In November 2016, I participated in Wroclaw, Wroclaw (Poland), in a congress whose theme was. The value of culture - the culture of value. My intervention was to present the process of secularization experienced by Spain in recent years. I was part of a panel that also included the Irish writer and music critic John Waters and the Dutch psychologist Gerard van der Aardweg. All three of us had in common that we were citizens of countries with a long Catholic tradition that had undergone a process of secularization that was as rapid as it was intense. Understandably, the problem was of concern to Polish Catholics who saw how the end of communism had ushered in a process of de-Christianization in their country, unexpected for some, unwanted for all. I had the impression that our hosts wanted to learn from the experience of others and try to avoid it. They were clearly surprised by the process of social change, especially secularization, experienced by countries like ours.
Democracy and de-Christianization
I found the presentations of my colleagues at the table very interesting, they revealed aspects that I did not know about the history of Catholicism in their countries, and allowed a discussion that I still remember. In my intervention, which was the first, I explained what I thought about the Spanish process, how people tend to think that the de-Christianization was almost a direct consequence of the end of Franco's regime and, therefore, something directly linked to political democratization and the experience of public freedoms. I explained that this interpretation of the facts seemed to me to be a simplification that led to a falsehood. To begin with, comparing the Spanish case with the Italian or French cases was enough to dismiss the idea that the growing de-Christianization of the seventies, accelerated in the eighties, was a consequence of democratization, since it also affected countries in which the civic freedoms of democracies had been experienced for many years.
In Spain, democratization and secularization coincided in time, overlapped, and in some aspects may have strengthened each other, but one was not the cause of the other, except in certain aspects that affect more the behavior of the Catholic hierarchy than that of the politicians.
The new sexual morality
My thesis was that the decline in the knowledge and practice of the Christian faith responded above all to a change in lifestyles that had accelerated in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a mutation that first affected the place where people lived: Spaniards emigrated massively to the cities in those years. This move had to do with the work that was being done, which was less and less linked to the primary sector, and led to a growth in family incomes that transformed lifestyles, making them more consumerist and materialistic as well.
The role played by television, cinema, music and advertising in the cultural change experienced was of an importance that is difficult to exaggerate. But this change in the way of life had an ally, which boosted social change in an impressive way, and this ally was precisely related to religion. The great transformation had been driven by the change of moral horizon brought about by the post-conciliar Catholic crisis. The gale that it brought to the consciences of many people produced an unprecedented change of mentality. The collapse manifested itself in an impressive way in the defections of priests, religious men and women who abandoned their spiritual commitment to give themselves to a new and temporary one. It was not something forced from the outside, but a process lived from within the Church, a sort of implosion.
However, it seemed clear that this affected a minority sector of the population: as important as it was for the Catholic world, it was not enough to explain a social change. There was something else that had led to the transformation of the lives of millions of Spanish Catholics. I argued that this had been the change in sexual morality and the practical acceptance of contraception as a matter of course by Christian married couples, an acceptance contrary to the teachings of Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, but spread by not a few clergymen and some bishops as something reasonable and even desirable.
Contraception
The widespread use of contraceptives seemed to me to be the main cause of the spread of an individualistic mentality that reinforced consumerism in an impressive way and changed people's way of thinking, also in religious matters. It was such an important change in lifestyles that it had a very strong effect on society as a whole within a few years. From my point of view, this was the key to understanding the cascading transformations that followed: the change in the way of life is much more transcendent than a mere political change.
My Dutch colleague, both in his intervention and in the colloquium, underlined his agreement with this thesis. In the 1950s, the Netherlands had been the European country that, in absolute numbers, sent the most missionaries outside its borders. Almost at the same time, in the midst of a doctrinal crisis that affected its episcopate and its theologians, the spread of contraceptive methods almost destroyed the Catholic fabric of Dutch society to the point of annihilation. John Waters, our Irishman, agreed with the thesis, but underlined, in his case, a harmful clericalism that had led in Ireland to fathers abdicating their duties and being almost replaced by clerics in their family responsibilities, with the connivance of mothers, in a process that proved fatal for the family institution.
Historical origins
I came back from Wroclaw convinced that we should better explain to our students the profound change that had taken place in the 1960s and 1970s throughout Europe. Well, not all of it. Catholics on the other side of the Iron Curtain had been spared this process, which put me on the track of the media coverage of Vatican II and the importance of publicity as determining factors in these changes, or lack thereof.
When I went deeper into the question, I discovered that the root of this transformation was in previous years, in the crisis of the beginning of the century in Europe and, especially, in the crisis of the late fifties and early sixties in the United States of America, in its counterculture and in the acceptance of contraception, and also of abortion, as a way of life of their families and, therefore, of their society. That great change landed in Europe in the late sixties, exploded in May '68, spread and brought about the greatest social change of the twentieth century, the separation of marital love and sexuality, which still shapes our time. Much more has happened around it, and its roots go even further than mentioned here, but that is another (exciting) story.
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