CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

God’s Little Loophole: Spain’s Public Funding of Private Prejudice

One hears, with some regularity, the accusation that Spain remains a nation trapped in its own medieval amber. The Black Legend, that centuries-old smear campaign prosecuted by Spain’s Protestant competitors, painted Torquemada’s homeland as a place where thought crimes were extracted by garotte and the Inquisition functioned less as a theological corrective than as a particularly enthusiastic human resources department. It is, one is told, a calumny. A slander. The fantasies of jealous northern Europeans who have never experienced a proper lunch.

And frankly, the evidence supports the defense. Spend a weekend in Maspalomas, where the dunes host what is arguably Europe’s most magnificently libertine open-air congregation, or in Ibiza, where the sacraments are administered at four in the morning and nobody is entirely sure what they just took, and this image of Talibanic repression dissolves faster than the sheen of lubricant on the surface of the club swimming pool. Tolerance is on display everywhere. Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, a full decade before the land of the Magna Carta got around to it. Its gender equality legislation, is a document of such fastidious progressivism that it would make a Scandinavian blush. No profession, it states with admirable clarity, may bar entry to a person on grounds of their sex.

No profession, that is, except the one the government helps pay for. Spain has outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex. It also funds it—lavishly—when the institution in question is old enough and wears vestments.

Walk into any of the country’s magnificent cathedrals on a Sunday morning — and they are magnificent, which is part of the problem, because it is very difficult to be properly furious inside something that beautiful — and observe the ritual with the detached eye of, say, an anthropologist who has stumbled upon a particularly well-funded cargo cult. There at the pulpit stands a man. Usually of retirement age. If younger, frequently foreign, which raises its own questions about the domestic recruitment pipeline — Spain has hemorrhaged thousands of local conscripts since the sputtering out of their fascist dictatorship, a staffing crisis that the institution has addressed not by reconsidering its eligibility criteria but by importing replacements from Eastern Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. One notes, with some admiration for the consistency involved, that the Church has chosen to solve its shortage of men by finding more men elsewhere, rather than glancing at the 51% of the population that has been waiting quietly in the pews.

This man is delivering to a congregation that is itself largely geriatric, a sermon whose intellectual content has not been substantially updated since the Council of Trent, on the common subjects of: the inadvisability of women wearing skirts above the knee, the spiritual dangers of loving the wrong person, and the eternal importance of a wife’s submission to her husband, her protector, her king. This last point is sourced, we are to understand, directly from the Pauline bits, and is therefore non-negotiable.

The women, meanwhile, are assigned roles commensurate with their theological status: they may arrange flowers, launder vestments, organise the parish raffle. The Church has always found uses for women’s labour. It is women’s authority that presents the doctrinal difficulty.

Now. The Spanish Constitution, Article 14, guarantees equality before the law regardless of sex. The Ley Orgánica 3/2007 closes every conceivable loophole. And yet that pulpit — that publicly subsidized pulpit — remains, by law, by treaty, by the solemn agreement of a supposedly secular democratic state, a Y-chromosome-only establishment.

The theological justification for this arrangement is, it must be said, one of the more ambitious pieces of reasoning in the history of human thought. The female of the species is ineligible for ordination because she is, in the founding mythology of the enterprise, derived from the rib of the first man, created as his companion and subsequently responsible, via a spectacularly ill-advised conversation with a talking snake, for the introduction of knowledge, suffering, and the general inconvenience of history into what had previously been a perfectly adequate garden. The precise date of this catastrophe, according to the seventeenth-century Bishop James Ussher’s admirably specific calculations, was the 23rd of October, 4004 BCE — a Sunday, as it happens, which at least has the virtue of explaining why Sundays feel the way they do.

This is the intellectual foundation upon which a modern democratic state has agreed to rest its........

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