The Vanguardia leads off today with the headline "Bush says another resolution 'unnecessary'." Bush made it clear that he wants another UN resolution to pass, but if it doesn't, he considers the US to be operating with UN permission anyway because of Resolution 1441 and the 16 previous UN resolutions censuring Saddam. Meanwhile, sources within the Spanish government said scornfully, "If France uses its veto, that'll be their last veto in history", since the UN will lose all authority if it is seen to be openly defied by the United States.

Aznar and Blair are sticking by Bush though it's going to cost them, short-term, in popularity. Big deal. After the war is won nearly bloodlessly and all of Saddam's atrocities are revealed--and they are going to shock the world--it will suddenly be a very popular war. Aznar and Blair and Berlusconi will look like strong leaders who took a stand. Chirac and Schröder will look like what they are: weasels. The Belgians will embarrasedly look to make some other international news, perhaps another bribery scandal involving the royal family or another ring of pederast murderers ignored by the police. The Spanish Left will claim that the anti-American demonstrations of the 15th were a glorious popular outcry against war in general rather than a tantrum thrown at the United States in general and the war on Saddam in particular.

The Vanguardia is making an extremely big deal out of the Vatican's--well, Angelo Sodano and Jean-Louis Tauran's--stand aginst the war on Iraq; Aznar is going to Rome tomorrow to see the Pope and the guys who do the actual work. (Note: I do not think these guys are manipulating the Pope. I see the Pope as someone like Reagan, someone who set the general tone of leadership, made the final decisions, and left the detail work to competent, well-chosen associates. Sodano and Tauran and Navarro Valls are certainly competent, and I'm sure they are following the Pope's general instructions.) I'll bet Aznar's visit does no good at all.

Jesús Gil from Ibidem had a good post a couple of days ago in which he warned about Catholic-bashing, which he is absolutely right to caution about, and pointed out that it's the Pope's responsibility to work toward peace. What's he supposed to do, cheerlead for a war?

I dunno. One thing is that the Church is not a pacifist organization and never has been. In fact, the Church has often justified war. (The Quakers, say, are really pacifists.) Therefore, it seems to me that the Pope is being unfair in his judgment. Right now there are ten or twenty wars, depending on how you count them, happening around the world. I haven't heard the Church speak out against any of them, and especially not about the French intervention in the Ivory Coast. I think, therefore, that the Vatican is being partial and the part it's taking is against the United States, since the only war that it is speaking out against is the war on Saddam--a war that is as justified as any in history, in my view. I also believe that this partiality is due to the Latin European cultural outlook of those who hold the important posts in the Church hierarchy.

Another thing I find very disturbing is the attitude among Catholic circles in Spain that there is a conspiracy against them in the United States. Their evidence is that there has been a "media campaign" about the wave of cases of child sexual abuse over the past couple of years in the United States. I personally believe that it's difficult to be much lower than a child-molester, and enough Catholic priests were child-molesters, lifelong pedophiles who behaved upon their urges, that this is a sign of a serious problem within the Church that has to be dealt with openly and honestly. The current Pope is unwilling to deal with the problem. But this is not the worst part about what happened; the worst part is that certain elements within the American Church, bishops and cardinals, knew there was a problem with child-molesting priests and covered it up. This is about as evil as it gets, protecting men who abuse their positions of trust and authority to exploit children sexually. The Church has lost a great deal of moral authority in my eyes, and I will continue to find it wanting until I see a real change. I haven't seen that change. I imagine it will take a new Pope to make a clean break with the past.

