Chapter 5
Is the Church also plotting against Suárez? Does Suárez feel the Church is also plotting against him? Just as in recent times he has made enemies of the journalists and bankers and businessmen and of almost the entire political class of the country, shortly before the coup Suárez makes an enemy of the Catholic Church; the Church, for its part, abandons him to his fate, if not actually doing everything in its power to bring him down. For Suárez, a religious man, a weekly Mass Christian, educated in seminaries and Acción Católica associations, very aware of the enormous power the Church still possesses in Spain and that its support is one of the few he has left in the disordered scattering of these final months, the setback is a terrible blow. The Church — or at least the upper echelons of the Church or an important part of the upper echelons of the Church — had favoured the change from dictatorship to democracy on the eve of Franco’s death and, since Suárez had come to power, Cardinal Tarancón, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference from 1971, established a complicity with him over the years that managed to weather the Church’s determination to maintain its eternal privileged status in spite of political transformations. In the autumn of 1980, however, Suárez and Tarancón’s relationship snaps; the provocation for the rupture is the divorce law, an unacceptable revolution for a large part of the Church and the Spanish right. By that time the law has been in the works for almost two years, always under the control of Christian Democrat ministers and always guarded by a personal pact between Suárez and Tarancón severely restricting its reach; but in September of that year, as a consequence of one of the cyclical crises that rock the government, the law passes into the hands of the leader of the Social Democrat sector of the Prime Minister’s party, who accelerates proceedings and manages to get the Congressional Justice Committee to approve in mid-December a much more permissive projected divorce law than the one agreed between Suárez and Tarancón. His response is immediate: furious, feeling betrayed, he breaks all links with Suárez, and from that moment on, wrong-footed by the Prime Minister’s feint — or by his weakness, which prevents him from keeping his promises — Tarancón is left at the mercy of the conservative bishops, partisans of Manuel Fraga, who also see their positions reinforced by the arrival in Madrid of an extraordinarily conservative papal nuncio representing the extraordinarily conservative Pope John Paul II: Monsignor Innocenti. So Suárez is also left undefended on the religious flank; more than undefended: it is a fact that the nunciature as well as members of the Episcopal Conference encouraged operations against Suárez organized by the Christian Democrats of his party, and it’s very likely that the nuncio and some bishops were informed in the days before the coup that a trimming or rectification of democracy with the backing of the King was imminent. It’s hard to believe all this had nothing to do with the Church’s behaviour on 23 February. That afternoon the plenary assembly of the Episcopal Conference was meeting at the Pinar de Chamartín Retreat, in Madrid, with the aim of electing Cardinal Tarancón’s replacement; on learning the news of the assault on the Cortes the assembly broke up without pronouncing a single word in favour of democracy or making a single gesture of condemnation or protest at that outrage against liberty. Not a single word. Not a single gesture. Nothing. It’s true: like almost everyone else.