The Dilemma of the Spanish Right: The Case of Abortion
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
<The author acknowledges his debt to the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur
Foundation for the grant making possible this study.>
Although at times this essay may seem to dissolve into the swamp of
contemporary Spanish politics, themselves distant from the
preoccupations engaging most Americans, I ask the reader to accept
what follows as an exercise in political philosophy. Our common
master, Aristotle, teaches us that political philosophy both emerges
from an examination of political reality and subsequently acts as a
model by which that same reality can be evaluated. The reality in
question in these pages, the subject under discussion, is
contemporary Spain. The three principal figures who occupy this stage
are Manuel Fraga Iribarne, unquestionably the first figure in the
Spanish Center-Right; don Juan Carlos I, King of Spain; and Dr. Jose
Guerra Campos, Bishop of Cuenca. The import of this study is to give
a series of predicates to the Spain of today which seems to act, as
Spain always has throughout its long history, as a mirror in which
the West can read its own soul. In turn, these considerations _ I
trust _ will enable students of political philosophy to add to the
body of predicates they affirm of their subject matter: man's life in
political society.
Few figures in the West today, if any, can emblazon on their
escutcheon the merits accumulated by Manuel Fraga Iribarne.
Throughout a full life dedicated to both political theory and to the
service of his country, the author of more than fifty books,
including an early translation from the Latin of one of the classics
of the Spanish Golden Age _ Luis de Molina _ his erudition in all
things political simply dazzles anybody who reads his <curriculum
vitae.>1 There seems to be nothing that he has not studied in the
literature of politics, spanning classical antiquity to the modern
era. Equally at home in Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu,
Fraga is a master scholar, a man whose achievements turn pale the
modest contributions made by the rest of us who pretend to some
competence in the field.
Were Fraga nothing other than a scholar, he could have rested long
ago on his merits. But added to this more than impressive academic
professionalism is a life lived at the center of Spanish political
existence. A cabinet minister in the government of General Francisco
Franco, Fraga put Spanish tourism on the world map. Almost alone he
turned Spain into a paradise for foreigners in the latter years of
the Franco regime. Blocked off from the world due to the isolation
forced on that country by the Allies after World War II and then only
slowly recovering from the devastation of a civil conflict that
blackened the land with ruins and that sent to their graves a million
men and women _ Spain then became known as the country to which
millions flocked to spend their vacations amidst castles,
incomparable beaches under the famous Spanish sun, the bull-ring and
the magic of the corrida, exotic food, low prices, and a hospitality
matched nowhere in the world. Don Manuel Fraga Iribarne orchestrated
the shift from Spain under siege to Spain swarming with tourists.
Spain became the playground of Europe to which millions of
Englishmen, Scandinavians, and others flocked as they fled their cold
and somewhat boring democracies in the north to fall upon the
delights of this hitherto unknown and strange land. The causes of
this transformation are many. One of them is one man: Manuel Fraga
Iribarne.
His legendary incorruptibility cost him his cabinet post when he
refused to countenance a financial scandal recalling the Teapot Dome
of American fame. Later we find Fraga as ambassador to the Court of
St. James where he distinguished himself in this somewhat more modest
role. Upon the death of General Franco and the advent of democracy,
Fraga became the undisputed leader of the Center-Right. Founder of
the <Alianza Popular> (The Popular Alliance), transformed later into
the <Partido Popular> (The Popular Party), don Manuel aspired to the
presidency of the government. To shorten a long and even tortuous
story, Fraga never grasped the brass ring. Some _ such as the
journalist and academician Ricardo de la Cierva _ say that an inbuilt
tragedy haunts the man. Always the bridesmaid and never the bride,
Fraga at this writing has settled for second best as president of the
autonomous government of his native Galicia in the northwest of
Spain, somewhat equivalent to the governor of one of our States.
Short of stature, wide of girth, powerful physically, brusque of
manner, an indefatigable worker who said that Spaniards in
administrative and professional roles ought to be in their offices by
7:30 in the morning (a mortal sin in a land known for its civilized
indolence), Fraga is a paradox. Almost everyone, including his
enemies on the Left, grant reluctantly that he is the most competent
man to govern Spain. But Fraga has never won nationally. Possibly his
association with the old regime is held against him.
The suspicion that don Manuel had a quasi-falangist and hence quasi-
fascist past cannot really explain his failure to achieve the
presidency. Scores of Spanish politicians today got their start under
the old regime and this has not harmed their futures. The case of don
Adolfo Suarez is revealing. Suarez began his active life as a member
of Catholic Action. He later became the secretary to the head of the
so-called National Movement, the name given the Falangist controlled
one party system that administered but never governed Spain during
the early and mid years of the Franco era. Suarez went on to become
the president of the government that made the transition from
autocracy to democracy after the death of the <Caudillo.> A man with
neither education nor languages, don Adolfo _ handsome, a kind of
Spanish Cary Grant _ for a time was director of television. In his
youth he wore the blue shirt of the semi-fascist Falange and there
are photographs of him giving the Roman salute, <a la> Mussolini.
Today he is head of the somewhat moribund Center Party but is
considered a model of all things democratic and therefore desirable.
