ministry of Health.

The bill’s supporters say the abortion measures are part of a broader national strategy on sexual and reproductive health, including education and access to contraceptives, which aims to prevent unwanted pregnancies in Spain.

That notwithstanding, The Roman Catholic church, in concert with Spain’s opposition conservative Popular Party have blasted the ruling Socialist government’s efforts to make it easier to get an abortion and give it legal backing.

In response several Spanish Socialist politicians and political commentators have already pushed back and are calling for an end of the Churches Tax Exempt status. They are alsoaccusing the conservatives of being “hypocritical,” saying they did nothing to completely outlaw abortion during their eight years in power from 1996 to 2004 for fear of alienating Spanish voters.

The Catholic Church and the state have been closely linked in Spain for centuries, but in modern times under Spain’s Fascist Dictator Fransisco Franco, a symbiotic relationship developed in which the support for Franco by the Roman Catholic Church in Spain lent legitimacy to the dictatorship, which in turn restored and enhanced the church’s traditional privileges in that country.

However after the Second Vatican Council set forth the church’s new positions on human rights in 1965, that relationship began to break down, until finally in 1973 the Episcopal Conference convened, calling for the separation of church and state in Spain and the revision of a 1953 agreement between Franco and the Vatican that gave the church extraordinary powers in Spain but also allowed Franco to veto Vatican appointments of Spanish Church officials.

After Franco’s death and the subsequent replacement of the Fascist government with a new democratic Spanish state, the church finally achieved the separation it had been seeking, however the result of this new independence did not always bode well for the church or its social positions.

The passage of a law in 1981 legalizing civil divorce struck a telling blow against the influence of the church in Spanish society, as did a 1985 law legalizing abortion under certain circumstances in Spain. That abortion law was further liberalized to it current version in 1986, over the fierce opposition from the church.

Another result were government measures aimed at reducing, and ultimately eliminating, direct subsidies to the church and the removal of the Church’s traditional influence in the area of Spanish Public Education.

But even with these rollbacks in the churches ability to direct public policy in Spain, the church still has considerable influence in this country where 76% of the electorate identifies themselves as Catholics.

And like the recent Patrick Kennedy Communion controversy in this country, the action of the the Church in Spain has now opened up the issue of denying communion as a means to intimidate Spanish Catholic politicians and influence Spanish law for serious and heated debate among Catholics in Spain.