Monthly Archives: August 2011

I had not been able to find other reports on this in the Times or in the other two main newspapers, the Independent and the Examiner, until news emerged that a 14 year old child had been shot dead by government forces.  

The last time Irish media attention was turned to Chile was during the long episode of the miners who were trapped in the copper mine. When that episode concluded, present Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, who was seeking the position of Taoiseach at the time, appeared on RTE’s prime time chat show The Late Late Show. He claimed that if elected Taoiseach he would approach the economic and political crisis with the same vigour that Piñera (the billionaire Chilean president) had approached the problem of getting the miners out of the mines.

There are other interesting coincidences between Chile and Ireland beyond the management style of certain members of the political class. For instance, because of past economic growth rates –largely a result of its mineral wealth, particularly copper- it became a commonplace to refer to Chile as ‘the jaguar of Latin America’.  It also has a caste of politicians who make a virtue out of running the country as if it were a business, and a Minister for Education with a taste for making money out of private investments in higher education.

Most reading this will be familiar with the story of Chile under Pinochet as a laboratory for the free market economics of the Chicago School after a US-backed coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

And yet the deep inequality entrenched by the Pinochet dictatorship was within Chilean society was never properly redressed, even as the Pinochet dictatorship receded and the Concertación –a coalition of centre-left parties- took over the running of the country during the past 20 years.

Indeed, post-dictatorship Chile has long been a poster child for neo-liberal voices who sought to sugarcoat their ideological devotion to the market with a social democratic tinge. Chile was held up as the reasonable, measured alternative to the populist revolutionary inclinations of the Chávez government in Venezuela.

Consider, for instance, this analysis by British Labour Party MP Denis MacShane from 2009:

<a href=" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/hugo-chavez-venezuela-media “>Barack Obama has robbed Chávez of his main anti-American card. Washington is calling for the return of the ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya and Obama is seeking to support democracy and rule of law in Latin America.

President Lula in Brazil or Michelle Bachelet in Chile are trying to create a step-by-step Latina social democracy in place of the populism inherited from the Peronist tradition.

These leaders seem more worthy of support from the British left than Chávez.

(I should point out that Manuel Zelaya did return to Honduras, but two years later, but not as president, and only after the Obama government had done everything it could to sustain the coup government and support the laundry of the coup through elections which, as Mark Weisbrot notes here,‘most of the rest of the hemisphere, and the world, rejected as neither free nor fair’).

It is interesting to revisit MacShane’s comments in light of a recent Wikileaks release from the US Ambassador in Chile, which ‘looks at ways the U.S. can counter Chavez and reassert U.S. leadership in the region’.

The cable assesses that

‘many of the region’s leaders and opinion makers…reject the notion that Chávez best represents the region’s interests’,

which is hardly surprising, given that the leaders and opinion makers usually come from the ruling class and largely represent ruling class interest whereas Chávez draws his support from the broad mass of poor Venezuelans.

The cable also notes that

‘Chávez has made significant inroads, particularly with local populations, by providing programs for the underprivileged and by casting the U.S. as elitist and only interested in promoting free trade to the benefit of big business.’

You would wonder how on earth he managed to convince local populations devastated by IMF adjustment policies of the latter.

Furthermore:

‘The slogans are facile: Neoliberalism makes the rich richer and the poor poorer;’

which, as populations across Europe are now learning, is facile in the sense that ‘cigarettes are bad for you’ is also facile.

But how did the ambassador to Chile envisage Chávez’s influence could be countered? In many ways, but one way stands out:

Chile offers another excellent alternative to Chavez.  FM Foxley seeks to integrate Chile more fully into the global economy.  Chile has not only stated but demonstrated — e.g. Bachelet’s letter to House leader Nancy Pelosi expressing Chilean support for congressional ratification of FTAs with Peru, Colombia, and Panama — its willingness to help bring along other Latin American countries into the global economy.  We should look to find other ways to give Chile the lead on important initiatives, but without making them look like they are our puppets or surrogates.

This, remember, is the social democratic government of Bachelet, not the current right-wing government headed up by the billionaire Piñera, whose management style Eamon Gilmore has admired in public.

This translated account by Victor de la Fuente from the Chilean edition of Le Monde Diplomatique provides the background to what is going on in Chile at the moment.

