By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
TOLEDO, SPAIN, March 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Spain sent a clear message to newly-elected socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero this week that the Catholic Church will continue to fight against his regime’s pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality policies.
While stating his willingness to cooperate with Zapatero’s government, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares made it clear that the bishops would continue struggling “against the widening of the abortion law and against euthanasia.” He said that it would be a kind of “treason” to give up the fight.
“The Constitutional Court has recognized the rights of the unborn child,” said Cañizares. “We must first demand the full application of the existing law: we are convinced that many of the hundred thousand abortions that occur every year in Spain would be avoided,” he said in an interview this week with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
Cañizares acknowledged the campaign of Giulano Ferrara, an Italian atheist intellectual, to secure a UN resolution for an international “moratorium” on abortion, and added, “I subscribe to it.”
“For the future, I will fight for the abolition of abortion, which is the worst abasement in the history of humanity,” the Cardinal said.
He acknowledged also that Europe is experiencing a “cultural revolution, not only in Spain but of all the West”, although Spain is “the most advanced in this revolution”.
“The Spanish government has passed laws that deny the evidence of nature and reason, that commit to the State the moral formation of young people, which seeks to establish a new culture based on a false conception of freedom.”
The Cardinals remarks were apparently made in reference to “Education for Citizenship and Human Rights”, a mandatory civics program created by Spain’s socialist government regarded by critics as an indoctrination program that promotes the homosexual agenda and a secularist value system.
Spain’s abortion regime is one of the most liberal in Europe, and under the Zapatero regime it has also instituted “homosexual marriage”, the second nation in Europe to do so after the Netherlands.
The Cardinal acknowledged that, in the recent history of Spain “so far there has been a lack of Catholics in public life, but things are changing, and the future will be different.”
Despite massive protests by Catholics against Zapatero’s anti-life and anti-family policies, the rival Popular Party lost in Spain’s national elections this month, and Zapatero and his Socialist Worker’s Party remain in power.