THE CHURCH, VIOLENCE, AND BASQUE SEPARATISM

ETA, the Basque separatist group, has killed more than a thousand people, from businessmen, functionaries, and professionals to children, but not a single priest. Does ETA perhaps have some debt to the church, or fear it? writes Jose Bono, president of the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha. In this article, Bono notes the predominance of nationalism in sectors of the church hierarchy and the Basque clergy, which raises new questions about the relation between power and religion, not only for the church prelates but the parishioners as well. In the Basque Country, many citizens have lost the freedoms that they had won. Though it is difficult to state with precision when this happened, the cause is clear: the terrorism of the ETA. The loss was gradual and progressive, as an unobserved sowing of hatred and destruction brought an ever greater harvest of fear. What the Basque region needs is to end ETA violence and guarantee democracy, which requires not only politics but the ethics necessary to a pluralist society, which Basque society is and must remain. If the church (the whole church, not just the Spanish or the Basque, the clergy or the lay) wants to play a role in this transition, based on an ethic of democratic coexistence --which does not exist today-- it must broaden its thinking and historical perspective on its own relation to higher powers and on violence.