GAUDI NIGHT:

Spanish Showdown (George Weigel, 4/08/11, Inside Catholic)

In the fall of 2007, I spent a week in Spain, giving lectures, meeting with Spanish Catholic leaders, and making a hair-raising climb up several hundred scaffolding stairs to the top of Antoni Gaudi's Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona -- preceded by Stanislaw Cardinal Dziwisz, Pope John Paul II's longtime secretary, who was doing the trip in a cassock (after confessing to me, sotto voce, that he wasn't too fond of heights)! Over the course of numerous conversations in those days, it became clear that the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, in power since April 2004, was not simply secular in character but aggressively secularist.

Textbooks were being rewritten to enforce the government's leftist view of modern Spanish history; students aiming for admission to prestigious universities would be required to give the "correct" answers about such traumas as the Spanish Civil War in order to pass their entrance exams. Street names were being changed to eradicate the memory of the politically disfavored from Spain's past. Marriage had been legislatively redefined so that any two people, of whatever gender, could be civilly "married." (Shortly after I left the country, another law enabled a Spaniard to enter a civil registry office and "change" his or her sex simply by making a declaration to a government bureaucrat that she was now he, or vice versa. Some things are so absurd that they compel ridicule, and this one prompted me to a knockoff from My Fair Lady: "The dame in Spain is mainly in the name.")

In interviews with the Spanish press, I suggested that the 20th century had a name for a political program that tried to re-manufacture human nature while rewriting history: the name was Stalinism, which used to be considered a hateful thing. Zapatero's Spain was not, of course, Stalin's Soviet Union in the latter's most brutal manifestations. Nor was the current Spanish government as crudely malevolent as the Spanish Stalinists of the late 1930s, who, during the Spanish Civil War, murdered tens of thousands of priests and religious, often sadistically. The Zapatero government, I suggested, was far more clever. It would impose a hard-left agenda on Spain through legislation, step by step, rather like the frog being slowly boiled in a pot of water who doesn't realize that death is at hand until it's too late.

Recent events in Spain have done nothing to persuade me that these judgments were excessively harsh.

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