Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,3604,1270381,00.html
On July 28, 2004 The Guardian reported, "The arguments are old, but the passions they provoke are no less fiery. Spain's leading archbishop compared the situation Catholics found themselves in today with the early Middle Ages, when the Moors swept across the Straits of Gibraltar. The object of his ire was a decision by the new socialist government to cancel the reintroduction of compulsory religious classes and to find ways of financing other faiths, including Islam, with public money. One plan is to subsidise mosques to make them less dependent on the money of the Wahhabis, the predominant doctrine in Saudi Arabia that funds Chechen rebels. The government has also been toying with the idea of monitoring the sermons being delivered inside mosques. Two quite separate ideas are colliding in the minds of Spain's anti-religious socialists. Modern Spain, a secular state, has been struggling for the last three decades to achieve the separation of church and state, and make the Catholic church in Spain self-financing."