Spain

Nihilist Drift
The Story of a Totalitarian
Initiative in a Rule of Law

by Javier Prades

After the attacks of March 11, 2004, and the electoral upset of March 14, 2004, the Spanish situation has been turned upside down. The Socialist Party has chosen a radical policy, which it is imposing on society with a utopian program that springs not from real social demands but from an ideological pretension. The recent legislative reforms–by now known to all–carry a double claim. On one hand, they try to re-introduce the sixties-era “revolt against the father”(in the widest sense of the word: revolt against everything that came before and is given), and, on the other hand, they aim to supersede the Spanish political transition and the Constitution of 1978. Paradoxically, it is the current government that is carrying out a policy of breaking with the social and constitutional consensus that is the basis for the civil coexistence of the last thirty years of our history.

A reawakening of consciences
The political powers, supported by very powerful media sectors, create a situation of social and cultural challenge that forces one to take a position. Such a challenge is an unforeseen opportunity for reawakening one’s own conscience and contributing to the good of our nation. Before describing our actions during this past year, it is good to start out by saying that even during the final years of the Popular Party government we judged certain initiatives to be unjust for both the society and the Church. It is enough to point to the statements we put out about the Iraq war or the attempt to use the Spanish Church in the anti-terrorist struggle between the parties.
We were very struck by Fr. Giussani’s insistence in his statements regarding the war about the need for an education suitable to the level of the situation in which we are living, i.e., the level of the human heart’s deepest needs. We have staked our position on this judgment, both in the face of social and political events (terrorist attacks, parliamentary and European Union elections, the referendum on the European Constitution) and the debate with other positions, both secular and Catholic.

An original contribution
Perhaps our most original contribution, in terms of judgment and action, is to recall, in the midst of these problems, the education springing from the essential factors of Christian experience. There is still an openness within people to the need for a fully human life, an openness perhaps weakened by the dominant mentality, but not wiped out.
Indeed, it is useless to restrict ourselves to blaming the government or ascribing to it an ideology foreign to Christian tradition, though we do not underestimate the seriousness of these factors. We have to question ourselves about the results of education in our country. What is not working? Public education is losing its own ideal references, and is reduced to pure instruction and the effort to maintain discipline, as some of the exponents of the left point out. State-subsidized private schools make up about 30%-40% of institutions and are mostly Catholic. Even within the complexity of the situation it must be said that a serious limit within education in Catholic schools–which show themselves to be weak in their ability to generate adult persons for this very reason–is the almost complete absence of a Christian education of the religious sense. For various generations, the bond between the person and his destiny–his happiness–has been identified almost exclusively with “duty.” Teachers, parents, and priests assured happiness–mainly in the life to come–by clearly proposing the duties that, in educating freedom, would bring it to fulfillment. The word “desire” was mostly absent from educational vocabulary and practice. It should not surprise us that this reduction of the Christian Fact and the nature of man’s heart made belonging to the Church a formalism for many. Hence, people abandoned or stayed in the Church purely in terms of social tradition. Fr. Giussani’s educational proposal permits one to recognize God as a factor within human experience (and which transcends it) so that we recognize ourselves as creatures, as sons and daughters, and not as overlords (and here one can find the root of “duty”). Moreover, every form of “slavery” is abolished, since God is not perceived as the external limit to my desire, but as the internal condition that makes it possible. In this sense, God, made man in Christ, encounters and can fulfill young people’s needs of freedom today, which, disengaged from any transcendent reference, express themselves mainly as exasperation of desire and therefore dissatisfaction.

The absence of a question
I was particularly struck at how, after March 11, 2004, it was almost impossible to find within Spanish political journalism a sincerely religious questioning raised by the dreadful tragedy of the attacks, almost as if in order to look humanly on the victims and the tremendous consequences of the massacre, reference to God was unnecessary, or even violent. Not even a cry of desperation or rage was heard: we can do without God, the culture of the “intellectuals” proclaimed. But this censorship of the human questions that instead lie hidden in the people is itself a herald of great harm to common civil life.
In the last few years we have been trying to make the entire life proposal that Fr. Giussani directs to each and every one of us our own. Each of our public positions or gestures of encounter, from participating in the large-scale protests of March 12th, July 4th, and July 18th, to flyers judging reality, is an effort to support each other in looking at reality as something given, as a gift that calls our freedom to adherence, to building society.
Fr. Carrón’s insistent testimony on the work of School of Community is showing the way ahead. It also has given rise to initiatives by some adults. I am thinking above all about the educational endeavors in Madrid and Villanueva de la Cañada [a Madrid suburb], but also about the Spanish branch of Families for Welcome, and all those committed to aiding families or cultural initiatives like Encuentro Madrid. In order to promote the awareness that education is our greatest good and our shared responsibility for all, we are launching a campaign entitled, “Time to Educate,” which, beginning in June and continuing throughout the following year, will involve individuals as well as our associations in examining and spreading Fr. Giussani’s educational conception, doing our best to bring in public groups and personalities, with the aim of raising up a reality of a people.