While the British are digesting what appeared to some to be a suggestion from Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor that Roman Catholics should vote Conservative in the coming general election, it is worth looking at Spain to see how complicated life becomes when Church and State jostle for the moral high ground.

Spain is undergoing a bout of strident name-calling as the Catholic Church tries to preserve its special status from encroachments by an increasingly secular culture under the new Socialist Government of José Luis Zapatero Rodríguez.

Some of those encroachments have been dramatic. Gay marriage will be legal in Spain by the summer, there are television programmes on “how to cook a crucifix”, and Catholic bishops and government ministers exchange regular and furious insults.

Church-State affairs in 2005 are a far cry from the cosy “National- Catholic” arrangement that predominated under General Franco’s 40-year dictatorship. With Franco’s death in 1975 and a new constitution heralding Spain’s transition to democracy, the Catholic Church was relegated to a privileged second place in Spanish society. Some 94 per cent of Spaniards still class themselves Catholic, but less than a quarter of Spain’s 42 million citizens attend Mass.

The Church, its influence reduced but by no means negligible, still receives a hefty state budget topped with voluntary tax donations. But increasingly the Church and the Socialist Government are locked in a bitter battle over Spain’s modern identity.

The conflict has sharpened steadily since the general elections last March when, just after the Madrid bombings, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) unexpectedly swept to power. As well as announcing the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, it launched a domestic programme of radical legislation: marriage and adoption rights for homosexuals, divorce within 90 days of marriage, liberalised abortion law and the scrapping of religious education as a compulsory option in schools while, for the first time, introducing the study of Islam to the curriculum.

All this, the party claim, reflects “progressive” Spain. The polls seem to back them; 66 per cent of those surveyed in the left-of-centre daily El País favour gay marriage.

To the Church, all this seems like a direct attack. It claims that the PSOE is hellbent on eradicating Spain’s Catholic traditions, and is determined to exclude Catholics from participating in politics.

“The PSOE seems to be saying that no one with a religious belief is equipped to participate in a democracy,” says Braulio Rodríguez Plaza, Archbishop of Valladolid. “But on the contrary, any Catholic fully versed in his faith will be tolerant.”

He, like other Catholics, sees uneasy parallels between today’s Church-State rows and the quarrels that prompted the 1936-39 Civil War. “It is always a mistake to treat religion in Spain as a political matter,” says Carlos García de Andoin, co- ordinator of the PSOE’s Catholic wing. “History shows that to do so results only in violence.”

After Franco, the new Constitution defined Spain as non-confessional but acknowledged the “special place” of Catholicism in Spanish history. This was recognised in pacts with the Vatican that guarantee the Church a £2.4 billion annual state subsidy.

According to Ignacio Arsuaga, of HazteOir.org (Make Yourself Heard), a website encouraging Christian political protest, the subsidy to the Church is used to benefit all through schools, hospitals and social welfare programmes.“Thousands of hospitals, old people’s homes, shelters for the homeless and hungry and schools for the poor are run by priests, nuns and lay volunteers for charities,” he says. “Frankly, the cost would be unmanageable for the Goverment should the Church withdraw from these services.”

While key Socialist ministers have indicated a strong desire to rid Spain entirely of Catholic influence, the Prime Minister has pledged dialogue with the Church and has tempered anti-clerical statements made by his vice-president María Teresa Fernández de la Vega”. Fernández devised a “roadmap” to make Spain non-confessional, including recommendations to abolish religious symbols in public places.

Such proposals have prompted outrage from Spain’s bishops and the Vatican. In a speech to Spanish bishops the Pope spoke of the dangers that “creeping secularisation” posed to religious freedom, commenting: “Christianity cannot simply be ripped out of a nation.”

Three million Spanish Catholics have so far signed a petition against religious education reform. “The Constitution guarantees my right as a parent to choose an education for my children which reflects my religious beliefs,” says Luis Carbonell, president of Concapa (the Association of Catholic Parents). “The citizenship classes that the Government are proposing instead are not what I want for my children.”

Gay marriage is the other inflammatory reform: this summer Spain will be the third country in Europe to allow it — something the Church has declared “equivalent to imposing a virus on society”. Gay associations are threatening to sue the Church over the contents of a heterosexual marriage pamphlet that damns homosexual acts.

The historian Javier Burrieza Sánchez urges observers to interpret the rows with caution: “It’s very Spanish to talk things up, but rhetoric doesn’t always match action,” he says. “These debates involve a section of the Socialists and a section of the Church; not everyone by any means.”

“We have a huge Catholic vote,” agrees Andoin. “Surveys show that 79 per cent of our supporters are Catholics, of whom 46 per cent are practising. The Church and PSOE see eye to eye on many issues including immigration, cancelling world debt and violence. The problem is the bishops, who are very conservative. Many priests are more in tune with the socialists than the bishops.”

Arsuaga disagrees, saying there are plans to challenge the gay marriage law through a “people’s legal initiative”, a constitutional device allowing Spanish citizens to propose new laws to parliament if they can first gather half a million signatures.

“Catholicism is in Spain’s guts,” says Archbishop Rodríguez. “These reforms will produce a society which totally devalues human life. Unfortunately it is a legacy of Franco that people over 50 aren’t at ease discussing their opinions in public, and those under this age haven’t been properly evangelised.”