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Interview With Primate of Spain
TOLEDO, Spain, 25 JULY 2006 (ZENIT) The family is the area that
suffers the most from secularism, says the primate of Spain.
In this interview, with the backdrop of the 5th World Meeting of
Families held recently in Valencia, Cardinal Antonio Caņizares of
Toledo, who is also the vice president of the bishops' conference,
analyzes the impact of that event.
Q: In a culture such as that prevailing in Spain, Europe and the whole
of the West, of a strong secularist ideological hue, can it be said that
it is in the realm of the family where this secularism is manifested in
the most obvious and aggressive way?
Cardinal Caņizares: I think the family is not the realm where that
secularism is generated, but it is the realm that is suffering it the
most.
The family in Spain is concretely a Christian family, even when it is
not practicing, when it is shaken by the winds of secularization, by the
whole media power that spreads a relativist ideology. There are still
some very valuable resources in the Spanish family and we are still in
time for it to recover its truth.
But it is also true that the Spanish family, because of the pressures of
this media power, of the very aggressive legislation against it, is
suffering from a strong relativism based on living outside of the truth
that constitutes it, so that people often fall into regrettable
situations.
Q: At one point you said that the teaching of certain currents of moral
theology have led to the secularization of the family. How is this
possible?
Cardinal Caņizares: That happened because it was not precisely the
anthropology that Revelation shows in Jesus Christ that has been at the
base of that moral theology.
And of course, all that spread later to premarital courses; it was
spread by family movements which have extended, for example, to a false
reading of Paul VI's encyclical "Humanae Vitae," even being contrary to
it. Here one finds many of the keys of that moral theology.
What was simply advocated, consequently, was that love is what is
important, not openness to life. It has been taught that marriage
being in fact indissoluble
that indissolubility is founded only on a decision of the spouses.
As can be seen, it is a morality that is based solely on a personal
decision and not on what are objective realities, which are given to us
in Revelation and in our created nature itself.
In sum, this moral theology has not spread the supreme reality of God
the Creator who made man in his image, man and woman.
All this has had a very negative influence on the secularization of the
family. And if the family is secularized, the whole of society is
secularized.
Q: Now we come to the "new rights," as, for example, that of "homosexual
marriage," which has been approved in your country by the Socialist
government.
Cardinal Caņizares: Human rights, in that new conception, are no longer
those inscribed in human nature.
Human rights are no longer something that precedes man, the decision of
the majority, the decision of power, but something that is indicated by
power, whether this is the totalitarian power of one man, of the
majority, or that generated through the manipulation of public opinion:
in a word
power.
In this way, it is the human being who decides and who gives the
absolute explanation of himself, so that there are no human rights.
At present we are witnessing
and Spain is one of the clearest exponents
a
very profound crisis of human rights, but with that very profound crisis
there cannot be democracy.
Q: You speak of totalitarianism.
Cardinal Caņizares: It is a totalitarian attitude. It matters not
whether it is a parliamentary totalitarianism or the totalitarianism of
a man; it is totalitarianism.
What matters is what the majority or the supreme power defines, and if
it defines something that is foreign to the natural created order, why
not? ... And this is taken as the criterion.
It is what we saw in the prime minister's investiture address, where he
said he would promote the possibility that every one decide on his sex.
But if each one can pronounce himself on all this and everything is a
question of decisions, then why should violence and robbery not be
legitimate also, if it is oneself that decides?
In this conception, there is nothing that is objectively good or evil.
Q: The natural law has been replaced by some "transit laws" ...
Cardinal Caņizares: Yes, but these "transit rules" are established by
power and no one else
so that we move to a totalitarian regime and a false democracy, and also
to an apparently absolute freedom. But it is the freedom of the fish in
the fishbowl. The fish is always moving, it seems to have much freedom,
but it has none.
Q: Who are the neediest today?
Cardinal Caņizares: Pope Benedict XVI has very great sensitivity for the
poor, but he does not turn it into demagogy.
He is concerned about the person and also knows that the most radical
poverty that the man of today suffers is the want of God. He has
repeated it constantly, in one way or another, and that is why he also
says, referring to Europe, that an atheist state is not possible, that
an atheist state turns against man.
And where the reality of God is wanting, as the reality that gives
intangibility to the law, to fundamental principles, to rights, etc.,
there cannot be a free society.
Q: The issue of the want of God is in close relationship with the
problem that the family is going through, you were saying.
Cardinal Caņizares: When there is want of God in the family, there is
want of love, and the family then enters in crisis, because the family
is either love or it is nothing. A reflection that the Pope has used on
occasions is that a world without God is an infernal world, it is a
hell. And that at times, under the appearance of good, man is being led
to hell, referring in such a case to questions on life that also have to
do with faith. ZE06072501
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