It illustrates that if there is something that ought to inspire Ireland from Chilean experience, it has nothing to do with persisting with obedience to the dictates of the market or Labour Party leaders seeking to adopt the managerial style of Chilean billionaires, but with the mobilisation of a student movement against government which serves entrenched privilege and supra-national financial institutions.

In Chile, the dreams of Allende are reborn

Hundreds of thousands of young people are demonstrating in the streets, something that has not been seen since the final years of the dictatorship. Chilean students, in three months of mass mobilisations, have changed the face of the country and placed the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera in an uncomfortable positon.

Chilean society has woken up after two decades in which it was half asleep, since it had somehow conformed to the idea that there was no alternative to neoliberalism.

“A stage in the history of this country is ending. It started more than twenty years ago and has encompassed five governments. It began full of hope when in 1988 the Chilean people put an end to a dictatorship. Whatever its achievements, the postdictatorial stage built up despair and frustration. The unkept promises have consolidated a profoundly unjust society”, claims a text written by three leaders of the new left force.”

“Where did the exemplary “Chilean model”, the “Latin American jaguar” end up? If forty years ago, when the country was poorer, education was free, what has happened with development and the high rates of growth? Where is the money from progress?”, the young people are asking themselves.

On the 28^th of April, presaging the large movement that would be unleashed in June, the first national mobilisation of university students took place, from public and private campuses, against the high level of indebtedness that they must take on in order to  access higher education.

In May winds of change began to be felt when thirty thousand people demonstrated in Santiago, and several thousand in various cities, against the HidroAysén project, which seeks to install five mega-dams in Patagonia. The opponents reacted swiftly in defence of the environment and in condemnation of the gigantic enterprise of the multinational Endesa-Enel, linked to the Chilean group Colbún. This project, supported by the government and leaders of the right-wing parties and of the Concertación, was approved despite public opinion, thus causing widespread condemnation throughout the country.

A little earlier there had been significant regional movements, such as in Magallanes against the rise in gas prices and in Calama for obtaining benefits from the production of copper in the region, as well as land reclamation and hunger strikes by the Mapuche. Then other demands emerged, the victims of the 2010 earthquake, who are spending their second winter in emergency dwellings, the copper unions who brought the mines to a halt, the demonstrations for the right to sexual diversity, but without doubt it was the secondary school and university students with mass strikes, demonstrations and school occupations, demanding free and quality education, who transformed the situation giving another dimension to the mobilisations and cornering the right-wing government.

They question the system

The student movement attacked the very foundations of the neoliberal system, staking a claim to the role of the State and demanding that education should not be considered a commodity. They demand an end to the education system based on profit, that the military dictatorship left behind. The most chanted slogan has been: And it will fall, it will fall, the education of Pinochet!

To achieve the fundamental changes they have set out the establishment of a Constituent Assembly to elaborate a new Constitution. The students also propose that funding for free education be carried out through the renationalisation of the copper industry and tax reform.  They seek the solution to the conflict by demanding more democracy, with the establishment of a plebiscite so that the citizens decide what type of education the country wants.

The students condemned the official press which is criminalising the demonstrations, and they conducted tough criticisms of both 0the Piñera government and the Concertación. They took over the TV channel Chilevision, and they also occupied the headquarters of the ultra-right UDI and the Socialist Party.

In parallel there is a strong rebirth of the figure of Salvador Allende, young people dressed up as the socialist president were enthusiastically applauded in the demonstrations, in which placards such as “The dreams of Allende are possible” appeared. The speeches of the martyred president, conducted more than 40 years ago, on education and the nationalisation of copper, broke records for internet hits.

The student movement has been characterised by its political clarity and also for its massiveness and persistence. It has been all-encompassing, with the participation of secondary school and university students, as well as teachers, parent associations, ONGs and unions.

As with other rebellions throughout the world new technologies have been widely used, but perhaps the main thing is that it has been a democratic and participative movement. The students have sought to maintain a good relation between with the activities of the leadership and the participation of the grassroots, with assemblies held where everyone gives an opinion and decides.

They have shown great creativity in the form of their protests, each day they would appear in the streets with something new:  costumes, dances, imitations of collective suicide, mass kissing sessions, painted naked bodies, impersonation of preachers, standing still in the street, ingenious banners…by doing this they do not merely wish to attract attention, but also to involve other sectors and to distinguish themselves from the reports of street violence. They have gone as far as to repair damage caused on the fringes of the protests, painting the walls of houses or collecting money for the owner of a car that got burnt out.

