Pope goes on attack for visit to Spain

POPE Benedict XVI has hit out at what he called "an aggressive" anti-church sentiment in Spain at the start of a two-day visit.

The pontiff said anti-clericalism felt today in Spain, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, harks back to the 1930s when the country lurched towards civil war, and violent attacks on the church escalated.

Speaking yestrday to journalists en route to Santiago de Compostela, the pope said he had created a new Vatican office to fight such secular trends worldwide.

He said Spain was a particular focus since it had played such an important role in reviving Christianity in centuries past.

"In Spain, a strong, aggressive laicity, an anti-clericalism, a secularisation has been born as we experienced in the 1930s," he said. "For the future of the faith, it is this meeting - not a confrontation but a meeting - between faith and laicity, which has a central point in Spanish culture."

The pope is making two stops in Spain, first in the medieval and present-day pilgrimage city of Santiago, whose ornate cathedral is said to hold the remains of the apostle Saint James.

In his comments upon arrival in a fog-shrouded Santiago, the pope recalled that Pope John Paul II had issued a similar message to Spain and Europe to rediscover their Christian roots when he visited Santiago de Compostela in 1982.

"A Spain and Europe concerned not only with people's material needs but also with their moral and social, spiritual and religious needs, since all these are genuine requirements of our common humanity," he said in Spanish.

The pontiff will end his trip up on the other side of the country in Barcelona, where he will dedicate the famous albeit unfinished Sagrada Familia church.

There, he will also face a "kiss-in" staged by gays and lesbians expected to number in the thousands, evidence of the secular lifestyle that he has identified as a threat to the faith.

With such palpable opposition to the pope, it's no surprise that Spain's socialist prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero will only see Benedict as he is leaving on Sunday night. Laws passed by Zapatero's government have allowed gay marriage, fast-track divorce and easier abortions, deeply angering the Vatican.