Dawn

Dawn

Monday, September 27, 2004

The Socialist government already seems to be downplaying its plans to remove the Catholic Church’s privileges. A pupil of my daughter’s may have given us an insight into why this might be wise. ‘We Spanish,’ he said, ‘are ready to die in a good cause. Or for an idea. But ask us to do something regularly and we are easily bored with it. We like the idea of the State giving money to the Church since it absolves us from going to Mass every Sunday and chucking coins onto a plate. We won’t necessarily agree with the government reducing the subsidy’. Perhaps this is why the latest announcement suggests that they won’t actally do this, but instead give taxpayers the chance to subsidise other religions as well.

Of course, another reason for the backtracking might just be that the upper echelons of business here are heavily populated by members of Opus Dei, an organisation which is considered right wing even within the Catholic Church!

LanguageWatch
It’s a funny thing about Spanish that it uses capital letters [upper case] where we wouldn’t in English. And vice versa. So, for example, the days of the week and the months the year don’t merit capital letters. But such things as the state, the army, the navy, the church and the government do. These, of course, are all authoritative organisations so I should point out that I have also seen nature and humanity capitalised.

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