The visit of the Pope to Valencia has been very short: he arrived on a Saturday morning and left on the following morning. He spoke several times during the visit and I have to say that listening to him I confirm my opinion about his messages: essentially he expresses the classical traditional ideas of the official teaching of the Catholic Church. He keeps his statements in a kind of theoretical perspective and in this way he does not sound as if he were condemning something concrete but on the other hand he is not speaking about real problems of people nor opens any possibility of change.
- Concerning the family issues, he repeated many times the essential importance of the families based in the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman. He also insisted on the importance of the religious education inside the families and remind the governments not to forget to protect families. I did not hear anything about problems of many couples with so many hours of work and so few to be with their children, or families who have real economic al problems to find a flat, nothing of course about divided families by hard life conditions in developing countries and some part of the families have to emigrate,…Needless to say that another topics like reproductive health, divorce, homosexual marriage etc. did not appear.
- Maybe conservative people expected a more critical speech against our government and they were disappointed. Apparently the Pope thinks that this more critical opinions correspond to Spanish Bishops, not to him.
- From the point of view of the government it has been a warm and correct visit.
- About the campaign ruled by critical groups: Though it has been a quite aggressive campaign, I think it is very positive that they have been mentioned by the media, though sometimes in a quite negative way. They organized several activities, mainly supporting the familiar diversity, the days before the world families meeting, and during the visit they appeared in several newspapers.
- A controversial issue has been that the president of the Government did not attend the Mass and other religious celebration, though he was at the airport when the Pope arrived and he spoke to him during half an hour on Saturday afternoon. I think the president was right in order to stress that we live in a non confessional country but many people think that he was wrong and very unpolite.
Summarizing, I am nothing optimistic about this pontificate and I think We Are Church should be very active in showing the people that another church is possible and in fact it we should show that it already exists in many places.
Raquel Mallavibarrena
Corriente Somos Iglesia, Spain
Chair of the International Movement We Are Church