Aggrieved secularism. For this ‘crime’, if we can define it as such, the Spanish Episcopal Conference will compensate with more than 16,000 euros a former religion teacher, Maria del Carmen Galayo Macias, for sacking her without any justified cause. This is the verdict of the Superior Court of Justice in the Canary Islands, a ruling which nullify the former by the Constitutional Court. The case had been brought into a Spanish court in 2002 in order to determine whether a conflict between the 1979 State-Church accords and the Spanish Constitution of 1978 existed. The Constitutional Court gave the right to the Church to fire Galayo Macias as she was infringing the Catholic doctrine: she was living with a man without being married, after the legal separation from her husband. The dismissal was unfair, the Canary court ruled, because the Church’s decision had been an ‘act against the fundamental rights’, which may be charged with financial and moral penalties. Ten thousand euros for material damages, six thousand for moral damages.

Apprehension or fear. However, the Episcopal Conference had revealed they will appeal to the Supreme Court and then to the Consitutional Court too. ‘This means that at least 7 years will go by before the woman will be able to teach again’, the newspaper El País underlines. This case highlights the issue of the power of the Church, which judges not only the knowledge of the subject of a teacher, but also his or her beliefs, private habits and affective and sexual ties. The Episcopal Conference mounted opposition since months to the new education reform (Ley Orgánica de la Educación) by Prime Minister Zapatero, particularly with regards to the new rules for the teaching of religion in schools and the new subject introduced with the reform, an education in citizenship course. In a document issued after the Episcopal Conference’s Council last February, the bishops claimed that this new subject may be used to ‘indoctrinate’ students in the government’s own beliefs and to impose relativism and gender ideology. The new subject will be mandatory for at least one year in primary schools and one year in secondary schools, dealing with topics from democracy institution to globalisation, from the highway code to human rights. The latter group includes also the topic of the ‘new families’ and homesexual marriage (Spain is the fourth country in which they are allowed, with Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands). That is the reason for the Church’s apprehensive (or fearful) attitude towards the government’s bill: students may learn new principles which clash with those taught by the traditional families and Catholic religion.

Contradictions. The new bill take away the Church’s total control over religion teachers. Bishops maintain the right to appoint the teachers autonomously, but their professional activity will comply with the workers’ regulation. In this way, only the government’s bodies will be responsible for deciding the limit over which the employer cannot judge. While waiting for news from the case of Galay Macias, the ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands may cast light on a contradiction in the Socialist Spain of Zapatero: from 1998 the Government controls the recruitment of 17,000 religion teachers, which however may be judged from the Church for their qualifications. This represents a conceptual and juridical contradiction resulting in the association of the government with a religion, in a country defined as secular by its Constitution.