"España será católica, o no será," (Spain shall be Catholic, or it shall not be) Menéndez Pelayo famously said. If so, the day is fast approaching in which Spain will be no more. From yesterday's edition of El País:
"Things are not as God orders anymore, Manuel and María believe. They were married in the Church in the middle of the last century and had their three children baptized, [and] educated in religious schools. Two of them got married before the altar in the 1980s, and the third before a judge and while already living with her boyfriend, in the 1990s. There was baptism for the three grandchildren, but only two had their first communion. Of these three generations, between 15 and 82, the grandparents are the only ones who go to Mass every Sunday. 'That is what there is,' grandmother María sums up.
"That is what there is is what in great measure happened to this Madrilenian family of unmentioned surnames. And the Spain that Pope Benedict XVI will visit for a third time, the old spiritual reserve of the West, is secularizing fast. Catholics are still a majority that is clear, but that decreases every year: 71.7% of Spaniards now declare themselves as such, compared to 82.1% in 2001. A fall of over 10% in one decade. Atheists and non-believers are already one in every four citizens: they have climbed to 24.3% compared to the 14.6% of 2001, according to the Center of Sociological Research (CIS). The remainder belongs to other faiths (2.4%) or did not respond.
" 'In our church, there are mostly elders and some children. One barely sees persons of other age groups,' María describes, after recalling once overflowing churches where now the faithful are rare at noon on Sundays. The numbers of the CIS back her observation: belief in Catholicism falls drastically with age. For those over 65, 9 in every 10 Spaniards profess to be believers, and the proportion falls to 56.8% among those who are between 18 and 24, according to the poll of this past July. The portrait offers other elements: the higher the education, the lower the belief (50.2% of believers among those with higher education), and greater secularization in large cities (53% of believers) than in the countryside (8 [believers] in 10)."
[First image: Church in Alcalá de Guadaíra, Andalusia, with the words, "Arderéis como en el '36" (You shall burn as in 1936).]
