CIAO DATE: 11/2013
December 2012
Centre on Human Rights in Conflict
The parable of Jesus walking on water occurs in three of the gospels. This parable was used by Imanol Zubero, former Socialist Senator and Basque peace activist, now Professor at the Basque Country University, to describe to me the position of the Catholic Church in Spain today: where once the Church had known how to walk on water and call to the Spanish people to follow it, today the Church has lost its prophetic voice and is in danger of becoming a closed sect. Zubero was referring to the 1970s when the Church played a positive, and widely admired, role in the Spanish Transition to democracy. In this paper I try to account for this change by considering cases from two ve ry different Catholic traditions, Spain and Australia, which have at least one thing in common: in both cases the Church has been accused of responsibility for historical wrong-doing and complicity in human rights abuses. In Australia the Church sought f orgiveness for its role in historic injustices perpetrated against Aboriginal people and became an agent for a wider reconciliation within Australian society. In Spain the Church has not offered an apology for its role in the Civil War and for supporting the dictator Franco, preferring to think of itself as a victim who forgives. What accounts for this difference? My suggestion is that four related factors are likely to bear heavily on this question: 1. Church mission and pastoral strategy; 2. Whether the conflict was symmetric or asymmetric, in other words, whether the church in question was victim or perpetrator, or both; 3. Transformations in the wider socio-religious context; and 4. The impact of theological change within world Catholicism.
Resource link: Walking on Water: Religion, Historical Memory and Human Rights in Spain and Australia [PDF] - 104K