The king made him a duke and politics made him rich. Suarez has a
modest palace in Avila and I have often passed that elegant house and
paused to admire the fruits of a life lived in government. Possibly
Fraga, on the other hand, simply lacks what the late Adolf Hitler
considered the first of all prerequisites for political success:
luck. Be that as it may, among Manuel Fraga's many books there is one
that illustrates for me the failure of the Spanish Right, a failure _
I hope to show _ written into the very ideological script of a
doctrine that reaches back to the first decade of the last century,
possibly even earlier.2 Confessing himself to be a liberal-
conservative in a long line of thinkers reaching back to Jovellanos,
Jaime Balmes, Canovas de Castilla, and their political doctrine which
crafted a compromise between the older Spain prior to the French
Revolution and a newer Spain which incorporated that Revolution but
tried to dilute its radicalism by injecting a large dose of the
traditions of the old order. Spain was to preserve its ancient
monarchy but was to strip that institution of power which now was to
repose in a parliament, supposedly a mirror held up before the nation
in which the people could contemplate its own face. Rousseau had
crossed the Pyrennees: the will of the people was now sovereign even
though, hopefully prayed the Spanish Right, that people would remain
Catholic with a king who admittedly was the heir to the famous
Catholic Kings of the Golden Age when Spain evangelized the Americas
and braked the advance of Protestantism in Europe.
Spanish liberal-conservatism was crafted by politicians in Madrid and
could not stomach the possibility of a victory by the Carlists in the
north and east: those mountaineers and peasants, bearded guerrilla
warriors, who swarmed out of their "caverns" as their enemies called
them, proclaiming the venerable doctrine of The Sovereignty of Christ
and the old monarchical legitimacy broken with the advent of Isabel
II. This dreaded possibility had to be avoided because a Carlist
victory would have returned to the Church and the municipalities the
lands robbed from them by the famous "<desamortizacion>" of the
liberal Mendizabel.3 The middle and later nineteenth century
Establishment, reposing, as it did, upon an immense theft of lands
and goods, reminiscent of what happened in England centuries earlier,
could not have permitted a Carlist restoration. Neither did the
liberal-conservative power structure want the triumph of socialist
and communist mobs murdering priests and nuns, burning churches and
convents, and threatening the public order upon which every civilized
society then reposed. From this refusal to go either backwards or
forwards was born Spanish liberal-conservatism. The immediate
political result was the Restoration of 1875, of King Alfonso XII,
the representative of the liberal line of the House of Bourbon, in
contrast to the legitimist or Carlist line which remained from that
time hence in exile.
This historical background may help the reader to understand Fraga's
<La monarquia y el pais.> Written when Spain was groping towards its
uncertain future and when all institutions, old and new, were being
discussed and reformulated, Fraga added his own contribution to the
conversation that gripped Spain upon the death of Franco. The author
casts the role of the monarchy in Spanish society within a broad
historical and philosophical panorama. Rejecting, as was to be
expected, Sir John Filmer's "divine right" patriarchal theory,4
rejecting severely French Bourbonic absolutism,5 exploring critically
but with a certain restrained sympathy the Prussian and Austro-
Hungarian royalist models of the nineteenth century which left
foreign affairs and the armed forces in the hands of the monarch
while turning over legislation to freely elected parliaments subject
to a royal veto,6 Fraga threads his way through a labyrinth of
European constitutional history. He eventually seizes upon the
English monarchy as his paradigm for post-Franco Spain:7 a king who
reigns but does not govern; who stands above the daily clash of party
politics; who advises and influences cabinets and prime ministers
discreetly and prudentially but who stands aside from political power
as the crowned symbol of the nation. This British model appealed to
don Manuel and seemed to him to be the quintessential pattern for the
then newly reborn Spanish monarchy. Fraga wanted, as did many others,
and he was eventually to get, the kind of liberal constitutional
monarchy that did away with royal power. There remains the modest
role of a king who "moderated" political disputes and this was
written into the new Spanish constitution.8
There was a certain irony in this "constitutional" frenzy that swept
Spain in the last years of the seventh decade of this century.
Whereas the English never wrote a constitution and we Americans wrote
one that has lasted two centuries, the Spaniards have a passion for
writing and then discarding constitutions by the bushel. The whole
nation is sworn forever to uphold some written document that is then
discarded in a few years.9 This bewildering and sad accumulation of
paper coincided, of course, with the deep decadence into which Spain
fell in the last century and well into this one. Most of these
documents _ none of them served the nation for long _ proclaimed the
"sovereignty of the people."10 Don Manuel Fraga, in the book under
discussion here, cites the doctrine and makes it his own. In so doing
Fraga situated himself in the broad tradition of European liberal-
conservatism. Ultimate authority and power repose in the people who
represent themselves in parliaments which are composed of men who
belong to political parties orchestrating diverse opinions existent
in the land. Fraga expresses his conviction that a constitutional
democracy, crowned or not, can operate only through a system of
conflicting parties that he hopes, piously, would be reduced to two,
thus paralleling the English and American experiences.11 Fraga warns
against the incipient anarchy menacing any nation split into dozens
of hostile factions.
But when we cut the cackle and come to the horses the heart of the
doctrine rests upon the liberal-conservative acceptance of the
revolutionary sovereignty of the people introduced into the West in
1789 in France. The People, capitalized, is Sovereign.
This shot-gun marriage between the older Catholic tradition and the
Revolution, crafted into existence in the last century by don Antonio
Canovas de Castilla, was to bleed Spanish liberal-conservatism of its
substance through more than a century and a half of anarchy, revolt,
civil wars, and the scandal of poverty mocking capitalist opulence.
This sad tale belongs more to Spanish history than to political
theory but is roots were indeed philosophical. They reach back to the
dawn of modernity and the identification of political power with the
sovereignty of the prince preached in France by Jean Bodin, the first
apologete of royal absolutism.12 I need not repeat here the well-
known history of how the power of the medieval monarchy was limited,
not only by a thicket of free institutions _ guilds, universities,
townships, regional rights and privileges the origins of which are
often lost in the mist of those centuries in which Europe came to
know itself as Christendom _ but ultimately by the Church as the
Repository of Christ's Revelation and as the authoritative
interpreter of God's Law to man a law which included but which was
not exhausted by that natural law, the recognition of which was a
glory of pagan antiquity which had not yet known the Gospel. This
well constructed cathedral of social and political existence began to
crumble when European man decided to secularize the world sometime in
the late fourteenth century.