Chilean education

If the mobilisations have been this strong it is also because of the injustice of the Chilean education model, implanted by the dictatorship and developed by the civil governments that succeeded it.

In primary and secondary education, in the last three decades there was a boom in private or subsidised schools, which nowadays take in 60% of pupils. There is not a single free public university since all of them –the public as well as the private- charge high fees, the only such case in Latin America.

Less than 25% of the education system is funded by the State and more than 75% of the rest depends on student payments. The State only dedicates 4.4% of GDP to education, considerably less than the 7% recommended by UNESCO. Today there are 60 universities in Chile, the majority of them private. The students must pay between 170,000 and 400,000 Chilean pesos (€250 and €600) monthly, in a country in which the minimum wage is €182,000 (less than €300) and the median salary 512,000 pesos (less than €800).

This situation means 70% of Chilean students take out student loans. 65% of the poorest quintiles stop their university degree because of economic problems.

According to the sociologist Mario Garcés it is a case of a perverse system, that leaves thousands of middle and working class Chileans in debt as soon as they finish study, since student loan repayment begins with one’s first job. He adds that education stopped being a mechanism for social mobility in Chile and ended up the opposite: a system for the reproduction of inequality.

Why now?

It is true that there were student mobilisations during the different governments of the Concertación, including that of 2006, under the presidency of Michelle Bachelet, known as “The revolution of the penguins” (because of the dark colour of the uniform and the white shirt of the secondary school students in public colleges).

However, never, in the last twenty years, were the protests so important as these. During two decades the Concertación administered the system by trying to maintain the complex balance between market policies and state regulation. It carried out some reforms, managing to lower the rates of poverty and extreme poverty, but raising inequalities,  leaving Chile as one of the 15 most unequal countries on the planet. At the beginning the Concertación had the benefit of the positive image of having contributed to the end of the dictatorship, but the discontent and the criticisms from the population kept building up, along with the indebtedness of the students. The injustice of the system became flagrant with the arrival of an openly right wing government that runs the country like a business.

Sebastián Piñera and the new leaders arrived with an even clearer conception of leaving education in the hands of the market, which was the last straw, moreover the young –who did not live under dictatorship- are less influenced by anti-statism.

Conflicts of interest also contributed to the student rebellion since the Minister of Education himself, Joaquín Lavín was a founder and shareholder of the Universidad del Desarrollo [a private university – R].

The discredit of the political class is at a high level. All opinion surveys show a persistent drop in support for right-wing parties in government and also in support for the Concertación, currently in opposition.

The young people only trust their own forces and those of the social movements, but neither in the parties nor in the institutions, rejecting the mediation of politicians and even the Church.

The government, in tackling the mobilisations, has used dialogue and repression, moving more and more toward the criminalisation of the movement. The official press –that is, nearly the entire press- has emphasised the violent actions, which have taken place at the end of many demonstrations, promoted by marginal groups, some of them delinquents and infiltrators, even police, who have been denounced using videos and photos.

The fourth of August past turned out to be “Black Thursday” for the government. The president Sebastián Piñera said “everything has a limit” and the Minister of the Interior, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, denied the right to students to demonstrate down the Alameda [the main thoroughfare in Santiago – R], as had become customary. The repression was systematic during the whole day, and 874 students were arrested, according to official figures. The response of the citizens did not take long in coming and that very night the street demonstrations, the ‘cacerolazos’ throughout every neighbourhood and city in Chile. The government, with its intransigence, turned the march into a National Protest, as in the times of the dictatorship. That same 4^th of August the influential CEP survey gave Sebastián Piñera only 26% support, the lowest rating for a president since the return of democracy.

The students persist in their mobilisations, they reject the proposals of the government to lower the loan rates and they demand a radical change of the system. They have joined the rest of the social movements, they are taking part in the National Strike on the 24^th and 25^th of August and they continue to seek a plebiscite so that the Chileans themselves decide democratically. In whatever way the mobilisations might continue, a new form of practising politics has been born, from the social movements. The young Chileans are opening the great avenues that Allende mentioned.

