Spanish views from a small town

A young woman is walking along the road, humming quietly to herself a song her mother used to sing to her as a baby. Her green cloak is still new, and she decided to wear it because of the chill in the air, despite the fact that her mother had warned her not to. Times had changed. The war had ended, and the men of religion had won. They had begun to impose their laws, and a green cloak was not appropriate any more.  "Woman!" a shout breaks her reverie. She looks around. A man of the law is standing behind her. "There is to be no singing! You are to be clad only in black! Hie ye home and strip that ungodly color off your back!" The girl turns and rushes home, her green cloak flowing like a wind-blown leaf. Her mother had been right. It was a good thing he hadn't asked her who her parents were, and where she lived. There would be a record of how the religious men had entered their house and taken the food cooking over the fire on the last Wednesday of the previous...

Today is the first Sunday in August. That means it's the Romería dos Milagros in my father's parish of O Araño, the pilgrimage of the Virgin of Miracles. I think that only in Spain does the Virgin Mary have just about every atribute. Virgin of Snows, Virgin of the Pilar, Virgin of the Miracles, Virgin of Carmel, Virgin of Guadelupe, Virgin of the Forlorn, Virgin of Mercies, Virgin of Heads, Virgin of the Oak, and the list goes on and on, passing through some very strange attributes (heads? really?).  More than anything, I assume that the Virgin Mary has taken on the names, attributions, and locations of ancient deities once venerated widely in certain areas. The spot where the chapel of the Virxe dos Milagros is in O Araño, is next to a pre-Roman hillfort, and may very well have had religious significance before Christianity came by.  Because the Virxe dos Milagros is not the patron saint of the parish. That's Santa Baia (Saint Eulalie), and her feast day is in Dec...

It has been mentioned that various states in the U.S. are trying to legislate Bible study in schools. Even Trump tweeted about what a good idea that was. Personally, it seems a suspicious attempt to put prayer back in schools.  Which Bible would be studied? The Protestant King James version? The Catholic Vulgate version? How would the texts be analyzed, in a literary fashion or from a religious viewpoint? Would any mention be made of Islam, that considers the Old Testament a holy book? How would the differences in religious interpretation be explained? Would they be mentioned at all? The First Amendment should put paid to those discussions in the states that are considering introducing the Bible. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,..." Thomas Jefferson later wrote an interpretation, in which he said the Amendment created a "wall of separation between Church and State." That Federal law was later extended to the individua...

Spain and Spanish politics have always had a working relationship with the Catholic Church. From the times when it was the only and obligatory faith, to more modern times, when the Church helped the State keep the people under control, they have almost always gone hand in hand. Despite the fact that Spain was declared a lay state with no state religion in the Constitution of 1978, some public personages have a hard time remembering that. Take the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz. The man is in charge of the different branches of police and national security. He is also a devout Catholic. I have no problem with that. I don't care if the ministers and other government bigwigs believe in God or not. I do care that they not mix their religion with their job. And when the Minister of the Interior declares that he solemnly believes that he has a Guardian Angel named Marcelo, that looks over him and even helps him find a parking space, it doesn't look too good for that...

From the outside Spain has always appeared to be a profoundly Catholic country, where religion and politics seem to be intertwined and everyone goes to Mass on Sundays. That was true once upon a time. Until the middle of the nineteenth century and a wave of anticlericalism by liberal governments, everyone had perforce to belong to the Catholic Church. The Inquisition made sure of that. After the "separation" of Church and State, a Spanish citizen could belong to a different religion without civil retaliation. But the Church still remained a force to be reckoned with. When George Borrow travelled the length and breadth of Spain as he described in The Bible in Spain in 1843, Catholicism was still the only religion allowed, though Protestant preachers were permitted to enter the country. As of 1868, though, freedom of religion became the law. Which did not mean the Church lost power. While it had lost a lot of property during the nineteenth century, it did not lose all of it no...