Spain RELIGION
Salamanca Cathedral
Courtesy James Scofield
Spain, it has been observed, is a nation-state born out
of
religious struggle between Catholicism and, in turn,
Islam,
Judaism, and Protestantism. After centuries of the
Reconquest, in
which Christian Spaniards fought to drive Muslims from
Europe,
the Inquisition sought to complete the religious
purification of
the Iberian Peninsula by driving out Jews, Protestants,
and other
nonbelievers
(see Ferdinand and Isabella
, ch. 1). The
Inquisition
was finally abolished only in the 1830s, and even after
that
religious freedom was denied in practice, if not in
theory.
Catholicism became the state religion in 1851, when the
Spanish
government signed a Concordat with the Vatican that
committed
Madrid to pay the salaries of the clergy and to subsidize
other
expenses of the Roman Catholic Church. This pact was
renounced in
1931, when the secular constitution of the Second Republic
imposed a series of anticlerical measures that threatened
the
church's very existence in Spain and provoked its support
for the
Franco uprising five years later
(see Republican Spain
, ch. 1).
The advent of the Franco regime saw the restoration of
the
church's privileges. During the Franco years, Roman
Catholicism
was the only religion to have legal status; other worship
services could not be advertised, and only the Roman
Catholic
Church could own property or publish books. The government
not
only continued to pay priests' salaries and to subsidize
the
church, but it also assisted in the reconstruction of
church
buildings damaged by the war. Laws were passed abolishing
divorce
and banning the sale of contraceptives. Catholic religious
instruction was mandatory, even in public schools. Franco
secured
in return the right to name Roman Catholic bishops in
Spain, as
well as veto power over appointments of clergy down to the
parish
priest level. In 1953 this close cooperation was
formalized in a
new Concordat with the Vatican that granted the church an
extraordinary set of privileges: mandatory canonical
marriages
for all Catholics; exemption from government taxation;
subsidies
for new building construction; censorship of materials the
church
deemed offensive; the right to establish universities, to
operate
radio stations, and to publish newspapers and magazines;
protection from police intrusion into church properties;
and
exemption of clergy from military service
(see Foreign Policy under Franco
, ch. 1).
The proclamation of the Second Vatican Council in favor
of
the separation of church and state in 1965 forced the
reassessment of this special relationship. In the late
1960s, the
Vatican attempted to reform the church in Spain by
appointing
liberals as interim, or acting, bishops, thereby
circumventing
Franco's stranglehold on the country's clergy. In 1966 the
Franco
regime passed a law that freed other religions from many
of the
earlier restrictions, although it also reaffirmed the
privileges
of the Catholic Church. Any attempt to revise the 1953
Concordat
met the dictator's rigid resistance.
In 1976, however, King Juan Carlos de Borbon
unilaterally
renounced the right to name the bishops; later that same
year
Madrid and the Vatican signed a new accord that restored
to the
church its right to name bishops, and the church agreed to
a
revised Concordat that entailed a gradual financial
separation of
church and state. Church property not used for religious
purposes
was henceforth to be subject to taxation, and gradually,
over a
period of years, the church's reliance on state subsidies
was to
be reduced. The timetable for this reduction was not
adhered to,
however, and the church continued to receive the public
subsidy
through 1987 (US$110 million in that year alone). Indeed,
by the
end of 1987 issues such as financing and education had not
been
definitively resolved, and the revised Concordat still had
not
been agreed to in final form, even though the 1953
Concordat had
expired in 1980.
It took the new 1978 Constitution to confirm the right
of
Spaniards to religious freedom and to begin the process of
disestablishing Catholicism as the state religion
(see The 1978 Constitution
, ch. 4). The drafters of the Constitution
tried to
deal with the intense controversy surrounding state
support of
the church, but they were not entirely successful. The
initial
draft of the Constitution did not even mention the church,
which
was included almost as an afterthought and only after
intense
pressure from the church's leadership. Article 16
disestablishes
Roman Catholicism as the official religion and provides
that
religious liberty for non-Catholics is a state-protected
legal
right, thereby replacing the policy of limited toleration
of
non-Catholic religious practices. The article further
states,
however, that "The public authorities shall take the
religious
beliefs of Spanish society into account and shall maintain
the
consequent relations of cooperation with the Catholic
Church and
the other confessions." In addition, Article 27 also
aroused
controversy by appearing to pledge continuing government
subsidies for private, church-affiliated schools. These
schools
were sharply criticized by Spanish Socialists for having
created
and perpetuated a class-based, separate, and unequal
school
system. The Constitution, however, includes no affirmation
that
the majority of Spaniards are Catholics or that the state
should
take into account the teachings of Catholicism.
Government financial aid to the church was a difficult
and
contentious issue. The church argued that, in return for
the
subsidy, the state had received the social, health, and
educational services of tens of thousands of priests and
nuns who
fulfilled vital functions that the state itself could not
have
performed. Nevertheless, the revised Concordat was
supposed to
replace direct state aid to the church with a scheme that
would
allow taxpayers to designate a certain portion of their
taxes to
be diverted directly to the church. Through 1985,
taxpayers were
allowed to deduct up to 10 percent from their taxable
income for
donations to the Catholic Church. Partly because of the
protests
against this arrangement from representatives of Spain's
other
religious groups, the tax laws were changed in 1987 so
that
taxpayers could choose between giving 0.52 percent of
their
income tax to the church and allocating it to the
government's
welfare and culture budgets. For three years, the
government
would continue to give the church a gradually reduced
subsidy,
but after that the church would have to subsist on its own
resources. The government would continue, however, its
program of
subsidizing Catholic schools, which in 1987 cost the
Spanish
taxpayers about US$300 million, exclusive of the salaries
of
teachers, which were paid directly by the Ministry of
Education
and Science
(see Education
, this ch.).