 

The relation between the power of the Church and class power are seldom considered. In mainstream discourse the standard practice in Ireland is to talk about the Church and the State as two monolithic entities and not bother mentioning class at all. So it is of no relevance, for instance, that many of the most exclusive schools in the country whose purpose is the cultivation of an elite, demanding huge fees for entry but still receiving funding from the state, are run by Church orders. So the Irish Times sees no issue in referring to the ‘prestigious Gonzaga College‘, a Jesuit school, as though this prestige were part of the natural order of things. In fairness,that is the way many of its alumni see it. How is it that a religion whose founder was crucified by the powers that be ended up with a Church hierarchy that in many places for long periods was -and still is- a key element of those powers? This translated article by Vicenç Navarro deals with one part of the answer: the saints.

I should point out from the start that I am not a believer, that is, I do not possess what believers call ‘the gift of faith’. I belong however to a family and a tradition that always drew a distinction between religions on the one hand and the institutions that reproduce it, such as the Church, on the other. My parents taught me to respect religions and believers, but not always the ecclesiastical authorities that run the churches, which, as human institutions, configure religions and their beliefs so as to optimise the interests that keep them going. An example of this is the composition of the collective of saints and blessed in the Catholic religion, picked out by the highest authorities in the Catholic Church. The study of who is named a saint, when, how and why, says a lot about this institution and its interests during the 20 centuries of its existence. It is highly interesting (especially for those who study how power is generated and reproduced) to analyse how this is perceived by the heads of the Catholic Church and what the objectives are in naming a particular person as a saint, and their relation to this power.

In theory, the naming of saints has the objective of establishing reference points, that is, models for orienting Catholic believers, since it is part of the teachings of the Catholic hierarchy to honour and celebrate them. They are therefore exemplary individuals that should inspire the Church faithful. But to be “exemplary” also implies that we should know what they are exemplary of, and the objective behind this. And this becomes very clear when one analyses the political context that largely configured the decision to bestow sainthood on some people as opposed to others.

These thoughts arise from reading an article titled ‘Roman Catholic Sainthood and Social Status: a Statistical and Analytical Study’, published by two historians at the University of Rochester, Katherine and Charles H. George, in the Journal of Religion. This article obtained most of its data from the detailed biography of the saints by Alban Butler, along with the work of Herbert Thurston and others, published in a total of twelve volumes.

What the article’s researchers sought to know was the social class or social status of the 2,494 saints about whom there is enough biography published. Needless to say there are considerable methodological problems when trying to compare social class or status throughout history since the establishment of the Catholic Church. But the authors of the article have carried out credible and rigorous work, showing in each epoch those sectors of the population that corresponded to the upper classes (nobility in the feudal epoch and bourgeoisie in the capitalist epoch, for example), middle classes and popular [in Spanish – ‘popular’ – R] classes with lower status. It turns out the authors found that the large majority (1,950 of the 2,494, that is, 78%) belonged to upper statuses, which they define as upper class; 422 (17%) were middle status, and only 122 (5%) came from the popular classes.

 

The authors of the study point out that the upper classes, of high status, made up only 5% of the population of the countries studied; the classes of middle status 10-15%; and the popular classes made up the great majority (from 80 to 85%). The exemplary beings for the Catholic Church were on the whole people from ruling elites, and this in spite of the famous saying in the Bible that “it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”. Naturally not all ruling elites throughout the history of the last 20 centuries were the richest people in that society, but it is a reasonable supposition to assume that if they were not, they were at least at their service.

What is even more interesting is the social composition of the saints according to the century in which they were named. And it is only in the first century of Christianity when the saints belonging to higher status are not the majority. In the first century, people of middle and popular status had more possibilities of being named a saint. Not so from the second century on. Since then, the domination of saints  among the upper classes is almost absolute, reaching its high point during the Middle Ages, a period in which the Church acquired greater power and wealth. In reality, sainthood was frequently related to the donation of riches to the Church, to the point that entire families were named saints. For example, the noble Dagobert was named a saint, as were his mother, his grandmother and his four children. The noble Dagobert and his relations donated all their properties, on dying, to the church. This domination by upper class saints diminished somewhat in the 18^th,19^th and 20^th century, when other groups of middle ranking status emerged which the Church wished to capture. Saints among the popular classes, however, continued to be a minority.

In Spain, apart from status, what has been decisive when it comes to conceding sainthood, has been one’s position within the co-ordinates of power. Thus the naming to sainthood of Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei and the defender of the military coup and dictatorship it established, as well as that of the priests killed by out of control groups (and opposed by the Government of the Republic), without ever sanctifying the Basque priests killed by the putchist State, is a clear indicator of how the Church identifies with the antidemocratic and reactionary forces in power in Spain, for which the Church was their central ideological support. And its leaders are proud of it.

