El Puente

When I worked in Spain in the seventies, a long-cherished tradition was that of el puente ('the bridge'), the habit of taking Monday or Friday off as an extra holiday if the Tuesday or Thursday that week was a fiesta or public holiday. I gather that this is now rather frowned on by the joyless multinationals and discouraged in the name of productivity. In December 1977, my students from the University of Valladolid informed me that, as St Nicholas's day, the University's own peculiar fiesta, fell on the Tuesday and the Immaculate Conception, a national fiesta, followed on the Thursday, they had two two fiestas and three puentes in a row, so they were all going home for the week and would see me the following Monday. 

University of Valladolid - note Papal tiara.

I had other students to teach, so I did not get San Nicolás as a day off, nor two of the three puentes, but I did get the Thursday and Friday as holidays and a very light teaching load all round. And of course, I had the opportunity to go to the Cathedral to observe the Archbishop enjoying the Spanish Privilege, which is to wear Mary-blue vestments on the feast of the Inmaculada.

The 'Spanish Privilege' in action.

I was very struck when I first went to work in Spain at how pervasive the Catholic culture was. Not all my students were Mass-goers by any means, but virtually all of them had religious names: Maria del Carmen, Maria de las Nieves, José Maria, Francisco Javier, and even, as only occurs in Spanish, Jesús. They knew the Catholic faith and many of them had been educated by religious. All the public holidays were religious feasts except for el Día de Hispanidad (I notice that Valladolid University's St Nicholas has now been overtaken by el Día de Constitución, something of a recent invention), and religion was essentially a public thing, from the small shrines on the walls of buildings to the great processions for Corpus Christi and Semana Santa. I could not help contrast this with my own country, where much of the public and popular side of religion had been done away with at the Reformation and general inertia had seen off the rest.

One could scarcely have envisaged the degree of secularisation that has taken place in Spain in less than a lifetime. The men who drew up the 1978 Constitution were well aware of the painful and tragic effects of hostile constitutional reform in the area of religion in 1931, and kept their provisions to a minimum:

Spaniards are equal before the law and may not in any way be discriminated against on account of [...] religion, opinion or any other personal or social condition or circumstance [Sect 14].

and

 Freedom of ideology, religion and worship of individuals and communities is guaranteed, with no other restriction on their expression than may be necessary to maintain public order as protected by law [Sect. 16].

This, modest as it sounds, is all very different from what went before:

The Apostolic Roman Catholic Church will continue to be the sole religion of the Spanish State and will enjoy the rights and prerogatives due to it under Divine and Canon Law [1953 Concordat with the Holy See].

Though the seeds were, perhaps unwittingly, sown in the 1978 Constitution, it took the socialist Zapatero government to drive through a thoroughgoing secularist programme which had the more or less explicit aim of weakening the remaining hold the Catholic Church has in public life, education and society. From being a very conservative society (though not a backward one – economic life flourished through the work of the Opus Dei technocrats Franco came to rely on), Spain has embraced the hedonist liberal dream with a vengeance. I enjoyed living in Spain when I did, and my admiration for King Juan Carlos and the way he managed the transition to a constitutional monarchy is second to none; but I would not want to live there again.

And, of course, with the 6th on Friday and the 8th on Sunday, there's no puente this year.