Visiting Pope’s Words a Balm for Traditionalists in Spain

Maria Pilar Hervas, a teacher, remembers the insults hurled her way when she walked through the streets with her five children. Large families were out of fashion in the fast-modernizing Spain.

“People treated me as though I had committed a crime” by producing a brood that size, Hervas said Sunday as she listened to Pope Benedict XVI extol the virtues of the traditional family, and of marriage between man and woman, to a gigantic gathering of faithful.

The pope was concluding a visit here of scarcely more than 24 hours to lend his support to the fifth World Meeting of the Families, and to drive home what he considers a central tenet of his papacy: There are basic truths that must not be marred by fads and the “dictatorship of relativism.”

For people like Hervas, conservative Roman Catholics in an increasingly secular society, Benedict’s message was welcome comfort. She and her family traveled to Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast from Madrid to see the pope.

“The sense of what family is all about is being lost,” said Hervas, 44, sprawled on the lawn at Valencia’s spectacular City of Arts and Sciences, the complex where Benedict officiated over Mass. “He is reminding us to fight for what we believe.”

Her husband, Alfonso, also a teacher, surveyed the crowd. “It’s good to see we are not alone and that a lot of people think the way we do,” he said. “People get very comfortable with a certain way of life and are no longer willing to make sacrifices.”

Many in Spain, in fact, do not agree with the families gathered here, and that is precisely the challenge for Benedict.

He said Mass before hundreds of thousands of people at the sports and arts complex, a hypermodern design of giant waves and sails by Valencia-born architect Santiago Calatrava. Women fanned themselves furiously against the heat; many people had camped at the site, built in the city’s dried riverbed, to have a good position Sunday.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls quoted organizers who estimated the size of the crowd at more than 1 million, with an additional 800,000 or so following along at outdoor television screens around the city. The numbers could not be verified, and some reporters estimated the crowd at about half that size.

In his remarks, the pope twice referred to the “indissoluble marriage between man and woman” as the pillar of family and truth itself. Both times, the audience broke into loud applause and cheers.

“In contemporary culture,” he said, “we often see an excessive exaltation of the freedom of the individual as an autonomous subject, as if we were self-created and self-sufficient, apart from our relationship with others and our responsibilities in their regard.”

He lamented that “attempts are being made to organize the life of society on the basis of subjective and ephemeral desires alone.” He said that shortchanged “objective, prior truths,” including the dignity of the human being and “his inalienable rights and duties.”

Though his language was generally couched and more studious than scolding, Benedict was clearly directing his words at families he believes are under siege in fast-changing Spain. Especially under Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain has adopted a program of liberal social laws, including one that legalizes same-sex marriage.

That and other laws have brought the Zapatero government into conflict with the Vatican. Polls in Spain, however, give wide support to such measures.

In a sign of the strained relations between Madrid and the Holy See, Zapatero declined to attend the Mass and the farewell ceremony at Valencia’s airport. Before leaving, the pope met briefly with the head of the political opposition, Mariano Rajoy, whose rightist Popular Party gave the church favored status.