I am convinced that the shift from classical and medieval politics to
modern politics can best be articulated in terms of the political
philosophy of another Spaniard, a contemporary of Fraga, don Alvaro
d'Ors, himself a veteran of the Spanish Civil War in which he served
as a Carlist <requete.>13 Through more than forty years of
philosophical speculation from his chair in Navarre as Professor of
Roman Law, d'Ors has hammered out a theory of power and authority
which does what political philosophy is supposed to do: render
intelligible in a universal way some aspects of man's life in
society.
Political philosophy _ I speak here in my own name _ gives an
elaborate series of predicates to the subject which is man as a
social and political being. The reader will recall my insistence,
stated early in this essay, that political philosophy aspires to a
kind of universality emerging from an induction into historical
particulars. This universal intelligibility is then referred back to
concrete political situations as a series of predicates capable of
illuminating these facts and rendering them intelligible to the
theoretician. It follows thus that political philosophy is composed
of a tissue of reasoned judgments the subjects of which are reality
itself and the predicates of which are composed of formalities
enabling us to affirm truths about matters political. If the subjects
are unduly emphasized we drift into pure history. If the predicates
are divorced from the subjects we are likely to end up with the
history of ideas. Both history and the history of ideas are
respectable disciplines but neither is political philosophy. The
tension between these two poles of affirmation (and negation) must be
retained by the man who has mastered the <habitus> of political
<episteme> or <scientia.> Dr. Alvaro d'Ors has done so admirably.
Briefly, d'Ors' theory runs as follows: power asks questions to those
in authority as to what ought to be done. Authority, always bereft of
power, answers out of a wisdom recognized by society. "<El que puede,
pregunta. El que sabe, contesta.>" ("He who can [do] asks; he who
knows, answers.") During the Roman Republic (d'Ors' model), the
Senate was the repository of authority. In medieval times authority,
in matters touching the soul of man and conditioning his salvation,
was the Church. The existence of a natural law binding and liberating
all men was incorporated into a theory which identified that law with
God's Law. If followed that political power was obliged to heed the
Voice of God as spoken through the Church.
With Bodin and the first decades of modernity this polarity and
distinction between power and authority disappeared. Ultimate
authority was identified with the will of the prince. Let us pray,
hoped Bodin, that the prince be a good man whose will is annealed in
the divine <fiat>, but even if he be other than a good man, the
prince's will is supreme. The incipient deism is evident. God
retreats to a distant paradise and His divine attributes of power and
authority are absorbed by man who thus deifies himself. Thus was born
political sovereignty and with it the politics of the modern world.
Less than two hundred years were needed to convert the sovereign will
of the prince into the sovereign will of the people. I will not argue
here the well documented thesis that royal absolutism was the father
of liberal democracy.
The doctrine of liberal democracy has always been plagued by a
thicket of philosophical problems. Hilaire Belloc, a friend of the
French Revolution in his youth, noted in his chastened maturity that
the sovereignty of the people has no way of resolving situations in
which, let us say, fifty-one percent of the people are mildly in
favor of one course of action and forty-nine percent are passionately
opposed.14 In practical politics, of course, the presumed will of the
people is manipulated by parties whose power is proportionate to the
money behind them and to the mass media that money buys and
manipulates. Establishments run the world and they are always
composed of minorities. Nonetheless, the fiction of a popular will
and a popular sovereignty endures as an abiding myth, especially in
Latin Europe, and it involves reducing politics to mathematics. There
is no way to measure statistically the wisdom of a few men now alive
or the weight of a venerable historical tradition, what Chesterton
called "the democracy of the dead," in terms of countability. The
logic of numbers is implacable and cannot permit, on its own
presuppositions, the admission of wisdom to the forum of politics.
The sovereign will of the <populus> can only be determined by
counting heads even if these heads be bought by the immensely
seductive technology of the mass media of our time. Numbers count:
<vox populi, vox Dei> has come to mean <vox populi>, period. If we
the people will it, then let it be with the force of law. The
voluntarism is total. There is no tribunal transcending either a
mythic or a real will of the majority. Democracy has become a new god
and it replaces the older Lord of Christendom.
To govern well and thus achieve the common good is one thing but this
act is not identified with governing democratically. Democratic
government might be good government but then again it might be
indifferent, bad, or positively evil government. These elementary
classical and medieval philosophical distinctions are simply lost in
the contemporary Spanish environment where democracy _ understood not
as a form of government but as an ontological absolute in being _ has
become the ultimate good by which all else is judged. To criticize
popular sovereignty is to commit a mortal sin in public and even some
churchmen fall into this trap when they attempt to make Christianity
palatable by pointing out its putatively salutary role in
contemporary democratic society.
Publicly there is only one god in Spain and its name is "democracy."
The democratic myth has become the essence of the new public
orthodoxy. Every columnist and lecturer, politician and public
figure, simply must justify whatever it is that he is talking about
or doing by referring it to this new divinity. Although in my many
trips to Spain I never hear the word used in the street or in
restaurants or homes, the term "democracy" can be found in almost
every other paragraph in the popular press. The television is
saturated with it. The nebulous authority of this mythic god has
erased from the memory of the governing classes in Spain the
traditional understanding of all authority emanating from God and as
calling forth from political power an adequate response to His
<fiat>. Democracy is no longer one instrument among many by which
societies can govern themselves. Democracy has become an end in
itself. When means become ends, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us, the
moral order is subverted. A sign of this forgetfulness or deliberate
obfuscation can be noted in the platforms, declarations, statements,
and speeches of the Spanish political Center-Right. God is never
mentioned, not even ceremoniously or hypocritically. The natural law
is never alluded to. The Catholic traditions of some fifteen hundred
years are silenced or forgotten.
