Spain, it has been observed, is a nation-state born out of religious struggle mainly between
Catholicism and
Islam, but also against
Judaism (and, to a lesser extent,
Protestantism). The
Reconquista against
Al Andalus (ending in 1492), the establishment of the
Spanish Inquisition (1478) and the
expulsion of Jews (1492) were highly relevant in the union of
Castile and
Aragon under the
Catholic Monarchs Isabel and
Fernando (1492), followed by the persecution and eventual
expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609. The
Counter-Reformation (1563–1648) was especially strong in Spain and the Inquisition was not definitively abolished until 1834, thus continuing their animosity towards Islam, Judaism, Protestantism and
parts of the Enlightenment for most of its history. Judaism and Christianity were introduced in the
Iberian Peninsula in
Roman times, with the latter absorbing many elements from "
pagan" practices that survived for a while even among Christianized populations.
Islam was introduced in the Iberian Peninsula after the
Muslim conquest in the 8th century, which resulted in the establishment of
Al-Andalus. In the late 15th to early 16th century, Jews and Muslims were forced to choose between conversion or expulsion, with the fostering of Catholic uniformity across the territory remaining a major concern for both State and Church authorities throughout the two following centuries. Connected to the Old Regime, the Catholic Church became the most controversial institution in Spain in the 19th and 20th centuries, struggling to find ways to relate to the nascent liberal society as well as clashing with governments seeking to find an acceptable delimitation of the role of religion in public affairs. Since the end of the
Francoist dictatorship practical secularization has grown strongly.
Antiquity and late Antiquity temple of Diana in
Mérida Before Christianity, there were multiple beliefs in the
Iberian Peninsula including local
Iberian,
Celtiberian and
Celtic religions, as well as the
Greco-
Roman religion. According to
a medieval legend, the
apostle James was the first to spread Christianity in the
Roman Iberian Peninsula. He later became the
patron saint of Spaniards and Portuguese, originating the
Way of St James. According to
Romans 15,
Paul the Apostle also intended to visit Hispania; tradition has that he did and founded the
Diocese of Écija. Other later myths include the
Seven Apostolic Men. There is some archaeological evidence of Christianity slowly penetrating the Peninsula from Rome and
Roman Mauretania via major cities and ports, especially
Tarragona, since the early
2nd century. The
Paleo-Christian Necropolis of Tarragona, with 2,050 discovered tombs, dates back to the second half of the 3rd century. Saints like
Eulalia of Mérida or
Barcelona and
many others are believed to have been martyred during the
Decian or
Diocletianic Persecutions (
3rd–early
4th centuries).
Bishops like
Basílides of Astorga,
Marcial of Mérida or the influential
Hosius of Corduba were active in the same period.
Theodosius I issued decrees that effectively made
Nicene Christianity the official
state church of the Roman Empire. This Christianity was already an early form of Catholicism. As
Rome declined,
Germanic tribes invaded most of the lands of the former empire. In the years following 410 the
Visigoths—who had converted to
Arian Christianity around 360—occupied what is now Spain and Portugal. The
Visigothic Kingdom established its capital in
Toledo; it reached its high point during the reign of
Leovigild (568–586). Visigothic rule led to a brief expansion of
Arianism in Spain, however the native population remained staunchly Catholic. In 587
Reccared, the Visigothic king at Toledo, converted to Catholicism and launched a movement to unify doctrine. The Council of Lerida in 546 constrained the clergy and extended the power of law over them under the blessings of Rome. The multiple
Councils of Toledo definitively established what would be later known as the Catholic Church in Spain and contributed to define Catholicism elsewhere.
Middle Ages By the early 8th century, the Visigothic kingdom had fragmented and the fragments were in disarray, bankrupt and willing to accept external help to fight each other. In 711 an
Arab raiding party led by
Tariq ibn-Ziyad crossed the
Strait of Gibraltar, then defeated the Visigothic king
Roderic at the
Battle of Guadalete. Tariq's commander,
Musa bin Nusair, then landed with substantial reinforcements. Taking advantage of the Visigoths' infighting, by 718 the Muslims dominated most of the peninsula, establishing Islamic rule until 1492. turned church after the
Reconquista. During this period the number of Muslims increased greatly through the migration of Arabs and Berbers, and the conversion of local Christians to Islam (known as Muladis or
Muwalladun) with the latter forming the majority of the Islamic-ruled area by the end of the 10th century. Most Christians who remained adopted Arabic culture, and these Arabized Christians became known as
Mozarabs. The era of Muslim rule before 1055 is often considered a "Golden Age" for the Jews as Jewish intellectual and spiritual life flourished in Spain. Only in the northern fringes of the peninsula did Christians remain under Christian rule. Here they established the great pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela. In 1147, following the
Almohads takeover of the bulk of Al-Andalus, Christians living in Muslim-ruled territory faced harsher treatment. Faced with the choice of death, conversion, or emigration, many
Jews and Christians emigrated. in
Antequera,
Andalusia The
Catholic Monarchs established the
Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition (also known as the Spanish Inquisition) in 1478. An ethno-religious cleansing of Jews, Muslims, and former Muslims took place in the Iberian Peninsula from the late 15th to early 17th centuries under the purview of a series of royal decrees.
