The Cause of Spain's Troubles
CATHOLIC writers are denouncing the attitude of the Spanish premier Canalejas as an attitude of war against religion. If it be so, the Papacy has only itself to blame that such a war threatens. If there is a country anywhere that has been subject to the Church of Rome, surely it is Spain. There, if anywhere, the real fruits of Romanism may be looked for. A writer in the Westminster Gazette gives the following account of the situation: "The program of Canalejas, the Spanish premier, translated into plain English, is, equal rights for all and special privileges for none. This statement is accepted as a political truism by the majority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In Spain the clericals denounce it as blasphemy. In many respects, in the country districts, Spain is still the Spain of Philip II. To make the causes of the present acute crisis clear to English readers it is necessary to go briefly into the past. The secret of the fall of Spain from her high estate can be summed up in one word—clericalism. The dew of privilege has soaked the clerical fleece, while that of the laity has remained dry. "How is it that the races which inhabit this peninsula, and which are brave and honest—how is it that they are not masters in their own house? The answer is that the Church of Rome has been (since the fall of Granada in 1492) absolute mistress of a country where nothing is modern, nothing is commonplace. Three memorable acts of cruelty have firmly planted the clerical yoke on Spain. These mile-stones on the road to ruin are—the founding of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, and the expulsion of the conquered Moriscos. By the expulsion of these two industrious races the church got rid of the two peoples which dared to think for themselves; by the Inquisition they penned the men of Spain into one fold. The effect of clerical dominion both on church and people was disastrous. "Spain, which, so long as the Moorish and Jewish religions flourished there by the side of the Christian, had been the freest country in Europe, became the most enslaved as soon as the Catholic was the sole form of faith permitted by the state. It is no figure of speech to say that for three centuries the path of knowledge led in Spain to the stake. Mental silence does not further a nation's growth. The population of Spain sank in two centuries from twelve millions to about six millions. No one can deny that the policy of Spain, both foreign and home, was completely under priestly influence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cassock, south of the Pyrenees, has always been on the side of absolutism and ignorance. Those have been the pillars on which clericalism has securely rested in Spain. Canalejas is the Spanish Samson, who has laid patriotic hands on these two pillars." — The Present Truth (England).