Precisely here the Spanish liberal-conservative foot is pinched by
the revolutionary shoe of popular sovereignty. Born in the last
century, as indicated, as a compromise between the older Catholic
order still deeply embedded in the soil of the Spanish spirit and the
new revolutionary popular sovereignty imported from France, liberal
conservatism would have it both ways. We accept modern democracy and
its presuppositions and we accept as well the Christian inheritance
of our own land. In such fashion the Spanish Establishment adjusted
its conscience even as it enjoyed the fruits of the industrialist and
capitalist revolution then sweeping the continent as well as England.
These men of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries looked
to an orderly democratic future and they hoped to contain the new
Marxist Left composed of the dispossessed proletarian masses and
their intellectual leaders. Liberal conservatism wanted the best of
two worlds, the older Catholic past symbolized by a monarchy that
remembered, even if it could no longer imitate, the splendors of
Ferdinand and Isabel and the first Hapsburgs. Liberal conservatism
rejoiced in the memory of Spain's Golden Age even as it lusted after
the glitter of a new world born in the factories of Manchester and
the salons of Paris. Ironically, that epoch's architect, Canovas de
Castilla, was murdered by an anarchist.
From the vantage point of the last decade of the twentieth century
Spanish romantic liberalism seems distant to the eye trained by the
historical imagination. Between those years and our own there loom
the horrors of the ghastly Civil War of 1936-1939, a nightmare still
haunting the Spanish spirit. A dispassionate observer might judge
that the Spanish nation had had enough of Rousseau and his Marxist
successors: one million dead, ten thousand priests and nuns murdered
by communist and anarchist gunmen, churches and convents by the
hundreds gone up in flames. All of this might well have given pause
to politicians as they framed yet another constitution in the last
years of the seventh decade of this century. Such might have mused a
man from Mars _ or America.
But there it is again! The sovereignty of the people in the very
first paragraph of the constitutional document.15 That the Left, now
come home after forty years of exile and silence during the Franco
regime, would embrace its old faith, was to be expected. What shocks
any student of political history is the truth that the Spanish Right
did the same thing. Let the American student of politics note
carefully what happened. The young king, don Juan Carlos, inherited
all power from his benefactor, General Franco. The king had behind
him the Armed Forces in their entirety, a military complex that had
grown out of the long war against Communism and Socialism; and that
officer corps hated with a passion all things smacking of the Left.
But the king voluntarily gave up all his power. The new
constitutional document not only stripped him of any effective role
in the affairs of state but it proclaimed once again the sovereignty
of the people, deconfessionalized the State with the blessing of most
of the hierarchy, and secularized the political order. In a country
in which only a few years earlier a lawyer could have argued his case
in court from the conclusions of the natural law, not only was the
natural law absent from the constitutional document but the Author of
that Law, God, was nowhere to be found. Constitutionally,
juridically, God has ceased to exist in Spain today.
The Spanish Right, in its more moderate and respectable conservative
liberal wing, did nothing to prevent the reintroduction into their
land of the same revolutionary doctrine that had effectively reduced
Spain to a pitiful simulacrum of its old glory in the last century
and in the early decades of this one. Nothing was learned. Old
General Franco was supposed to have said that he was leaving
everything "tied and well-tied": <Atado y bien atado>, but within
months nothing remained of the old regime, nothing bad and nothing
good.
The assembly that wrote the new constitutional document was composed
largely of the Spanish Right and Center. These men, if any, would
have been thought to represent the Christian traditions of their
nation, the only genuine alternative to a laicist and anticlerical
Left. Yet not one word was raised in defense of Spain's Catholic
inheritance in the debates which drafted the constitution. Not only
was the church "disestablished" but no paragraph was added admitting
the existence and authority of a natural law anterior to all
political power, reposing on the Will of God. The surrender of the
Center-Right to the spirit of the French Revolution was total.
Spanish liberal-conservatism and the so-called Spanish "Center" de-
christianized juridically Spanish life. The socialist and communist
Left had its work done for it by its presumed enemies. And the whole
process was called into being and backed by the new king, certainly
no longer The Catholic King of a tradition that went back to Receredo
and the Third Council of Toledo.16
Don Manuel Fraga in his book on the roles of King and Country
expressed his adherence to the new constitutional order. But Fraga,
the Catholic, is better than Fraga the liberal-conservative. In
another section of his reflections in the same work he speaks of
public morality and ethics. He speaks like the Christian he is. He
condemns as unthinkable any law which would sanction abortion,17 an
abominable and execrable crime as so named by the second Vatican
Council. The Catholic in Fraga _ and he has been a believing Catholic
whose whole life has been a testimony to Christian integrity _
reacted with horror before the very possibility that one day Catholic
Spain would authorize the murder of unborn children. The same book,
however, as emphasized throughout these pages, accepted democratic
parliamentarianism and its public orthodoxy concerning the
Sovereignty of the People, not the Sovereignty of God.
