Word: churchful
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...Catholic Church, the dramatic increase in Spain's divorce rate underlines the moral threat it perceives from Zapatero's government. At a December rally in Madrid to "defend the Christian family," ? Cardinal Augustín ? García-Gasco lambasted Socialist initiatives, ? saying, "The culture of radical laicism ? leads to nothing but despair along the road of ? abortion and express divorce." Benigno Blanco, president of the Spanish Forum for the Family, agrees: "The reform has transformed the marriage contract into trash. It's banalized marriage...
...made Spain a paragon of progressive family law. Popular Party challenger Mariano Rajoy has attempted to tap into what he sees as an underlying distrust of those rapid changes, but even he shies away from addressing them directly because he is aware that his allies in the Catholic Church hierarchy awaken distrust as well...
...Catholic Legacy Even before 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella vanquished Granada, the last stronghold of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula, the Roman Catholic Church set a rigorous religious tone for Spain. For centuries, the Catholic faith - and the patriarchal family structure that it inspired - was the foundation of daily life from the hills of the Basque country to the Andalusian coastline. But the Spanish church was often an overbearing, sometimes repressive presence that brought the Inquisition and provided cover to Franco's fascist regime. Its influence was exemplified by the introduction of the Spanish Civil Code...
...Marion is in relatively good shape-compared with Mansfield, a town the governor and I visited earlier that morning. Strickland is a former minister, and we began our day at the United Methodist Church, a lovely place with a guitar-playing preacher. Back in the 1960s, Mansfield had been home to famous American brand names like Westinghouse and Tappan. Now the town was shriveling slowly, the young people moving away. "I'm the only one I know who went to a four-year college and came back home to live," Ben Stauffer, a young high school teacher, told me later...
...that reaches across party lines, which is why John McCain talks about the need to help displaced workers. "This income gap is the biggest issue for me," Bob Currens, a Republican painting contractor who was thinking about voting Democratic-for Obama-for the first time, told me after the church service. His wife Kim joined us and said Bob had been a salaried worker at AK Steel, "and the union was a big problem there. They worked at not working." Eventually there was a lockout-and AK Steel reorganized itself as a nonunion shop. "They're making big profits...