If today I am only allowed to pray in my church, tomorrow I will only be allowed to give my opinion in my own home

@ElentirENG ES 11·30·2023 · 7:09 0

I recently read an apt phrase that says that Jews are like the bird in the mine, and that statement is full of reason.

A crowd responds in the street to the socialist attack on religious freedom in Spain
The Sánchez gov't prohibits a group of Catholics from exercising their right to pray in the street

History shows that the Jewish people have been the first victims of persecution in places where, finally, the rights of the rest of the people have ended up trampled. This is what happened in Nazi Germany. However, there is another great indicator of the totalitarian threat that looms over a society: religious freedom. Proof of this is what happened in Soviet Russia, where different religious denominations were victims of brutal persecution, which was later repeated in other countries, including republican Spain between 1931 and 1939.

This week we have seen situations that are dangerously reminiscent of those years in which totalitarians unleashed all their hatred and violence on the Catholic community of Spain: a government threatening Catholics with fines for praying in the street, on the stairs leading to a church. I don't know if the most astonishing thing is this or that the majority of the media (and also the Church itself) have looked the other way, as if it were something irrelevant.

We are witnessing the creation of a dangerous Overton window, that process of social engineering with which some seek to normalize things that until then were objectionable. First it was to identify those who pray as religious fanatics, but only if they are Catholic, that is (in the case of Muslims, they only call you "fundamentalist" if you are a terrorist). Then they wanted to leave us without a religion subject in schools, violating what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) says, whose Article 18 indicates education as one of the areas of exercise of the right to religious freedom.

Two years ago the left-wing launched itself to prohibit praying in front of abortion clinics, accusing those who did so of committing a crime of coercion, a type of criminal offense that has always involved the use of the violence. They did not even bother to explain what violence there is in saying a prayer: we have a left that imposes its hatred, its intolerance and its irrational prejudices in more and more areas of society.

The latest thing (for now) is to threaten us with fines if we pray in the street in front of a church. What will be next? Ban religious processions? Forbid celebrating Christmas as a Christian holiday?Someone will call me exaggerated, but wouldn't it have seemed exaggerated to us years ago that they would single us out for being Catholic, that they would want to expel religion from schools or that they would fine us for praying in the street?

The most striking thing in this process is meeting people who are not among the group of fanatics who attack religious freedom, but who have been normalizing the effects of those attacks. One of the most normalized effects among many Spaniards, to a point that is beginning to be surprising, is the idea that if you want to pray you have to go to a church or your home, and that you cannot do it on the street. An idea that also contradicts the aforementioned Article 18 of the UDHR, which states that every person has the freedom "to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."

Some should begin to think a little about the effects that tomorrow may have if they accept the idea that the street is a place where one should not and cannot pray. If we accept that today, perhaps tomorrow they will tell us that if we want to express an opinion opposite to that of the government, we should go home, that the street is not an appropriate place to express political opinions (especially if they contradict to political power) and that public space must be something like an area without freedoms, where totalitarian silence reigns.

Again, this is not an exaggeration. It is as aberrant that someone is fined for praying in the street as it is that someone is fined for expressing an opinion in the street, since at the end of the day we are talking about two possible expressions of the same right to freedom of expression. expression. Those who today approve fines for praying will do so thinking that it does not affect them, because at the end of the day they are not going to suffer these sanctions because they do not pray in the street. That attitude is as selfish as looking the other way if someone beats up a black person or a homosexual for being one, simply because you are not black or homosexual.

There are people who seriously believe that dictatorships are regimes that are established overnight, but this is not always the case. At the current time, we are suffering a progressive degradation of our freedoms at the hands of a government formed by socialists and communists, two political groups that promoted serious attacks against freedoms in Spain in the 1930s.

Today, socialists and communists remain committed to expanding the role of the State in our society, exercising increasing government control over all types of areas: the economy, the media, justice, health, education... Always appealing to false pretexts, always disguising their assault on society as good intentions, to make us believe that they do it for our good, but conveying to us the idea that they decide for us because we don't know how to make the right decisions.

If we continue like this, how long will it take them to tell us that we don't know how to vote properly either and that it is also better that we leave that decision in their hands? If you think that this is also an exaggeration, you just have to take a look look at what happened in socialist and communist dictatorships such as Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua.

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Photo: iStock.