http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/spai-s19.shtmlThe Catholic Church is using the network of Catholic family organizations known as Concapa to broaden its campaign to oust the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) government and return the right-wing Popular Party to power.
Concapa has collected a 3-million-signature petition denouncing PSOE policies. Together with the Church and the PP, it has called a demonstration in December in Madrid to denounce the PSOE’s proposals to change religious education policy. They anticipate a turnout of over 1 million.
Under the PSOE’s proposals, Catholic families will retain the right to choose a religious education for their children, but it will be optional. The Church is also bitterly opposed to a proposal to allow Islamic clerics to teach religion in schools.
A Concapa spokesman declared that “all actions are legitimate” to counter what it describes as an attack on “freedom and education.” The PP accuses the government of sowing “chaos, alarm and confusion and uncertainty” by an education programme that is in the “hands of a radical minority.”
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The Vatican sees its campaign against the PSOE as the starting point for an international struggle against what the new pope has described as a creeping “global secularism.” John L. Allen, Madrid correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, explained, “observers across the Catholic world have been waiting to see if this crisis might stimulate Spanish Catholics to invent a new model of resistance, a new battle plan ... for the struggle against what Pope Benedict XVI has called a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in the secular West.”
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