Monday, April 20 · Day 5
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The Almaria Herald

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Culture

Don Rafael invokes Aquinas in a call for a restoration of Almarian values

Don Rafael invokes Aquinas in a call for a restoration of Almarian values

The essayist's invocation of the Summa arrives as the Corts debates a public-order clause that senior advocates call dangerously vague.

By Cultural affairs desk·From edition 5, Culture

From the offices of the editor's network, Don Rafael Miralpeix i Cardona has published a lengthy meditation upon what he terms "the decency that built us," arranging, in the manner he favours, a passage of the Summa Theologica alongside a catalogue of contemporary discontents. The essay has been reprinted in these pages in the interest of a full public record.

Don Rafael's principal concern, as has been the case for some months, is the moral temperament of the kingdom's younger citizens, whom he charges with a certain inconstancy; his secondary concern is the language, now under debate in the Corts, of a draft amendment to the public-order statutes. Upon this second question, however, he is more elliptical than his admirers might wish, preferring to speak of "the forms of civil conduct" rather than to engage the clause itself.

The Herald notes that the draft amendment, tabled by deputy Tomàs Verdú and a conservative bloc of the Corts, has been described by the senior advocate Mireia Puigdomènech as "dangerously vague and an embarrassment to a modern constitutional monarchy." The Crown's advisory council on constitutional affairs has been asked to report within thirty days. A demonstration, small in number but firm in purpose, assembled outside the Corts on the Plaça Reial by early evening.

Don Rafael is entitled to his Aquinas, and his readers to their agreement or dissent. This newspaper observes only that a constitutional monarchy rests, finally, upon the competent draftsmanship of its statutes, and that vague language in a public-order clause has, historically, proven a poor servant of any decency worthy of the name.

— Filed for Culture, edition 5.