Precisely here the political philosopher discovers a profound
contradiction in Spanish liberal-conservatism. As in many other
things, the Spanish contradiction reflects in a glaring and cruel
mirror a contradiction wounding the entire European Right. If the
People is Sovereign and not God and His Law, if Bodin and Rousseau
are right, then why cannot the people authorize legitimately the
murder of the unborn as well as a descending series of lesser
abominations? My very language betrays me: abominations are such
because the people declare them to be such, not because of any
supposedly existent divine or natural law anterior to political
power. Altogether apart from our personal reactions we collide at
this point with an insuperable iron curtain of contradiction. If
abortion <is> a crime because it is the most execrable and cowardly
of all murders, then it must follow that men _ some men at least _
recognize this truth because it is involved in human nature and in
that nature's law. Counting noses and taking statistical studies
concerning attitudes on the issue in no way attenuates the evil of
the act. This has been the common conviction of Western man for two-
thousand years.
Within the Catholic tradition the evil of abortion is demonstrated
from the nature of man, himself a creature of God who gives him life.
Within the Lutheran tradition the evil of abortion is more often
argued from the Will of God as revealed in The Ten Commandments.
Neither the Prussian King-Emperors of the last century, Lutherans,
nor the Catholic Hapsburgs in Austria would have countenanced the
legalization of abortion. Their power, as autocratic as some think it
was, responded positively to the authority of God and His Law.
The case of abortion is a "limit situation" as Karl Jaspers might
have called it. According to the German philosopher the truth of any
philosophical position is best tested if we evaluate it in the light
of its most extreme application.18 The right to life is not
altogether absolute. Men lose life in war; criminals forfeit life in
capital punishment and often by being caught by the police or even by
armed civilians in the act; martyrs give up life when they witness
publicly to the Faith. But abortion is the single instance where life
may never be taken under any set of circumstances. So unconditionally
wicked is this murder of the unborn that the Catholic Church punishes
the crime with excommunication. We must grant, naturally, that there
are moral situations of such a subtle difficulty that even competent
and learned ethicians differ in their evaluations thereof. But
abortion is so clear cut, so obvious, that a unanimity of judgment in
the history of the West attests to its condemnation.
The political philosopher is not engaged in elucidating the content
of the moral law. That task pertains to moralists. However, the
political philosopher must point out that public and, to some degree,
private morality loses its absolute character when it is subject to
the will or caprice of political power. Again the theory of Professor
d'Ors is helpful. If power does not respond to an authority with
which it is <not> identified, power converts itself into the ape of
God. The doctrine of the sovereignty of popular power makes that very
conversion: popular will can find no authority more profound than
itself; not content with simply being a political power, in this case
democratic political power, popular sovereignty in the modern state
has made itself a last and ultimate authority, identifying its own
positive law with justice; in some cases it persecutes those who
insist on obeying God rather than man. Spanish liberal-conservatism
finds itself gutted in its very essence. The secularist Left exalts
in abortion as a last insult thrown in the teeth of the older
Christian morality it rejects. The conventional Right in Spain would
have nothing to do with such an aberration but the Right has cut its
own throat in accepting popular sovereignty. You cannot affirm
simultaneously the Bodin-Rousseau thesis <and> the claims of the
Christian tradition.
Although this position cannot be entertained theoretically, the
desacralized Spanish Center-Right tries to live within this
contradiction. The abortion law was passed thanks to the socialist
majority in parliament backed by the Communists and a handful of
splinter parties of the Left.19 Once any law is passed by the
Parliament it goes to the King as Head of State who then "sanctions"
the law with his signature.20 The King, don Juan Carlos I, signed the
bill thus converting it into the law of the land.
At this point I must appeal to Spanish jurisprudence before I can
attach any philosophical predicate to the subject under discussion.
Some jurists in Spain hold that the royal signature is a mere
formality and that the law is <already> a law once approved by
parliament. Most jurists reject this reasoning as being flawed. If
already a law prior to the royal signature, then why does the king
have to sign at all? Yet sign he must, thus giving the weight of the
sanction of the Crown to what the people have willed through their
representatives. Although already detailed, I think it worthwhile to
repeat this doctrine which must seem curious to Americans. In
classical European constitutional theory the People is sovereign but
the Crown, representative of stability and tradition, seals the
parliamentary will with the dignity of the monarchical institution
which is still surrounded by a faint aura of the sacral.
Don Juan Carlos, presumed heir to the old Catholic monarchy, signed
the abortion law which is a dagger menacing the heart of Catholic
and, for that matter, all morality. At the moment in which Juan
Carlos posed his pen over the document he was to sign he was behind
an enormous Eight-Ball! Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't!
In order that the drama be made intelligible to the American reader
some background _ both psychological and historical _ will be
helpful. Nobody doubts but that the abortion bill was repugnant to
the Spanish King. He is a practicing Catholic and abortion must
offend his Christian sensibilities. What were his options? The
constitution itself is vague, even possibly contradictory, on the
political role of the king. On the one hand he is supposed to
arbitrate and moderate21 but he is not responsible for his own
acts.22 A man might think, <a priori>, that somebody who is not
responsible for what he does cannot arbitrate and moderate with much
hope for success. Possibly this is an American prejudice of the
author of these pages. We shall never know if the king used his
influence against permitting the abortion bill to pass into law.
Influence, in any case, is not power. We do know that the bill was
backed by the President of the Government, don Felipe Gonzalez, head
of the Socialist Party (PSOE). If Juan Carlos did use his influence,
it was rejected.
If the king had refused to sign and thus "sanction" the bill a
constitutional crisis would have followed. No provision for a royal
veto exists in the Constitution. The Spanish king is not an American
president nor is he an Emperor Franz-Josef of the last century.
Mentioning Franz-Josef calls to mind that monarch's answer to
Theodore Roosevelt when he asked the Kaiser what he considered his
role to be in politics. The old gentleman answered: "I protect my
peoples from their governments." Possibly behind this older and now
moribund reserved power of a Head of State there reposes the
venerable conviction that an emperor, king, or president in Europe
not only stands above politics but that he stands against politics
when the latter disturb the common good of the states he incarnates.
