The Spanish Catholic Church from the Zapatero Era to the Rajoy Government
Since 1983, the year of John Paul II's visit to Spain, the church in Spain has organized collectively through the pastoral plans. In this regard, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's years in government are located within the coordinates laid down by a document drawn up during the Jose Maria Aznar government in 2002, Una Iglesia esperanzada. "iMar adentro!" (Lc 5:4) and above all by the plan Yo soy el pan de vida (Jn 6:35) written in the midst of a controversy with the Socialists in 2006. There is strong continuity between the two documents, but it is certainly the second one that had a greater influence on the decisions made by the church during the years the Socialist Party (PSOE) was in government. The 2006 plan moves between warnings about the danger of an "immanent humanism" and of "internal secularization," referring, respectively, to the idea that man can live independently from God and the confusion and doubts that are increasingly affecting priests. According to the bishops, on the one hand, Spain was under attack from "laical tendencies as far as the organization of society is concerned, a disregard for the reality of marriage and family, attacks on the life of unborn conceived, restrictions on freedom of education, the drifting of young people, now subjected to new forms of slavery." On the other hand, they state that "the main issue that the church in Spain must face today is not to be found in society or in the cultural environment, but within itself; it is an internal problem and not an external one."1