YOU wouldn't expect a Spanish socialist mayor to take too much pride in a shrine to St Michael the Archangel. But that was the first place Carlos Rodriguez Bacelo took a group of journalists when we went to visit his little village of Navalagamella, 40 km north west of Madrid, last Friday.
Religion, people will tell you, is not much of a force in today's Spain. This, after all, is the land of post Franco hedonism, epitomised by the outrageous movies of Pedro Almodovar like Tie Me Up! Tie Me down! Thirteen years of government by a largely agnostic and anticlerical Socialist party leadership has created and reflected what is possibly the, most proudly permissive society in Europe.
So why was Senor Bacelo showing us the shrine to St Michael with such unaffected pleasure? The reason is both simple and very complex the formal authority of the Catholic Church may have been severely eroded, but religious rituals still hold a central role in Spanish life, regardless of the declared ideology of the citizens. "I don't believe in all this myself," said Senor Bacelo a little ruefully, nodding towards the simple little church as he unlocked the door, "but it is the place where all our people come to celebrate together in summer.
On May 19th most, if not all, of Navalagamella's 839 citizens will walk uphill several kilometres from the village, many of them barefoot. Some of them will carry the statue of their patron saint on their shoulders.
Many of the pilgrims, Senor Bacelo says, will participate in order to ask a favour or expiate a sin. But for many others, the high point of the day comes when the Mass has ended, and they can spread their tablecloths out on the grassy meadows, under the shade of evergreen oaks, and celebrate a romeria. This a kind of collective picnic, certainly involving wine and often music and dancing, which probably owes more to the rites of Pan than to Christianity. Nobody will see much contradiction between the two rituals.
Agnostics and Catholics did not always co-exist so happily in Spain. Very close to these idyllic meadows, Franco's troops regrouped in July 1937 to counter the Republican offensive at Brunete. This became one of the bloodiest battles of a very bloody civil war, fought quite specifically, among other things, to keep Catholic Spain safe from secular democracy.
Last Friday, one of our party recalled finding nearby, as a boy, a shattered helmet and blood stained sheets in a hidden bunker during a scout camp in the 1960s. He gave them to his mother, who destroyed them. "She wanted to forget everything about the war," he says. That understandable personal amnesia became a kind of social pact not to awaken the demons of the past during the transition to democracy in the 1970s. It now seems to have extended to refusing to entertain any suggestion that the interests of the church and the people might still be opposed.
I first encountered this new attitude about 12 years ago in Seville. I was writing an article on the militant Maoist trade union, SOC, which had organised a series of impressive hunger strikes in support of landless labourers. These jornaleros lived in Third World conditions. Their leaders were heavy duty Marxist Leninists who still espoused the language, if not the practice, of violent revolution.
After a long day visiting their comrades in far flung empty villages, I asked three of the leaders what they would do about the great Sevillano tradition of Holy Week parades, ff they came to power. They looked quite taken aback, and said they would change absolutely nothing. It was a great popular tradition, they said, nothing to do with the church really and they quickly fell into a heated and to my mind hilarious argument about whose barrio had the best Virgin, or the best Christ.
Last weekend, we crossed the Sierra of the Guadarramas, another site of Civil War slaughter, to the exquisite medieval city of Segovia. Down every narrow alley you could hear the thump thump, thump thump thump of youths rehearsing for Semana Santa. As Holy Week begins, local men will don the long pointed hoods, reminiscent to us of the Ku Klux Klan, and march behind wonderfully kitsch neighbourhood saints, as they have for centuries.
If you encounter them in a dark street, under the ancient towers of a bleak convent, you may feel you are caught in a time warp with the old Spain of the Black Legend and the Inquisition. But some of these men, and most of the people who will throng the streets to watch them, see the parades less as religion than as theatre, in which they take enormous local pride.
And they would see no contradiction in going to an Almodovar movie immediately afterwards. Come to think of it, Almodovar's extremes of kitsch, sensuality and melodrama could only have been produced by a country with popular religious traditions like these. The fact that such traditions can now co exist peacefully with democratic liberties is something most Spaniards would rather celebrate than question.