Keeping Up With Teresa Forcades - A Nun With A Mission | The Guardian | May 17, 2013
/Sister Teresa Forcades is one of Catalonia's foremost political figures, but uniquely for a faith-led figure in Spain, her ideology is feminist and left-wing. Against a backdrop of continued economic contraction and austerity, she spoke to the Guardian about the need for an alternative to capitalism and criticised the misogyny of the Catholic church
Keeping up with Teresa Forcades, a nun on a mission
Spanish Benedictine nun is emerging as one of the most outspoken – and atypical – leaders of southern Europe's far left
by Giles Tremlett in Montserrat
The Guardian, Friday 17 May 2013 12.40 BST
The speedometer on Teresa Forcades' battered silver Peugeot saloon shows 130kmh, but Spain's most famously radical nun is so busy talking she seems oblivious to the 80kmh speed limit signs above the motorway near her Sant Benet convent on the slopes of Montserrat, Catalonia's sacred mountain.
“The Roman Catholic church, which is my church, is misogynist and patriarchal in its structure. That needs to be changed as quickly as possible.”
The woman whose biting criticism of everything from banks to big pharmaceutical companies has shot her into the political limelight is rushing to Barcelona's train station so she can travel to Valencia to deliver a speech. Then she will fly to the Canary Islands for the next appointment on her public speaking schedule.
She is on the campaign trail to promote a radical manifesto for revolutionary political change (link in Catalan). In the black headdress of the Benedictine order, Forcades has emerged as one of the most outspoken – and atypical – leaders of southern Europe's fragmented, confused far left.
Flooring the accelerator, she praises Syriza, the leftwing Greek group that rose from the rubble of the country's ruined economy and is a reference point for her manifesto for a radical approach to building an independent Catalonia.
"The economic crisis in Spain has got to a point where it threatens the fabric of society," she says. "This is something that has happened in Greece. The precariousness of people's lives is progressing at an accelerated pace and they cannot cope. The danger of violence and upheaval in some non-democratic way is a possibility."
She and economist Arcadi Oliveres co-wrote the manifesto calling for a refounding of the Spanish state, with an independent Catalonia, nationalised banks and energy companies and an exit from Nato. They hope to rekindle the spirit of the indignados who occupied Spanish squares in 2011, but focusing on more concrete aims.
"I and a group of people felt a need to intervene, in my case because of this popularity I've acquired. I thought it could be good to try to organise this discontent, this feeling of deep disappointment and growing tension," she says. "I'm not starting a political party and am not intending to run in any elections. That is not for a Benedictine and not for me."
Forcades hopes to revive the spirit of Spain's 'indignados' protest movement. Photograph: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images
While she is not running for office, Forcades is not shy of public debate, regularly appearing on local television. Her conversation includes references to liberation theology, Marx's theories on surplus value, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela and the Tobin tax, as well as the 12th-century figure Saint Hildegard of Bingen or the rule of Saint Benedict, precepts by which she tries to live.
Visiting Venezuela in 2009 she found a country she did not recognise from critical descriptions in Spanish newspapers. "Marginalised people spoke as if what they thought and wanted was important in the politics of their country," she says. "They had a sense of counting, which is essential in democracy."
Her critique of neoliberal capitalism includes not just a Christian desire to protect the weak, but also an attack on the hypocrisy of a system that gives goods and capital the freedom to cross frontiers while workers cannot. "It is a version of capitalism where the rights and needs of people are pushed aside," she says, pointing to how taxes are higher on selling bread than on financial speculation.
Her fame stems from a polemical spat with the World Health Organisation and the pharmaceutical industry over swine flu vaccines in 2009. A video filmed at her convent, in which she talks to camera for a solid hour about what she claims are the dangers of the vaccine, went viral.
"What I found astonished me, the lack of scientific ground for any of the public policies and decisions," she says. "The video was highly viewed by more than one million people. And that was the start of my public presence."
El País labelled her a "paranoid conspiracist" and "hoaxer-nun" who used half-truths and her religious status to spread fear. But Forcades, who trained as a doctor in the US and has a public health PhD, says she spent three months studying the science before making an hour-long YouTube video, one of 95 that now sit on a Forcades YouTube channel.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/17/teresa-forcades-nun-on-mission
