Zapatero says the Bishops of Spain have fallen into temptation
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By h.b. - Feb 2, 2008 - 7:41 PM
The Spanish Prime Minister said the Bishops had fallen into the temptation of using terrorism in their arguments, and he would not accept that

Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, speaking at a rally in Orense on Friday night, has said that ‘The Bishops have fallen into the temptation of using terrorism’.

It comes after the issue of a note by the Spanish Bishops on Thursday advised the faithful not to vote for a party which was prepared to hold talks with terrorists, despite the fact that one of the Bishops had acted as a mediator in 1998 when the Aznar government was also involved in cease-fire talks with the Basque terrorist group ETA.

Socialists at the rally started to boo as soon as the word ‘Bishops’ was mentioned by the Prime Minister.
‘The Bishops are in their right to call for a vote for the PP’, he said, ‘but they have fallen into the temptation of using terrorism, and we do not accept that from neither Rajoy nor the Bishops’.

Zapatero said that the citizens needed to know, before the election date of March 9, that he wanted to be Prime Minister again, to defend a country for all, a tolerant, free society where everyone can think as they wish and live in accordance with their beliefs.

‘The essence of freedom is that everyone feels free’, he said, ‘and the essence of democratic coexistence is that all beliefs are respected, the essence of a deep and authentic freedom is that nobody, nobody, tries to impose their morals or their beliefs, and that they respect others’. The Prime Minister’s comments were greeted with loud applause.

On Saturday the Spanish Ambassador to the Vatican held talks with the Vatican ‘number two’ to inform him about the Government’s ‘perplexity and surprise’ over the posture of the Spanish Bishops who have called on the faithful not to vote for the Government.

Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, went as far as to describe the Spanish Church’s action as ‘reactionary, fundamentalist, and neo-Conservative’. El País headlined on Saturday that the Socialist Party was threatening to revise the relations between the Government and the Church.

Speaking to the press in the Córdoba town of Rute on Saturday, Moratinos said ‘I want to express my opinion, as a Catholic, not only as an active Socialist, and I want to express by indignation and perplexity, because I do not believe that any Catholic from the 21st century can understand it’, adding that he did not believe that the Bishops’ opinions represented the sentiments of the majority of Spanish Catholics.

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