Living high on the hog on the backs of the sheep!
Catholic Clergy Protest Pope’s Visit, and Its Price Tag
Two hundred portable confessional booths were set up in Madrid's Retiro Park for Pope Benedict XVI's visit this week.
Marta Ramoneda for The New York Times
To the Rev. Eubilio Rodríguez, the trip's cost is “scandalous.”
MADRID — The Rev. Eubilio Rodríguez’s church is a prefabricated building in an area of this city hard hit by Spain’s economic crisis. In front of the altar are a few scraggly potted plants. Behind it, some plastic chairs.
How, he asks, can the Roman Catholic Church be getting ready for a lavish $72 million celebration in this city — some of it paid for with tax dollars — when Spain is in the midst of an austerity drive, the unemployment rate for young people is 40 percent and his parishioners are losing their homes to foreclosure every day?
“It is scandalous, the price,” he said. “It is shameful. It discredits the church.”
Father Rodríguez, 67, is among the 120 clergymen working among the poor here who have signed a lengthy petition deploring the pope’s visit this week on many grounds — from its cost to what they see as an inappropriate melding of church and state.
Madrid is girding itself for the arrival of perhaps one and a half million pilgrims. Its lampposts are gaily decorated with banners. Retiro Park has been decked out with 200 portable confessional booths. But bitter debates are raging over the festivities and the role of the church in Spanish politics.
The priests, along with dozens of left-leaning groups demanding a secular state and young people who occupied many of Spain’s main squares for months to protest the government’s handling of the economy, are planning at least one major protest march on Wednesday.
Pope Benedict XVI is coming here on Thursday to meet hundreds of thousands of young people celebrating a World Youth Day event in this capital. Some 450,000 have already registered, and three times as many are expected, organizers say. To accommodate their activities — which will include a daylong vigil at the airport, with temperatures likely to reach nearly 100 degrees, and an all-night procession with priceless works of religious art — some of Madrid’s main avenues will be closed to traffic for up to six days.
Government and church officials insist the cost to taxpayers will be minimal and the lift to local businesses substantial. Spain’s businesses community came up with $23 million to pay for various events and the pilgrims will pay $44 million themselves. Other donations should cover the rest, the officials say.
“The public administration helped us in only two ways,” said Fernando Giménez Barriocanal, the financial director of World Youth Day 2011. The pilgrims will be allowed to sleep in public buildings like schools. And businesses will be able to get tax deductions for their contributions, he said.
But critics are calling the claims ridiculous. Father Rodríguez and others who signed the 10-page petition say the costs are always fuzzy when the pope comes to town. They suspect that the cost of extra security, of collecting trash and of stress on health systems will add up to millions for taxpayers. For one thing, the pilgrims have been granted an 80 percent discount on public transportation, which some find particularly galling because subway fares just went up by 50 percent.
The priests are not alone in making such claims. “They still can’t tell us how much the pope’s visit cost two years ago,” said Esther López Barceló, youth coordinator for the small United Left party. Ms. López initiated a Twitter campaign this month against the pope’s visit. “Every time he comes here, the figures become opaque,” she said.
Spain is less solidly Catholic than it once was. A government survey released in July found that 71.7 percent of Spaniards declared themselves Catholics, compared with 82.1 percent in 2001. Of those, 13 percent attend Mass on Sundays, compared with 19 percent 10 years ago.
But the church is eager to keep a spiritual hold on this country, where people can still check a box diverting up to seven-tenths of a percent of their taxes to the church.
A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said at a briefing in Rome that the protests planned against Benedict’s visit were “not worrying or surprising,” particularly because “there are hundreds of thousands of young people who will be happy to welcome the pope.”
“It’s part of life in a democratic country,” he added.
Protest organizers said it was hard to estimate the turnout they might get because August is a time when many people are out of the city. But the protests organized by angry young people earlier this year surprised almost everyone, as tens of thousands of demonstrators, now called “indignados,” took over squares all around the country for several weeks.
Earlier this month, the police moved in on the Puerta del Sol, a square here, forcing the last indignados to leave in time for the pope’s visit. But some organizers believe that the operation, shown on evening television broadcasts for several days, could spur more young people to turn out.
Spain’s Interior Ministry declined to answer questions about the event. The Madrid City Council referred all questions about the visit to its civil protection agency, which said the visit posed logistical challenges the city has never had to deal with before.
“More than one million outsiders will be circulating in Madrid,” said Alfonso del Álamo, the director of the agency. “A major event like winning the World Cup is only 500,000. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
On Friday evening, rare works of 16th- and 17th-century art depicting the stations of the cross will be carried through the streets beginning at 8 p.m. Mr. del Álamo said that would mean that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would be in the streets throughout the night.
His agency has trained 3,000 volunteers in first aid, radio communication, evacuation and panic control, he said. Still, he said, it will be in overdrive. Instead of the usual 4,000 shifts in a week, the agency’s workers will do 10,000 shifts. He said that he had not calculated the costs.
Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.
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