Liberal Spain embraces divorcee as future queen

Wide public acceptance of a church wedding for Spain's crown prince to a divorcee shows how liberal traditionally Catholic Spain has become since the iron rule of Francisco Franco ended almost 30 years ago.

Only a handful of people turned up to a recent protest under the banner "No to the royal wedding" and a reverential national press has barely touched on the marital status of the future queen for a country where divorce only became legal in 1981.

Three-quarters of Spaniards approve of Prince Felipe's marriage tomorrow to well-known television journalist Letizia Ortiz and only five per cent do not, polls show.

This "live and let live" attitude reflects the views of modern Spaniards, some 95 per cent of whom profess to be Roman Catholic but whose views on issues from homosexuality and prostitution to abortion are surprisingly permissive.

"Divorce is seen as something normal. It is widely accepted now in Spain," said Juan Diez, head of analysts ASEP. "Spain is a country with a new social order... In a few decades it has become one of the most liberal countries in the world."

At the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, Spanish women were not allowed to open bank accounts or hold a job without their husband's permission, divorce was illegal and some 99 per cent of Spaniards were Roman Catholics.

Since it was legalised in 1981, more than 500,000 divorces have taken place in Spain.

While the divorce rate remains in the lower half of the EU - ahead of only Ireland, Italy and Greece - many young Spanish couples are simply choosing not to marry.

According to official figures, more than a fifth of Spanish children are now born outside wedlock.

The Roman Catholic Church, which will marry the royal couple in Madrid's Almudena Cathedral tomorrow, has turned a blind eye to Ortiz's divorcee status.

"She (Letizia) should not be given a punishment other women do not receive," the Archbishop of Seville Carlos Amigo, who will preside over the wedding, said recently.

The Catholic synod has emphasised that because Ortiz's previous marriage to her university literature professor was a civil one, it was not valid in the Church's eyes and hence allows her to be married in a Roman Catholic ceremony.

Catholic customs still permeate Spanish life: most children are baptised and receive communion, many of their parents get married in church. Tens of thousands, many of them young people, take part in Easter processions where religious icons are paraded by penitents in tall peaked masks and full-length robes.

"These are more cultural traditions than religious ones," said Diez. "While some 95 per cent of people define themselves as Catholic, only around 25 are actually practising Catholics."

Franco - a Catholic who took the preserved arm of Spain's patron Saint Teresa with him whenever he travelled - banned other religions until 1966. Modern Spain's liberal outlook, enshrined in its 1978 Constitution, is in part a backlash against his authoritarian rule.

Spain's recently elected Socialist government has pledged to push ahead with a liberal social agenda, including the legalisation of gay marriage. For the first time, Spain has a female deputy prime minister and half the cabinet are women.

Many of the conservative social taboos of Franco's years were torn down during the hedonistic 1980s, when figures such as avant-garde film director Pedro Almodovar pioneered Madrid's bohemian movida of sexual adventure and drugs.

Today, mass tourism to Spain's sunny costas and rising immigration has produced an increasingly multicultural society, although the Catholic church remains influential and wealthy.

For many open-minded young Spaniards, it is not so much Ortiz's divorcee status as the monarchy that troubles them.

"It doesn't matter to me that Letizia is divorced," said Olga Arriaga, a 26-year-old economist. "But why should I pay for her to live in luxury? She should work like the rest of us!"