Word: garrisons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Spanish Protestants do enjoy some liberties, e.g., they may organize churches, preach in them as they please, train their ministers and print literature for circulation among themselves. However, reports Dr. Garrison, "they cannot lawfully do anything that would be regarded as the public practice of their religion...
Protestant churches may not bear any external symbols to show that they are churches at all. They are not found on the main thoroughfares, but stick to narrow side streets. (However, "many narrow side streets in Spanish cities are very nice streets," writes Garrison. "Moreover, the narrower the streets, the more dense the population.") No public signs or announcements of services may be made, no church literature may be generally circulated, no new churches may be opened without special permission, and no Protestant schools for children are allowed. "For Protestant children the only choice is between Catholic schools and public...
...Sowers of Evil." Occasionally even these meager rights have been violated by mob action. Six weeks after one such episode, reports Garrison, "the periodical El Iris de Paz ('the Rainbow of Peace'!), by its own description 'a fortnightly magazine of information and guidance, Marian and Catholic'-answered a real or imaginary inquirer who asked: 'Is it lawful to enter into chapels or meeting places of Protestants . . . with the sole idea of disturbing and of destroying the furniture and other articles?' The answer was in three parts: 1) as to 'disturbing...
...Editor Garrison devotes one of his articles to examining the origins of Spain's state Catholicism. As he entered the country, the state tourist department handed him a pamphlet "containing a defense and glorification of the Spanish Inquisition" and Garrison quotes it at length to show that the compulsory conversion enforced by the Inquisition was undertaken as much for political as "religious" reasons...
...Reformation failed in Spain, says Garrison, not because "the Spanish mind is naturally, congenitally and incurably Catholic," but simply because the church-state's repression of non-Catholicism was so ruthless. How long would such a leader as Luther, he asks, "have lasted in the fires of an auto-da-fé at Seville? Or, even if he had been made of asbestos, what role would he ... have played in Ferdinand's program of national unification by compulsory religious solidarity...