"Silent Storms"

By tradition and Franco's constitution, Spain is a Christian state. But across Spain last week sounded a grave warning from spokesmen for the state church itself: "The overwhelming majority" of Spanish workers are indifferent to religion. "Contrary to what was hoped," they have not developed "a greater feeling for Christian life."

The warning came in the pages of Ecclesia, official journal of Spanish Catholic Action and the only magazine in Spain not censored by the government. Ecclesia listed some of the causes of the Spanish worker's "aloofness from the church," as reflected in a door-to-door survey conducted by priest-advisers to the government-sponsored unions: "

The Marxist virus that rusts his soul; his current contact with the priest; economic difficulties that worry his spirit, and a bitter life . . . coupled with an indifference for any institution--be it the church or the state--that does not solve his most pressing problem . .

"The workers believe that both the church and the priest are more inclined toward the moneyed than the humble classes, and are even convinced that our apostolate protects the rich more than the poor."

Though Spanish workers appreciate the benefits they have received from recent government wage increases, the survey found that "quite a few of them attribute that policy not so much to the reasons of justice as to the need for avoiding the advance and penetration of Communism." On the favorable side, the survey noted: "However, the Spanish worker does not have a feeling of contempt for religion; he has instead a foundation of religious conscience that makes possible its revival."

Concluded Ecclesia in a follow-up editorial: let Spain "beware of a comfortable attitude of complacency toward brilliant processions and of indulging in the rash assumption that law and the police are enough to check silent storms, well-founded discontent and rampant social injustice." Next door in Portugal, a bishop raised the same warning cry last week. In a pastoral letter published in Lisbon's Roman Catholic daily, Novidados, Bishop Jose do Patrocinio Dias of Beja called upon both government and private charity to come to the aid of the poverty-stricken rural workers whose numbers were "not decreasing but growing daily."

"Tlie rich grow richer, the poor poorer," wrote the bishop. "Year after year "has passed, crisis upon crisis, generation upon wasted generation, and while we live in the hopes of better days and of the public measures which shall remedy such fearful conditions, the evil grows, the wasting sickness prevails, and poverty increases its procession of victims."

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