The Catholic Church loses ground in favor of minority religions. That is the main conclusion of the map of places of worship published by the Observatory of Religious Pluralism last October. In Spain, a total of 30,949 templesof which 22,933 belong to the Catholic religion, the hegemonic confession since the conquest of Granada in 1492.
The minority religions They already have 8,016 temples, 26% of the total, which represents an unprecedented quota in the contemporary history of a country that until the 1931 Constitution expressly prohibited the public manifestation of any doctrine other than Catholic. places of worship evangelicals They represent 14% of the total, with 4,455 buildings of a religious nature. They are followed by muslimswhich total 1,839 mosques and 6% of the places of worship, and the Jehovah’s Witnesseswith 633 temples and 4.8%.
Although the Catholic Church still maintains an overwhelming dominance of the Spanish religious map, its implementation describes an evident decline in the last decade. The first cartography published by the Observatory of Religious Pluralism In 2011 it attributed 23,074 temples, 141 more than in last October’s report. Its supremacy was even greater if we analyze its predominance in relative terms. 13 years ago, Catholicism controlled the 82% of oratorieseight points more than today, while minority religions barely accounted for 18% of Spanish temples.
As a whole, Spain today has 2,873 more buildings of worship than 13 years ago, largely due to the increase in the migrant population. In Latin America the evangelical religion grows exponentially and its influence is noticeable in the South American community settled in Spain, while the Islam Its presence increases due to the flow of North African labor.
In 2011, evangelical temples numbered 2,944, 10% of the total, while today they are close to 4,500. The islamic oratories were those that experienced the sharpest increase, doubling the 988 registered then. Jehovah’s Witnesses have also lost 73 temples, reaching 633, although they retain third place among minority religions.
By communities, Catalonia (1,599), Andalusia (1.276) and Madrid (1,142) are the regions that register the most places of worship of non-Catholic confessions. The cities that present greater religious pluralism due to their diversity of temples are Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza and Seville.
The Observatory of Religious Pluralism is an entity dependent on the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundationchaired by the minister Felix Bolaños. There are twenty senior officials on its board, including the general director of International Legal Cooperation, Eva Maria Perez; the general director for the Maghreb, Mediterranean and Middle East, Carmen Magariños; and the general director of Budgets of the Ministry of Finance, Javier Sánchez.
The directory of places of worship published by the Observatory of Religious Pluralism It is nourished by three basic sources, as reported by the entity on its corporate website: the registry of religious entities, the research promoted by the foundation itself and the requests for the incorporation of data made by the different communities.
The Observatory was created in 2011 at the request of the Ministry of Justice and the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces with the objective of “providing data and diagnoses on the diversity of beliefs and the needs linked to the effective exercise of religious freedom to contribute to the improvement of public management”.
The map of temples in Spain gives an approximate idea of the number of faithful of each religious confession. If we cross the directory of places of worship with the opinion polls of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), we observe a balanced evolution between both indicators. In 2006, for example, the 77.3% of the population Spanish declared themselves Catholic, while only 1.7% said they subscribed to other religions.
Eighteen years later, the Catholics represent 55.6% of the total and minority religions amount to 2.9%. That is, the majority confession has lost almost 22 percentage points while the rest have increased as a whole by 1.2 points. In any case, the segment that has grown the most by far has been that corresponding to non-believers or indifferentwhich has gone from 19.4% to 39.4%. The record of atheists and agnostics was reached in 2023, with 41.8%.
All these data indicate that Spain is increasingly a “mestizo society.” This is how he maintains it Amelia Sanchisprofessor of State Ecclesiastical Law at the University of Córdoba and expert in public management of religious freedom. “We are not univocal societies but multicultural and intercultural, because we are condemned to understand each other,” he argues. Precisely for that reason, Professor Sanchís advocates for the “secularism as a space for coexistence”.
Amelia Sanchís: “We should open the angular width to show that not all people think the same”
The UCO jurist grants “maximum reliability” to the directory of places of worship prepared by the Observatory of Religious Pluralism, although it clarifies that there are buildings of a sacred nature that do not appear in the registry of religious entities. “We should open the wide angle to show that not all people think the same,” he emphasizes. Sanchis. “And that it be shown not as a danger but as a wealth of our country.”
In his opinion, despite the fact that the Spanish Constitution protects in its article 16 the ideological, religious and cult freedomcitizens are often reluctant to talk about their beliefs. “This is our last coming out of the closet,” he points out graphically. “We have managed to talk freely about sex, for example, and now we will have to learn to also talk about our conscience.” Article 10 of the Supreme Charter advocates “dignity and free development of personality,” recalls Amelia Sanchís. In such a way that neither Catholics nor Muslims nor any other confession have a “plus” that non-believers do not have. “Dignity is what makes us all equal,” concludes the State Ecclesiastical Law professor.
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