Andrew Brown in today’s Guardian writes, of the protests in Madrid against the pope’s visit:

the ability of mainstream Christianity to attract a crowd of 1.5 million young people seems to me a damn sight more newsworthy, since we expect people to protest against the pope, and we do not expect them to turn out in large numbers to support or see him.

Numbers don’t prove truth, of course. But they are measures of commitment, and of political importance. Three hundred times as many people have travelled to Madrid to see the pope as have travelled to protests against him. Which group is more important to know about?

There is something of truth to this. People should be interested in the social forces that lead 1.5 million people to Madrid, and of the wider social and political implications for such a movement. So what are they? 

Pope Benedict XVI is in Madrid  for the celebration of World Youth Day. In Spanish, this translates as Jornada Mundial de la Juventud, or JMJ as per the common abbreviation. Not being well up on World Youth Day in Spanish, the first time I saw JMJ used in association with the Pope in a newspaper headline I thought it stood for Jesús Maria y José.

The Pope’s visit has caused a lot of consternation. For lots of reasons, not least for the fact that the Spanish hierarchy of the Catholic Church are megalomaniacal demagogues closely associated with the most reactionary sections of the Spanish ruling class, or the fact that the Catholic Church in Spain for the most part was deeply intertwined with Franco’s fascist regime. It is therefore seen as an affront by many Spanish people who want a fully secular state that World Youth Day’s staging in Madrid should be solicitilously attended to by the Madrid government. Those who have taken to the streets to protest have been beaten off it by the police. Here in this video, at 1:30, you can see the police beat a young woman (to whom they refer as a ‘niña’ – a young girl) and a journalist.

Various journalists have complained of their violent treatment at the hands of the police. In this video below, you can see a police officer remove the credentials of a journalist, and refuse to answer her questions as to why he is doing so. He then claims that he is unable to identify her properly because her credentials do not contain the name of her parents, her address..he then threatens to thump her, and demands that she produce identification. He then calls for her to be placed in handcuffs.

My own feeling about this is that we are witnessing a recrudescence of right-wing authoritarian Christianity as a product of the political and economic crisis sweeping Europe.

This is not quite so palpable in Ireland, since the brute facts of the abuse perpetrated by Catholic Church authorities are fresh in the public mind. But even in Ireland, there are some aspects of the reaction to the abuse scandal that bear consideration.

First of all, in his much-praised speech in the Dáil, Enda Kenny spoke not only in his capacity as Taoiseach but as a faithful member of the Catholic Church. He used Catholic teaching to repudiate the actions of the Church hierarchy. He spoke of the ‘good priests’, the ‘Church’s light and goodness’. He talked about what the Church needed to do for its own good (‘to be a penitent Church’). He said that it needed to do this ‘in the name of God’, and ‘for the good of the institution’. He spoke of his agreement with Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. And yet the robustness of his statement that the Church should not be above the law of the State -hardly a radical stance- was greeted as though it were a heroic and epoch-changing declaration.

More recently, Wednesday night in fact, TV3 broadcast an edition of Tonight With Vincent Browne, presented by Libertas founder Declan Ganley.

Ganley is also the ‘chairman and chief executive‘ of St. Columbanus AG. This Swiss asset management company claims on its website that the firm was:

named after St. Columbanus who emerged from the austerity of Celtic Christianity to become one of the most outstanding sources of cultural, educational, and spiritual renewal in Europe, which was struggling to create a new unity from the many regional conflicts resulting from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries.

On the Browne programme, Ganley featured David Quinn, Irish Independent columnist and head of the Iona Institute, a right-wing Catholic think-tank. Also present was Breda O’Brien, a fellow member of the Iona Institute, and Kevin O’Connell, a former Metropolitan Police commissioner . The topic under discussion was the London riots. The emphasis of the discussion, resolutely enforced by the leaden insistence of Ganley, was that the riots could be explained in terms of absent fathers and abdication of parental responsibility, and that prevailing political and economic conditions had nothing to do with it.