He is thus a final power who answers only to the authority of God and
His Law. But European kings today are crowned symbols, nothing more.
The thesis can be argued, however, that don Juan Carlos did not
become king as a ceremonial figurehead. He was given the throne by
General Francisco Franco with a plenitude of power to be exercised as
he saw fit. Although the king had by then, some years after ascending
the throne, surrendered theoretically that power in the new
constitution, effectively at that moment he could have activated his
constitutional power as Head of the Armed Forces. Those Armed Forces
had no love of anything which smacked of socialism or secularist
atheism. The officer corps was Catholic to a man.
A refusal to sign would have forced the king to abdicate or to defy
the constitution. Abdicate he would never have done. Catholic though
he is, the Spanish king's faith does not cut as deeply as does the
faith of the King of Belgium who was willing to take a walk rather
than sign the abortion bill in his own country. We must ask ourselves
one of those "if" questions which make the study of history and
politics so fascinating. If Juan Carlos had defied the government and
the constitution by calling in the Armed Forces to back him, what
would have happened?
Nobody knows with any certainty about events that never happened,
<possibilia>, but everybody takes a hand at speculating about them. I
give the reader my own opinion, an educated guess. Had don Juan
Carlos called in the Armed Forces they would have backed him with
enthusiasm. The Spanish hierarchy, as cowed and timid as it is, would
have had to support him, albeit in fear and trembling. The Vatican
would have applauded. Don Juan Carlos would have appeared before the
entire Christian world as a Catholic king and knight whose sword was
at the service of the unborn. In a day he would have undone centuries
of pusillanimity and appeared before the world as the defender of the
weak as he bowed his knee to God's Will _ and to hell with the
constitution!
But the world is no longer Christian and Juan Carlos knows it. The
new god today is not The Man on the Cross but the Man at the Ballot
Box. Our new lord is democratic sovereignty, the only ultimate
authority admitted in the forum of political existence. If I
speculate in this essay on what might have happened and if I come up
with a child's tale of chivalry and honor, the king must have
speculated as well. He knew what probably would have happened: Spain
cut off again from Europe and The Common Market; Spain punished for
having done away with democracy; Spain again the dictatorial pariah
of the world; Spain possibly subjected to an economic boycott and to
a new poverty that would have stripped the nation of both a hard
earned affluence and a much desired "democratic" respectability. King
Juan Carlos probably pondered all these things in his heart and then
he put his signature to the abortion bill. He obeyed the constitution
and granted that that parchment is the ultimate in political
authority. He had sworn to uphold the document. Earlier he had sworn,
under the watchful eye of Franco, to uphold a Catholic Monarchy. All
of us, being human, usually obey the last oath we have taken and let
earlier ones rest in the cemetery of the past.
So much for King Juan Carlos I, the second protagonist in this drama,
who emerges as somewhat less than an heroic figure. Now I move to my
third actor, Msgr. Jose Guerra Campos, the Bishop of Cuenca. Guerra
Campos will probably never rise to an archbishopric because he is too
intellectual, too honest, and too logical in his orthodoxy. Men like
Guerra Campos tend to stay where they are. When the abortion law was
being debated in the Spanish Cortes, Guerra Campos issued a ringing
pastoral from his episcopal seat in Cuenca in which he stated
forcefully the traditional Catholic condemnation of abortion and in
which he rehearsed for his readers the evils of infanticide as argued
from the natural law.23 Citing as well the condemnation in the
decrees of Vatican II which damn abortion as an "abominable crime,"24
Guerra Campos concentrated on Pope John Paul II's words insisting
that "the death of an innocent can never be justified."25 These words
were pronounced by the Pope in Spain and it seems evident that The
Holy Father saw what was coming. As a man who measures his words
carefully, Pope John Paul knew what he was saying: abortion "can
<never> be justified." Neither constitutional propriety nor
democratic dogma can justify the slaughter of innocent unborn babies.
Had Juan Carlos taken his Catholicism seriously he could have found
here, had he not known it as a result of his splendid Christian
education, all the justification he needed to call in the troops as
shields against an impending slaughter. The Bishop of Cuenca in a
profound sense called on the King to do just that. But Juan Carlos de
Bourbon signed, knowing that the socialist government and its allies
were bent on depenalizing abortion and thus forwarding their
progressive secularization of Spanish social life. Guerra Campos'
fellow bishop, Jesus Pla, bishop of Guadalajara-Siguenza, had already
stated that "The government of Spain is disposed to convert itself
into the official assassin of millions of Spaniards."26 These were
strong words but Guerra Campos went further: he fingered officially
and openly the role of King Juan Carlos in the whole sordid affair.
The King has recently proclaimed solemnly (January 6, 1983) before
all Spain that 'the institution of the monarchy does not depend on
any elections, a referendum or on a vote.' If this can be said of an
historical value which is important but neither absolute or morally
binding, then how much greater must be the absolute moral value _ the
first obligation of a social authority _ which is to protect the life
of innocents."27
A society that forgets the basic dignity of man "destroys itself,"
thundered the bishop. Those who have promoted this bill and "sowed
confusion" in the nation are guilty of an "enormous" failure in
responsibility.28 Nonetheless, the final and ultimate responsibility
must be laid upon "the authors of the bill: that is to say, a) the
president of the government and his council of ministers, b) the
parliamentarians who vote for the bill; and the Head of State who
sanctions the bill."29 This governmental decision, continued the
bishop, "has placed the king in a limit situation in which he cannot
participate in this aggression against the innocent, and even more in
the light of his laudable exaltation of the values of the family
expressed in his Christmas message in the wake of the Pope's
allocation" where the evils of abortion were emphasized.30 If passed,
went on the bishop, this bill turns those who vote for it and those
who sanction it into "public sinners." And the law remains a dead
letter for all Christians who must then view their own government as
a tyranny.31
The reader will note that both the rhetoric and the logic of this
latter-day Athanasius tended to place the king in a dilemma. If the
institution of the monarchy is above popular sovereignty as expressed
through elections (as the king insists), then the dignity and
sacredness of the life of the unborn is all the more above popular
will. Indeed, insisted the bishop, there is no comparison whatsoever:
the one looks to a political institution the worth of which is
relative to historical circumstances but the other looks to a moral
absolute in existence.