The Church needs to greatly modernize itself. Its hierarchy needs to be completely democratized and to become transparent. It needs to do a much better job vetting its priests. It also needs to get rid of the "only single men in the priesthood" rule. It's unnatural to expect people to be celibate all their lives. Most normal people, gay or straight, are thereby excluded from the Church hierarchy; many young Catholics who feel a religious call go over to the Episcopalians or Lutherans instead, where they can work as ministers and live like normal people at the same time. What this means is that there is a sizeable percentage of weirdos among priests. (Personal experience: I've known three Catholic priests. One is a great guy who I went to high school with. He's a real Christian and I admire that. He practices what he preaches. We had a running gag in senior-year American government class: I'd make a comment and end my reasoning with "Because, of course, there is no God." This guy Bill would imitate a lightning flash striking me dead and intone in a deep voice, "You could be wrong." Maybe you had to be there. Cracked up the class, though. One, here in Spain, is a weirdo but not a perv. He is a drunk. I know this because back when I was a drunk I used to drink beer with him. And a third, who lived in the same college dorm as I did, is a major weirdo. He's a perv, all right. I wouldn't turn my kids loose around him if I had kids. I really would not.)

And, by the way, it's simply ridiculous to say that women can't be priests. That attitude is simply not acceptable to the general American or European public any more. In addition, the no-birth-control rule is just plain ridiculous too and a cause of unnecessary deaths from sexually transmitted diseases. Seems to me they could at least legalize barrier methods for reasons of disease prevention. I'll bet all you Catholics have heard this many times before and don't much appreciate us outsiders giving unsolicited advice, but you know the Church is in trouble and needs a major shakeup. There have been major shakeups before; allowing condoms, women priests, and married priests wouldn't be as big a change as those made during Vatican II, and taking these steps would remove a lot of the opposition to and criticism of the Church. And they'd regain the moral authority they used to have, because right now, the fact that the Church opposes the war means about two cents to me. A democratic, modernized, transparent Church--I'd think twice about what they have to say. The Church as it is currently operating--nope.

Here's a little pearl from right-wing Catholic Enric Juliana in today's Vangua: "Catholicism will have to have a showdown with the evangelical fundamentalism of the ruling group in Washington". That is not a very responsible attitude at all, and it is not unusual among Spanish Catholics. Enric Juliana is the guy who keeps complaining about the "moral lynching" of the Church over the pederasty scandals in America. He's one of the elements that just doesn't get it yet. By the way, Bush is a Methodist. Some evangelical fundamentalism. The United Methodist Church is against the war. The only evangelical, as far as I know, who is important in the government is John Ashcroft. He's pretty far right and is too extreme for me. I would not vote for him in an election if the Democrats put up a reasonable candidate. But Ashcroft is not the neo-Nazi that he is often portrayed as. His fundamentalism is non-violent. It's misleading to call both Ashcroft and other American fundies the same thing we call Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda and the Wahabis, because they are two different kinds of fundamentalism.

The Generalitat took a survey about the values of Catalans and especially Catalan young people (ages 18-29) in 2000 and have just gotten around to publicizing it. Only 5.7% of Catalan young people consider themselves to be practicing Catholics. 58.2% consider themselves "nonpracticing" Catholics. The rest, I suppose, are agnostics, atheists, or don't know, don't cares. If this isn't an alarm bell for the Church, I don't know what would be. And check out this table of "basic values"; the percentages are, first, young people who say these things are basic values, and second, all adults.

Value Young people Adults
Family 99% 99%
Friends 97% 88%
Free time 92% 79%
Work 85% 88%
Politics 15% 20%
Religion 10% 33%

This should be another alarm bell. And here comes wake-up call number three: the degree of confidence in the social system. These percentages are of the number of people who trust different influential institutions.

Institution Young people Adults
Educational system 58% 63%
Health care 58% 62%
Catalan parliament 55% 62%
Catalan police 54% 61%
European Union 46% 45%
Spanish police 46% 58%
Spanish parliament 46% 53%
Public administration 41% 41%
UN 41% 36%
Press 40% 40%
NATO 38% 31%
Judicial system 36% 42%
Armed forces 21% 37%
Church 18% 31%

My responses would have been that I trust all of these Spanish institutions to be acting basically honestly and with the public good in mind except for the press and the judicial system, but I only trust the health system, the Spanish Parliament, both police forces, and NATO to act generally competently.