Berkley Center

If you walk around the streets of a Spanish city you will find yourself passing a church every five or six blocks. Madrid itself proudly boasts more than 200, each bearing a new and different saint’s name. Honestly, until I got to Spain I hadn’t really realized just how many saints there were. These churches are not like the ones we find in the United States, but rather they are majestic, old, intricately decorated, and filled with history. Another important characteristic these churches share is that they are all empty.

Big, majestic, and empty churches. From experience and from what I’ve heard, even on Sundays these churches have only a small attendance consisting predominately of the elderly and the occasional tourist who steps inside to look at the architecture. One of the first facts I learned about Spain was that only 14 percent of the young people in Spain described themselves as religious, a percentage that many of the young people I’ve asked seem to think is far too high. When I asked a group of Spanish college students who were eating in the cafeteria if they would describe themselves as Catholics, I got the ironic response: “No! Por Dios!” (By God, No!). It didn’t take me long to realize that while Spain is often considered to be a very Catholic country, Spaniards are not. The Spain of the Catholic monarchs of the end of the fifteenth century, the Spain that Christianized the Americas, where the Inquisition played an important role, and gave birth to the pious orders such as the Jesuits, seems to have long since disappeared. Those forgotten churches around the city seem to be grandiose vestiges to the way things once were, monuments to the past rather than places of worship.

If you explore this topic, you’ll find books and articles where scholars attribute this backlash against religiosity in Spain to the oppressive Franco regime that dictated religious life and squelched all religious dissent as well as to the Catholic Church’s originally strong support of the dictatorship. From the Reconquista, to the Inquisition, and to the Franco regime, it seems like Catholicism has always been used as a way to unite Spain. As a result of this checkered history, the Church is seen by much of the youth as a force that is tied to the past, the rich, the backward, and the country folk. At one of the Masses I attended the entire homily was devoted to the priest criticizing the political parties and their manipulation of the Church. He claimed that they were choking the Church to death. Listening to the Spanish students discuss religion one comes to find that being areligious, or even anti-religion, is a trait that indicates that someone is progressive, worldly, and intellectual, that one has gone beyond the troubled times of their parents and grandparents and that one has evolved into the twenty-first century. When I explained to some girls in my dorm that I was a theology major one girl asked me if I “actually believed in God.” Digging deeper, she told me that she thought I was “too smart” to actually have faith.

There are, of course, students that have faith. It should be said, however, that those I have met with faith have been from the smaller towns. One friend of mine waited until we were far from the group to admit to me that he believed in God, and he quickly asked me to not tell the rest of our friends. He was from a town with less than 1,500 people.

It’s interesting to see that the once most Catholic country in Europe now is one of evaporating faith. This is remarkable especially since this change occurred in roughly two generations. This rejection of religion can be seen as a very strong testament to how people reject something when it is so forced upon them, even when that something was once so ingrained into their culture.