Spanish views from a small town

Outsiders tend to think of Spain as a religious country, where women clad all in black file into church on Sundays, and where on feast days, the priest comes out in procession with the parish parading behind him. There are areas where that is still a reality, but they are becoming infrequent. Spain, of all the Mediterranean countries, is abandoning the Church. Every year there are less and less parishioners attending Sunday Mass. There are fewer men who want to enter the priesthood, too, and as the older priests die, the ones left behind find themselves leading two or more parishes, sometimes many kilometers apart.  Fewer people are getting married. Those that do, are heading for the mayor's office and a civil ceremony. In the year 2000, over 160,000 couples tied the knot in a church. Last year, the number didn't even reach 42,000. Less children are being baptized, and less are receiving First Communion. What is rising in number, are Last Rites and funerals. The coming gene...

From the outside Spain has always appeared to be a profoundly Catholic country, where religion and politics seem to be intertwined and everyone goes to Mass on Sundays. That was true once upon a time. Until the middle of the nineteenth century and a wave of anticlericalism by liberal governments, everyone had perforce to belong to the Catholic Church. The Inquisition made sure of that. After the "separation" of Church and State, a Spanish citizen could belong to a different religion without civil retaliation. But the Church still remained a force to be reckoned with. When George Borrow travelled the length and breadth of Spain as he described in The Bible in Spain in 1843, Catholicism was still the only religion allowed, though Protestant preachers were permitted to enter the country. As of 1868, though, freedom of religion became the law. Which did not mean the Church lost power. While it had lost a lot of property during the nineteenth century, it did not lose all of it no...