Anyone visiting Spain must be constantly aware of the
church's physical presence in buildings, museums, and
religious
celebrations. In a population of about 39 million, the
number of
non-Catholics was probably no more than 300,000. About
250,000 of
these were of other Christian faiths, including several
Protestant denominations, Jehovah's Witnesses, and
Mormons. The
number of Jews in Spain was estimated at about 13,000.
More than
19 out of every 20 Spaniards were baptized Catholics;
about 60
percent of them attended Mass; about 30 percent of the
baptized
Catholics did so regularly, although this figure declined
to
about 20 percent in the larger cities. As of 1979, about
97
percent of all marriages were performed according to the
Catholic
religion. A 1982 report by the church claimed that 83
percent of
all children born the preceding year had been baptized in
the
church.
Nevertheless, there were forces at work bringing about
fundamental changes in the place of the church in society.
One
such force was the improvement in the economic fortunes of
the
great majority of Spaniards, making society more
materialistic
and less religious. Another force was the massive shift in
population from farm and village to the growing urban
centers,
where the church had less influence over the values of its
members. These changes were transforming the way Spaniards
defined their religious identity.
Being a Catholic in Spain had less and less to do with
regular attendance at Mass and more to do with the routine
observance of important rituals such as baptism, marriage,
and
burial of the dead. A 1980 survey revealed that, although
82
percent of Spaniards were believers in Catholicism, very
few
considered themselves to be very good practitioners of the
faith.
In the case of the youth of the country, even smaller
percentages
believed themselves to be "very good" or "practicing"
Catholics.
In contrast to an earlier era, when rejection of the
church
went along with education, in the late 1980s studies
showed that
the more educated a person was, the more likely he or she
was to
be a practicing Catholic. This new acceptance of the
church was
due partly to the church's new self-restraint in politics.
In a
significant change from the pre-Civil War era, the church
had
accepted the need for the separation of religion and the
state,
and it had even discouraged the creation of a Christian
Democratic party in the country.
The traditional links between the political right and
the
church no longer dictated political preferences; in the
1982
general election, more than half of the country's
practicing
Catholics voted for the PSOE. Although the Socialist
leadership
professed agnosticism, according to surveys between 40 and
45
percent of the party's rank-and-file members held
religious
beliefs, and more than 70 percent of these professed to be
Catholics. Among those entering the party after Franco's
death,
about half considered themselves Catholic.
One important indicator of the changes taking place in
the
role of the church was the reduction in the number of
Spaniards
in Holy Orders. In 1984 the country had more than 22,000
parish
priests, nearly 10,000 ordained monks, and nearly 75,000
nuns.
These numbers concealed a troubling reality, however. More
than
70 percent of the diocesan clergy was between the ages of
35 and
65; the average age of the clergy in 1982 was 49 years. At
the
upper end of the age range, the low numbers reflected the
impact
of the Civil War, in which more than 4,000 parish priests
died.
At the lower end, the scarcity of younger priests
reflected the
general crisis in vocations throughout the world, which
began to
be felt in the 1960s. Its effects were felt especially
acutely in
Spain. The crisis was seen in the decline in the number of
young
men joining the priesthood and in the increase in the
number of
priests leaving Holy Orders. The number of seminarists in
Spain
fell from more than 9,000 in the 1950s to only 1,500 in
1979,
even though it rose slightly in 1982 to about 1,700.
Changes in the social meaning of religious vocations
were
perhaps part of the problem; having a priest in the family
no
longer seemed to spark the kind of pride that family
members
would have felt in the past. The principal reason in most
cases,
though, was the church's continued ban on marriage for
priests.
Previously, the crisis was not particularly serious
because of
the age distribution of the clergy. As the twentieth
century
nears an end, however, a serious imbalance will appear
between
those entering the priesthood and those leaving it. The
effects
of this crisis were already visible in the decline in the
number
of parish priests in Spain--from 23,620 in 1979 to just
over
22,000 by 1983.
Another sign of the church's declining role in Spanish
life
was the diminishing importance of the controversial
secular
religious institute, Opus Dei (Work of God). Opus Dei was
a
worldwide lay religious body that did not adhere to any
particular political philosophy and was allegedly
nonpolitical.
The organization was founded in 1928 by a Spanish priest,
Jose
Maria Escriva de Balaguer y Albas, as a reaction to the
increasing secularization of Spain's universities, and
higher
education continued to be one of the institute's foremost
priorities. Despite its public commitment to a
nonpolitical
stance, Opus Dei members rose to occupy key positions in
the
Franco regime, especially in the field of economic
policy-making
in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Opus Dei members
dominated
the group of liberal technocrats who engineered the
opening of
Spain's autarchic economy after 1957. After the 1973
assassination of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco (often
rumored to be an Opus Dei member), however, the influence
of the
institute declined sharply. The secrecy of the order and
its
activities and the power of its myth helped it maintain
its
strong position of influence in Spain; but there was
little doubt
that, compared with the 1950s and the 1960s, Opus Dei had
fallen
from being one of the country's chief political
organizations to
being simply one among many such groups competing for
power in an
open and pluralist society
(see Political Interest Groups
, ch.
4).
In the late 1980s, however, the church showed signs of
becoming more conservative than liberal. After years of
being the
minority in the church hierarchy, conservative Catholic
leaders
had reasserted their power and influence, and they were
beginning
to wrest power from the liberals. One telling indicator of
the
return of conservatives to control within the church was
the
battle in late 1987 over the editorial policy of the
leading
Spanish Catholic weekly magazine, Vida Nueva, which
ended
with the liberal editor's being forced out of office and
his
being replaced with a conservative.
Data as of December 1988
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