Richard Boyd Barrett of the United Left Alliance was ceaselessly interrupted and the right-wing commentators were given free rein to make their case, unencumbered by any need to cite evidence or justify assessments. While this may be merely a stronger dose of the formula usually pursued by the normal presenter, it is striking that Ganley had been given the slot in the first instance. In one of his previous appearances on the show, in which he had been invited to respond to a new book on Marx by Kieran Allen, Ganley used the opportunity to bark anti-communist gobbledygook, demonstrating in the process that he had not even bothered to read the book. It might therefore seem odd that he should be considered a suitable candidate to present a current affairs programme. But the pedigree did not matter: in the end, it was welcomed. And this provided Ganley the opportunity to dedicate a full programme to the association of morality with police.

Of particular note here was David Quinn’s invocation of Edmund Burke, whom he claimed had spoken of an ‘inner policeman’ -derived from parental and clerical authority- that removed the need for more police on the street. It scarcely matters here if the ‘inner policeman’ is a religious deity in disguise or the incarnation of a forbidding patriarchal male superego: what it demonstrates is how austerity becomes fertile ground for an authoritarian imagination. It is worth noting in passing that Edmund Burke -who was pro-slavery and believed that the law of the market was the law of god- recognised that an authority based on fear would rob the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning.

(A few little drops of fear always comes in handy when consolidating democracies)

We should therefore ask what real resistance there is in Ireland to a revamped version of Catholicism based on a veneration of capitalism-and-freedom and accompanied by a message of renewal and rebuilding.

Back to Spain. Below is a translated piece by Juan Carlos Monedero, more of whose work I translated here.

Benedict XVI in Spain, Ratzinger in the Puerta del Sol, 15-M in the street.

History tells us it is a religious custom to exterminate those who, having a same intellectual fixation -consistent with believing in imaginary or real beings with highly unlikely- attribute those extraordinary facts to a being with a different affilation to one’s own. Sin was not initially so much about not unbelief, but believing in the same thing with slight differences. It was only with the development of civilisation that the number of atheists grew. This increased the range of candidates for execution, since as well as the heretics, there were now the wicked and the godless. It should not be surprising that, from time to time, religious believers reach an agreement to get rid of a common enemy, leaving their history of fighting for later. At the end of the day, who cares if an atheist gets stabbed by a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim or an Orthodox?

Though it might seem strange, to burn those who profess a different religion is part of the evolutionary process, even though, at the same time, it is still a clear sign that it is not enough for the process of hominization to be complete to assume that the process of humanisation is also complete. When homo sapiens developed langauge, he began to bury the dead (something that no other species does). A cold eye cast over the past can freeze the smile of those who do not dare to think of themselves as one of eternity’s random episodes. What happens when the gods are everything but kind? If instead of being an explanation for evil they are its directors?

The neanderthals, that extinct ancestor of ours -that gave way to the cro-magnons from which today’s humans come, including the pope- already worshipped the dead. This meant that they thought in some sort of life after death and in some keeper for the inn beyond the grave. And yet, they disappeared as a species. When a whole human species intelligent enough to believe in gods disappears, is it because it wasn’t sufficiently developed to believe in the true god? If this were the case, what guarantees are there that today’s homo sapiens, which has given so many indications of brutality and backwardness, is not condemned to the same fate, such that those gods in which it believes abandon it and make it disappear from the world? As Isidore of Seville said, live as if you were going to die tomorrow and study as if you were going to live forever.

The less believable something is, the more pomp and circumstance it needs. To crown a king needs more pageantry than hanging a sash on an elected president. Judges have so little credibility that they need to dress up. It is unthinkable to have an army without dungeons for those who question the stripes. And the Catholic Church prefers to spend 50 million euro on proselytising rather than send that money to the Horn of Africa. Jesus Christ, if he were alive today, would be in Somalia. Though he would have been excommunicated by Rome beforehand. The pope, on the other hand, prefers Spain. And to prepare his visit, Ratzinger sent the Jungen Katholiken to take the Puerta del Sol. It could have been nice to live and let live in Madrid (with those communities who have been locked in, making the streets their own). But that was not how it turned out. They lack the irreverence of the young. A young person who does not ask questions of herself has been born old. Some of these young Catholics, after leaving McDonalds in Arenal street, tried to stop the secular march from entering Sol. But theindignados had already learned the way. “This plaza/belongs to the pope”, said the Catholics. And the indignados, looking on them with clemency, thought: “what ignorance”. Although, with the things of the beyond, who could find the right argument?

