Friday June 11, 2010
Pope Discusses Spain’s Anti-Life, Anti-Family Legislation with Spanish President
By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
VATICAN CITY, June 11, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero concluded a meeting yesterday with Pope Benedict XVI, during which they reportedly discussed Spain’s new abortion law, which permits women to have their unborn children killed by a doctor for any reason during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.
The law, vigorously opposed by the Catholic Church and a majority of Spaniards, violates Catholic teaching on the sacredness of all human life.
During the meeting, which was reportedly double the length of a normal papal meeting with a foreign leader, the two also reportedly discussed the “importance of education,” an issue that has also created divisions between Zapatero’s socialist government and the Catholic Church.
Zapatero’s Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE), which controls the government through a coalition with other socialist parties, has imposed a civics program called “Education for Citizenship and Human Rights,” which seeks to indoctrinate children with socialist concepts of moral relativism, and promotes the acceptance of homosexual behavior.
They also reportedly discussed “the eventual presentation of a new law on religious freedom,” a prospect that has hovered over the Catholic Church and other religous institutions in Spain since 2008, when the Zapatero government first proposed it.
The current law protects the freedom of religious institutions to conduct their own affairs, restricted only by the freedom of other religious groups to function as well as “security, health, and public morality.” However, Zapatero has menacingly spoken of amending the law to preserve the “secularity” of the government, in the face of objections raised against his anti-life and anti-family legislation.
Although the discussions themselves remain private, there is little doubt that the pope reiterated the Catholic Church’s opposition to the PSOE’s social legislation, and expressed concerns regarding the rights of the clergy. Zapatero reportedly assured the pope that the reform of the 1980 religious freedom law would not affect the concordat between the Spanish state and the Catholic Church.