Madrid, Spain, Aug 8, 2007 / 09:01 am
In a ferocious column published by the Spanish Socialist daily, “El Pais,” Professor Gregorio Peces-Barba, considered the inspiration behind the current Socialist anti-clericalism in Spain and author of the course ”Education for Citizenship,” has threatened the Catholic Church, warning it to either be silent or “suffer the consequences.”
In a column entitled, “Regarding Education for Citizenship,” Peces-Barba said the massive opposition by the Church to the government-sponsored course is illegitimate, since “faith cannot be set against the law in a democratic society like ours.”
The Church, he continued, which “embraces an anti-modern and clerical traditional culture and opposes many legal conclusions of the democratic State” has no basis for its opposition.
Peces-Barba accuses parents who have opposed the course of “extreme arrogance, an attitude of impunity, and an unbearable sense of superiority, derived from the idea that they hold to ‘superior truths,’” and he accuses the Church of years of “challenging legitimate authority, the Constitution and the law by seeking to impose its views as opposed to the general interest and the popular sovereignty which resides in Parliament.”