CHURCH leaders in Spain have appealed for restraint amid mass protests against the new Socialist-led government’s plans to grant amnesty to jailed Catalan separatists.
“Reform is always necessary — but it must respect legal mechanisms and seek the common good,” the President of the national Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Juan José Omella, said.
“I’m asking political leaders and opinion-formers to do everything possible to ease social tension — to work at all times for the general interest, favouring communion and what unites us.”
The Cardinal, who is the Archbishop of Barcelona, was speaking at the start of a bishops’ plenary on Monday, two days after right-wing Catholic groups joined a mass rally against the new Amnesty Law in Madrid.
He said that Spain was experiencing “harsh realities”: one quarter of its population was facing deprivation, which necessitated dialogue and respect for constitutional rules “without sanitary cordons and exclusions”.
Any political pact that modified the status quo agreed by Spaniards in their 1978 constitution would provoke “division and confrontation”, Cardinal Omella said, unless it enjoyed the support of all political forces and a “qualified majority of society”.
The Amnesty Law, agreed with Catalan parties by the Socialist Premier, Pedro Sanchez, in return for supporting his new government, will free up to 400 separatists and law enforcers who were imprisoned after the independence referendum in October 2017, ruled illegal by Spain’s Constitutional Court.
More than 70 per cent of Spaniards, including a majority of Socialist Party voters, opposed the amnesty in an opinion poll conducted in September. Police, judicial groups, and civil associations have also warned that it could fuel new secession demands.
Among church reactions was a comment by Bishop José Ignacio Munilla of Orihuela-Alicante, who told his diocese’s radio station that it would be “immoral” if “some politicians amnestied others who committed crimes in exchange for their votes”. Archbishop Jesús Sanz Montes of Oviedo told ABC news that the amnesty represented “a calculated amnesia, with harmful consequences for Spain”.
Mr Sanchez was sworn in last week by King Filipe VI for a new four-term term, after securing a narrow majority of 179 votes in Spain’s 350-seat Congress of Deputies, four months after an inconclusive election.
The socialist Premier, who has been in power since 2018, declined to take his inaugural oath on the Bible. He was reported on Tuesday to have included prominent Catholics in his new government, in an effort to improve ties with the Church, which has criticised recent laws restricting religious education and liberalising abortion, euthanasia, and gender recognition.
The Pope has summoned all Spanish bishops to a meeting at the Vatican on Tuesday, to discuss an early 2023 papal visitation report on their Church; there has been a sharp decline in vocations and attendance at mass across its 70 dioceses and 23,000 parishes.