The political philosopher cannot help but note that Juan Carlos'
esteem for the royal institution he incarnates in his person cannot
be reconciled logically with the doctrine of popular sovereignty. I
find it curious that monarchy escapes popular sovereignty but
abortion does not.
The moral failure of the King points back to the philosophical
failure of don Manuel Fraga who simply reflects a fatal flaw written
into the very script of the Spanish Center-Right. This tragedy has
not gone unnoticed in Spain. Don Jose Maria Carrascal, for more than
twenty years a correspondent in Washington for Spain's leading
monarchical daily, the prestigious ABC, noted recently that in his
opinion the Spanish Right would never assume central power in Spain
because it stands for nothing unique,32 no alternative to the
governing Socialists. By no means suggesting that my reasoning is
precisely that of Carrascal, permit me to argue the thesis in the
following way. The Center-Right throughout its entire history had two
cards to play: the free market and the development of a capitalist
system with the prosperity that would ensue in its wake; <and> the
defense of Spain's historic Christian tradition. I have already
insinuated that this less than comfortable marriage permitted the
Right to appeal to the inherited Catholic sensibility of large strata
of Spanish society, moving from the new banking and financial
interests centered in Madrid, through to a burgeoning capitalist
class fomented during the old regime of General Franco, spreading
then throughout a fairly broad electorate composed of a bourgeois of
shop owners and an imposing and steadily growing professional class.
The wives went to Mass daily. The youngsters were educated in schools
run by nuns, brothers, and priests. The fathers ranged from the
devout through the tepid to the downright skeptical. Behind all of
this loomed the landed aristocracy. Here, in truth, was the Spanish
Establishment.
When the government of the so-called Center under Adolfo Suarez
yielded power to the Socialists in several massive socialist
electoral victories, pessimists predicted a return to the radicalism
of the earlier decades of the century. But the Left has learned its
lessons. There would be no more burning of convents and churches and
murdering of clergy. The Left in Spain today is both chastened and
enriched. Today the Left presents two faces to the nation, an
internal face to the working men of the Socialist party that repeats
the old Marxist formulas of the past and an external face to the
country and to Europe that has adopted not only the doctrine of the
free market but even its style.
The Socialist aristocracy that flocks to the beaches every summer in
its bikinis and its yachts is as chic and elegant as are their
counterparts from the old capitalist Right. Unless you are learned in
these things, it is hard to tell the difference between the older
aristocracy of blood or money from the socialist new rich whose
pictures and pleasures are the standard fare of a series of magazines
_ "<revistas de corazon>," magazine of the heart _ bought largely and
eagerly by more humble citizens, principally women, who feed off the
glamour and glitter they can never imitate. The Socialists have thus
spoiled the Egyptians and stolen from the Right its economic bolt.
The only other bolt left to the Right was its presumed fidelity to
the Catholic traditions of the land. But not a word can be found in
the speeches and propaganda of the Right that reflects, even
remotely, that inheritance. The Spanish Center-Right, in crafting the
secularist and laicist constitution,33 found itself with nothing to
offer the country. The Socialists in the last decade have become as
enthusiastic about capitalist development as the monied Right. The
one difference seems to be that the Socialists are better at stealing
than are their counterparts on the Right.34 The Spanish Center-Right,
out of a massive inferiority complex united to the corporate spirit
of a general European slide into secularism and consumerism,
permitted its old defense of the Christian tradition to wither on the
vine. The Right has nothing to offer the Spanish people that they do
not already have. Today it is fashionable to be considered a man of
the Left.
In accepting the doctrine of popular sovereignty through almost two
hundred years of civil wars, anarchy, constitutional crisis,
illegitimate and comic-book monarchies, and just plain bad
government, the Center-Right abdicated what ought to have been its
most firm theoretical basis: an acceptance of an authority anterior
to all constitutional tinkering based on the natural law and the Will
of its Author, God. Manuel Fraga is too good a man and too good a
Catholic to believe in his heart of hearts in the sovereignty of the
people, the identification of political power with ultimate
authority. As a Catholic he has before him the long theological
tradition asserting that Sovereignty is God's alone and that this
Sovereignty is lodged in Our Lord Jesus Christ as King of Kings:
<Christus Rex.> Yet were he to accept this doctrine he would be
driven logically into the arms of Spanish Traditionalism and he has
always resisted that temptation, if in fact it ever was one. And if
Fraga is the best of the Spanish liberal-conservatives, so too with
the rest of them, not only not as good as Fraga but most of them
decidedly inferior men with nothing original or exciting to interest
anyone.
We find here the predicates for which we have been searching in this
exercise in political philosophy: the identification of power and
authority in the supposed Sovereignty of the State, be it royal or
democratic, is antithetical to the proposition that the natural law
is anterior to all political power which in turn is called upon to
ask questions of, and respond positively to, the dictates of that Law
which is a part of Divine law. When this is not done, the state _ my
words here are those of Bishop Guerra Campos _ converts itself into a
tyranny. Abortion is the test case, the limit situation upon which
everything else stands or falls.