Days earlier, within the 15-M movement the pope’s visit was discussed. As is often the case, the movement showed its wisdom. It has nothing against the individual beliefs of anyone, but against a religion that wants to tell everyone else how they have to behave. And, moreover, with public money. This is, mainly, the complaint against the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the administrative successor of the Holy Inquisition). But it is obvious that there are more reasons.

In 1953, the US and the Vatican were the countries that broke the international isolation of the Francoist dictatorship, which was born out of the defeat of the constitutional government of the Republic. The gringos did it in exchange for military bases. The Church, in exchange for privileges.

It was the same Catholic Church that blessed Franco’s cannons, that allowed the dictator to enter cathedrals under a canopy, that placed its corps of priests in the service of the denunciation, punishment and repression of Republican men and women. 

The same Church that has not sought forgiveneess for the Francoist genocide supported by the Catholich hierarchy. It was Ratzinger who recommended that the pilgrims visit the Valley of the Fallen, the mausoleum in honour of fascism, built by Republican slave labour.

Difficult to say hello to him nicely on the streets of Madrid. One keeps imagining him making the Nazi salute.

After the short parenthesis of the Second Vatican Council and the Church of the poor promoted by John XVIII, John Paul II, and his armed wing, the current Pope Benedict XVI, set about breaking the spine of liberation theology. In this task of demolishing the greatest renewal of the Church in the past two centuries, they relied on the Legion of Christ and Opus Dei, the latter elevated to Personal Prelature. Do we need reminding that the founder of the Legion, Father Maciel, was responsible for polygamy, paedophilia and corruption?

Do we need reminding that Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer was an important pillar of the Francoist dictatorship? Ratzinger was the main instigator of the cover up of the crimes of paedophilia within the Church. If in democratic Ireland there is evidence of more than 25,000 cases of abuse of minors, what happened under the dictatorship in Spain? Only in 2010, Benedict XVI denounced the “appalling crime” of paedophilia. But when the Irish authorities sought to apply the same laws to priests as to any other civilian, the Pope recalled his ambassador, in a clear threat of breaking off diplomatic relations. The crimes of the Church have tribunals that only concern their god.

In Spain we have spent too much time putting up with the privileges of the Catholic Church, despite Spain being a secular country. Privileges in education, where public money is used to finance religious schools; privileges in tax returns, where one is invited to dedicate the social contribution (even in 2011!) to the Catholic Church; privileges in the funding of priests and their presence in public spaces; privileges in the funding of activities of proselytism (such as the current visit); privileges in the dereliction of duties on the part of prosecuting authorities on a multitude of crimes -sexual, real estate, banking, media, homophobic, patriarchal, racist or of other types committed by members of the priesthood. Privileges that emanate from a Concordat negotiated before the Constitution and whose Francoist character makes it incompatible withour democracy. When a group of crazed individuals who confer extrasensory qualities on the state show contempt for the lives of others [not sure what he’s talking about here – R], the law ejects them from institutions and closes, even without any proof, their magazines and newspapers. And why should the press organ of the archbishop of Madrid be afforded the luxury of calling for rape to be removed from the penal code? Why does this ecclesiastical invitation to rapists, in a country that still murders women, not receive penal prosecution?

Ratzinger in Madrid has come to the city that has woken up. The city that is telling tired Europe how it has to reinvent itself. Since Machiavelli at least, one does not believe in coincidences. Cameron the conservative blames the disturbances in London on the “loss of values”. Not on the rupture of the egalitarian foundations of democracy. He repeats, albeit with less intelligence, Daniel Bell’s argument in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), a work intended to do its little bit for the struggle between the crisis of legitimacy that the left explained and the request for governmentality and demand for Moral-Christian rearmament of the right. And one of the main intellectual battles is going to be fought in Madrid. On the side of the Vatican -and Spanish national-catholicism- there will be an attempt to raise the religious Reconquista from the capital of the kingdom. The 15-M movement, on the other side, is going to keep calling for a democracy that is worthy of the name, and that is incompatible with the dark kingdom as signified by the obscurantist, authoritarian and reactionary conception of the Vatican. The right wing is clear in its aim. The police charge in the Puerta del Sol makes one think that the government is still stumbling. If social democracy, which has lost its direction since adopting the third way, loses the banner of secularism, what does it have left?

All the more reason to continue to call for the reinvention of nearly everything.