Modern period In the early modern Period, the Crown saw itself as the bulwark of Catholicism and doctrinal purity. Catholicism was introduced in the New World and the Philippines under Spanish colonialism, but the monarchs insisted on independence from papal "interference". Bishops were forbidden to report to the Pope except through the Crown. In 1767, under the Bourbon dynasty, the Crown banished the
Jesuits from the Spanish Empire. The Inquisition was ended for good in the 1830s.
Religious freedom continued to be denied in practice, if not in theory.
Concordat of 1851 Catholicism became the state religion in 1851, when the Spanish government signed a
Concordat with the
Holy See that committed
Madrid to pay the salaries of the clergy and to subsidize other expenses of the Roman Catholic Church as a compensation for the seizure of church property in the
Desamortización de Mendizábal of 1835–1837. This pact was renounced in 1931, when the secular constitution of the
Second Spanish Republic imposed a series of secularist measures that threatened the Church's hegemony in Spain, provoking the Church's support for the
Francisco Franco uprising five years later. In the ensuing
Spanish Civil War, alleged communists and anarchists in Republican areas killed about
7,000 priests, the majority murdered between July and December 1936. Over four thousand were diocesan priests, as well as 13 bishops, and 2,365 male regulars or religious priests. On the other hand, the small
Protestant minority was harshly persecuted by the
"national" side, most churches were closed and many priests and religious figures were jailed or killed.
Second Spanish Republic On 9 December 1931, the
Spanish Constitution of 1931 established a secular state and freedom of religion in the
Second Spanish Republic. It would remain in effect until 1 April 1939.
Francoist Spain The advent of the
Francoist dictatorship saw the restoration of the church's privileges, pursuant to the ideological tenets of
National Catholicism. While in agreement with the Catholic doctrine in regards of the opposition to sterilization and euthanasia, the regime, imbued of a "deeply Catholic" approach, advocated for "environmental eugenics" instead, enforcing coercive measures justifying the repression, segregation and elimination of its political enemies, otherwise overlapping with a racial discourse that identified the decline of the Spanish race with republican policies and ideology. Under Francoism, Roman Catholicism was the only religion to have legal status; other worship services could not be advertised, and no other religion could own property or publish books. The Government not only continued to pay priests' salaries and to subsidize the Church, it also assisted in the reconstruction of church buildings damaged by the war. Laws were passed abolishing divorce and civil marriages as well as banning abortion and the sale of contraceptives. Homosexuality and all other forms of sexual permissiveness were also banned. 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 military service. As a result, he received continuous death threats from hardline Francoists, including far-right Catholics, until democracy was well established; "¡Tarancón al paredón!"
(Tarancón to the execution wall!) was a common slogan. In 1976, however, King
Juan Carlos de Borbon unilaterally renounced the right to name the bishops; later that 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 over a period of years the Church's reliance on state subsidies was to be gradually 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). 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
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. 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. 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 neared an end, however, a serious imbalance appeared 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 The number of nuns shrank 6.9% to 54,160 in the period 2000–2005 as well. On 21 August 2005,
Evans David Gliwitzki became the first
Catholic priest to get married in Spain. 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, a worldwide lay religious body, did not adhere to any particular political philosophy. Its founder,
Jose Maria Escriva de Balaguer y Albas, stated that the organization was nonpolitical. The organization was founded in 1928 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 régime, 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.
21st century An important number of Latin American immigrants, who are usually strong Catholic practitioners, have helped the Catholic Church to recover part of the attendance that regular Masses (Sunday Mass) used to have in the sixties and seventies and that was lost in the eighties among native Spaniards. Since 2003, the involvement of the Catholic Church in political affairs, through special groups such as
Opus Dei, the
Neocatechumenal Way or the
Legion of Christ, especially personated through important politicians in the right-wing People's Party, has increased again. Old and new media, which are property of the Church, such as the
COPE radio network or
13 TV, have also contributed to this new involvement in politics by their own admission. The Church is no longer seen as a neutral and independent institution in political affairs and it is generally aligned with the opinion and politics of the People's Party. This implication has had, as a consequence, a renewed criticism from important sectors of the population (especially the majority of left-wing voters) against the Church and the way in which it is economically sustained by the State. While by 2017-2018 the Church was slowly backpedaling, the damage is potentially long-lasting among the younger generations who had not experienced it personally to such a degree. The total number of
parish priests shrank from 24,300 in 1975 to 18,500 in 2018 when the average age was 65.5 years. The number of
nuns dropped by 44.5% to 32,270 between 2000 and 2016; most of them are old. By contrast, some expressions of popular religiosity still thrive, often linked to local festivals, and about 68.5% of the population self-defined themselves as Catholics in 2018, but just 39.8% of them (27.3% of the total population) attend Mass monthly or more often. Despite
the arrival of large numbers of Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Protestant immigrants,
irreligion continues to be the fastest growing demographic . ==See also==