It is an anecdote – or a joke, if you like – that circulated throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, although it is very likely that the origins are even earlier. The thing is more or less like this: a Spaniard, soldier of the thirds, confesses somewhere where he has been on campaign; for example, Naples. And he tells the priest the list of his sins, among which there are murders, thefts, rapes, the worst of the worst. And when he has already received and felt the penance and walks away from the confessional, all of a sudden he returns and tells the confessor that “I’m sorry, father, but I left a little sin, the little sin of the Spaniards”. “And what is this sin, my son?” “Well look, father, if we have to be frank, I believe believe, what is believing, I don’t believe in God”.
And I don’t know if we don’t continue to share this sin with a part of those who were our ancestors, because we continue to focus a lot on accessory things and whether certain rules and rituals are followed and often forgetting the most important thing…
Even more, I am not clear if our greatest political sin is that, in reality, and this unites us Catalans, Castilians, Navarrese, Andalusians, Aragonese, Asturians, Basques, Galicians and all the others, we do not believe in democracy . We give ample evidence that the Constitution and the separation of powers must be respected theoretically and only by word of mouth, but then we sin against the precept. Finally, we have little evidence of believing in democracy, since the invocation to the power of the sovereign people, in the street, to direct democracy (whatever it is) or to the force of extemporaneous ballot boxes – via referendum ad hoc more or less manipulated – or to the simple and more forceful brute force we use and maintain it very often.
You know what is said around the world, that two Spaniards in the middle of a dispute stop him because one says to the other: “Listen, but if we could have solved this with fists, why an hour that we discuss?”. Or, to continue with the commonplaces, that the best way to get a Spaniard to do something is to tell him: “You don’t have peppers”. And he goes straight there.
In short, a complicated country, ours, which now seems to be regressing in terms of form and content. And that brings us once again to a dark place full of bad omens. Very Catholic Spain was the seat of the Arian heresy for a long time. And Emperor Charles dared to sack Rome and by force of arms put an end to the papacy’s pretensions to temporal power. So there is nothing that is that simple or that easy, because among the many Spains in history, the champion of Christendom exists, yes, but based on interests – today we would say geopolitical – very determined and determining. And yet it was true that the Spanish, to believe, to believe, did not believe in God.
And still another: Spain went from having mass almost every day to this time today, in which priestly vocations can be counted in dozens, if they even get there, and what is practiced is, to put it bluntly, a agnostic Christianity, with basic Christian values ??but without the position or weight of constant practice. We hope that the same will not happen to us with this democracy that is still so young, with almost half a century, generously counted, that it has. Our democracy runs the risk that we end up confessing all our sins against it and its commandments to add at the last moment a small sin: that we are not democrats.
