Spain has seen a dramatic fall in numbers of people identifying as Catholic as part of a wider stagnation of the Catholic faith across Europe.
(LifeSiteNews) — Spain is no longer a de facto Catholic country, the nation’s leading Catholic prelate has stated, with numbers of Catholics falling and the hierarchy also mired in a controversy to sell off Church assets.
“The time has passed, settled for centuries, when we said: I’m Catholic because I was born in Spain,” said Archbishop Luis Argüello last week. The Archbishop of Valladolid was speaking at the recent plenary assembly of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Spain (CEE) in his capacity as president of the CEE.
Commenting on the dramatic loss of practice of the Catholic faith in the country, Argüello said that it “in principle, is not bad news, as it is making us aware of the need not to take conversion for granted, nor, even less so, Christian initiation.”
“It is a major challenge, both quantitatively and qualitatively, when it comes to making the first proclamation and Christian initiation,” he warned, adding that the crisis of loss of faith “requires discernment on our part. How many baptismal fonts are we capable of maintaining in the diocese? How many tables that summon us to the Eucharist on Sunday?"
Spain’s 70 dioceses have recorded “around 23,000 baptismal records,” he said, appearing to refer to growth in the Catholic population since the CEE’s spring 2024 meeting. But many of the county’s rural parishes are not able to hold a Sunday Mass, such is the drop in both laity and clergy figures.
Attempting to urge his fellow bishops to consider the question, Argüello asked, “How can we promote community life as a basic school of synodality and of vocation promotion in our parishes?”
Recent statistics from Pew Research Center show that Spain “has the largest net losses for Christians from religious switching (in proportion to the size of its population) of any country surveyed.”
Some 87 percent of Spanish adults surveyed said they were raised as Christian, but only 54 percent described themselves as Christian today, according to the survey. This, the survey noted, was a drop of 36 percent of Spanish adults, while only 3 percent of adults entered Christianity.
Statista polls showed that in September 2024 some 57.1 percent of Spaniards identified as Catholic, which is down from a high of 73.1 percent in 2013. Of this figure, however, there was no detail given about how many actually practice the faith, attending weekly Mass or adhering to the tenets of the Creed.
Indeed, official Vatican data reveal that number of Catholics is stagnating in Europe, and numbers of priests and seminarians especially dropped in the once thoroughly Catholic continent.
READ: Catholic laity grow in number as priests and seminarians continue decline
Many bishops remain publicly confused about the dramatic loss of practice of the faith in recent decades, but a growing number of Catholic commentators – both lay and clerical – are pointing to the non-enforcement of Catholic teaching as being crucially linked to the phenomenon.
Speaking during a recent interview, Tyler’s emeritus Bishop Joseph Strickland opined that modern ecclesial liturgy and poor priestly formation has played a key role. Strickland said that, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the Novus Ordo Mass, “I think all of that really began to shift the priesthood more into being a social worker, a good man, and doing good things, but not being a priest of Jesus Christ.”
In recent years, a number of prelates have pointed to the lengthy Synod on Synodality as exacerbating the confusion in the Church, particularly given its promotion of arguments which run contrary to Catholic doctrine.
Following the three-year extension of the synod, canonist Father Gerald Murray wrote that it could “be a destructive moment for the Church.”
“The bishops of the Church must oppose this manifestly anti-Catholic innovation that would turn the Church into something akin to a Protestant body,” he argued.
For many Catholics in Spain, Argüello’s words will appear as particularly bizarre given the Spanish episcopacy’s role in the controversial resignification of the Valley of the Fallen and the Benedictine monastery there.
The Valley of the Fallen is home to the war memorial erected in honor of the dead from both sides of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Also situated on site is the Basilica of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen and, on the other side of the hill, the Benedictine Abbey of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen.
In recent years, Spain’s leftist government has pushed for the monument to resignified, given that it sees the monument as aligned with General Franco.
Madrid’s Cardinal José Cobo and Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin have both been accused by Spanish Catholics of having collaborated with the government to effect a desacralization of the site.
Cobo has denied a number of the allegations made against him, but the case – which has rumbled on with much controversy in recent years – is unlikely to die out anytime soon, as protestors establish themselves outside the Spanish bishops’ headquarters to demand the site remain Catholic.