In meekly bowing to the postulates of the spirit of the French
Revolution, the Spanish Right inadmittedly committed political
suicide. Some of its theoreticians spend time today defending the
free market but the free market defends itself very adequately. It
does not need these men and their pens. The Socialist Left, grown fat
with power and money, is delighted to live off the fruits of the
economic system it theoretically condemns. And Christian Spain slowly
twists in the wind, agonizing, hanging on a tree of secularism, as
its glorious inheritance fades into folklore.
1 Cf. the list of Fraga's works which follow his: <De Santiago a
Filipinas, pasando por Europa> (Editoria Planeta, S. A., Barcelona,
1988), pp. 218-220.
2 Manuel Iribarne Fraga, <La monarquia y el pais> (Coleccion
Panorama, Barcelona, 1977).
3 Throughout this study the terms "liberal-conservative" and "Center-
Right" are used as equivalents as they are in Spain today.
4 Fraga, op. cit., pp. 23-25.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 52-55.
7 Ibid., passim.
8 <Constitucion Espanola>, Biblioteca de Legislacion, <serie menor>
(Editora Civitas, S.A., Madrid, 1986), titulo II, articulos 56-65,
pp. 26-28.
9 Cf. Maria Isabel Alvarez Velez, "<La unidad catolica en la historia
constitutional contemporanea espanola," Iglesia-Mundo> (Madrid, Epoca
III-384, 2.a Quincena de Abril, 1989), pp. 36-38.
10 <Constitucion Espanola>, op. cit., "La soberania nacional reside
en el pueblo espanol, del que emanan los poderes del Estado,"
<Titular Preliminar>, 2, p. 13.
11 Fraga, op. cit., pp. 99-101.
12 Cf. my study: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, <Christianity and Political
Philosophy> (University of Georgia Press, 1978), passim.
13 Cf. my study: "The Political Philosophy of Alvaro d'Ors,"
<Political Science Reviewer>, forthcoming.
14 On Belloc's attitudes towards the French Revolution, cf. Robert
Hickson, "Belloc y Chesterton: sus parciales reflexiones sobre la
Revolucion Francesa," <Aportes>, 1990 _ Ano V, n. 12, pp. 58-62.
15 <Constitucion Espanola>, loc. cit., p. 26.
16 Cf. "III Concilio de Toledo," <Iglesia-Mundo>, 2.a, Madrid,
Quincena de Abril 1989.
17 Fraga, op. cit., "Por supuesto, el aborto no puede aceptarse en
ningun caso ni lo dicho servir como pretexto a la permisividad con
los no casados," p. 152.
18 Karl Jaspers, <Einfurhung in die Philosophie> (Zurich, 1950), pp.
153-157.
19 The American reader must note that there was no groundswell of
popular support for the legalization of abortion in Spain. The
measure was purely ideological, a dictate demanded by the agenda set
by the Left for the gradual secularization of Spanish social life.
After the bill was passed observers noted that there was no rush to
abortion mills throughout the country. The medical profession was
extremely reluctant to exercise its new "right" of aborting the
unborn. Abortion, popularly understood as an issue that engages the
population in debate as in the United States, has failed to stir the
immense Catholic majority in the nation. Abortion is not <felt> in
the streets. The battle remains largely doctrinal and theoretical. A
small Pro-Life political party failed to win many voters in the last
general elections and the Spanish political Center-Right has not
exploited the issue in its favor.
20 <Constitucion Espanola>, loc. cit., <Titulo II, De la Corona>, n.
62, a. "Corresponde al Rey sanctionar y promulgar las leyes," p. 27.
21 Ibid., a. 56, 1., p. 26.
22 Ibid., a. 56, 3., p. 26.
23 Jose Guerra Campos, Bishop of Cuenca, <Boletin Oficial de la
Diocesis>, Cuenca, 28 de enero de 1983.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Jesus Pla, Bishop of Guadalajara-Siguenza, <Documentacion Oficial
de la Diocesis>, Guadalajara, 15 de enero de 1983.
27 Guerra Campos, op. cit., (translation my own).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Jose Maria Carrascal, "Generaciones," ABC, viernes 3-8-90, p. 15.
33 Cf. Emilio Romero, "Cronica de lo que pasa," jueves, 9 de agosto
de 1990, Ya, p. 10. "La restauracion democratica espanola la hizo la
derecha, con el deseo y el estimulo del Ray; sus personajes
principales fueron Torcuato Fernadez Miranda y Adolfo Suarez, que
procedian del regimen anterior." The entire article ought to be read
because it documents how the Spanish Right, in making the transition
from the regime of Franco to the new democracy, fell into the hands
of its own presumed ideological opponents.
34 The observer of things Spanish thinks immediately of the immense
robbery of the enormous financial and economic complex of Rumasa by
the Socialist government and of the unexpected reaction by its former
director, Ruiz Mateos, a man who, while being chased by the police,
managed to win democratically a seat in the European Parliament. From
this privileged refuge he continues to excoriate the corruption
surrounding the new Socialist Establishment.
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the
University of Madrid. He has been Professor of Philosophy and
Politics at the University of Dallas for over twenty-five years.
This article was taken from the Winter 1990 issue of "Faith &
Reason". Subscriptions available from Christendom Press, 2101
Shenandoah Shores Road, Ft. Royal, VA 22630, 703-636-2900, Fax 703-
636-1655. Published quarterly at $20.00 per year.
Copyright (c) 1996 EWTN
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