Spain: A Moment of Truth

The scene was worthy of Goya. Out of Barcelona's Gothic Santa Eulalia Cathedral marched a procession of 120 angry, black-robed priests bearing a petition that preached against the government. From the other direction charged a crowd of grises—the grey-clad, club-swinging cops who maintain order in Spain. Before the melee was ended, blood flowed from anointed pates. It was another sign of the crisis that Spain is undergoing on the long road to reality.

The priests were supporting the cause of Barcelona University students, who have long been demanding "free associations" in their colleges as opposed to the Madrid-dictated "syndicates" that have long called the collegiate shots. The cops, on the other hand, were merely trying to maintain order—a major problem in Spain since the days of the Moors.

After the clash, some 100 priests gathered outside the home of their Archbishop—76-year-old Gregorio Modrego Casáus—and sent in six of their leaders to demand that the church immediately take steps to excommunicate the guilty cops. They also said that they would "tell the truth" from the pulpit. Archbishop Modrego said nothing—but his silence wished the priests back to their pulpits.

To the priests, that was a rocky challenge. They swarmed into Barcelona—many of them wearing zippered windbreakers over their cassocks and roaring in on motorcycles—to challenge the Archbishop on his home ground. To that extent, the clear, Catalán distortion of Joan Miró was more appropriate than Goya. But more than anything, the priests were reflecting the alienation that exists in Spain between age and ambition, between the liberal principles of the Vatican and the rigidity of the Spanish Catholic hierarchy, which automatically aligns itself with the state.