Spain: Catholic Church fights legal battle to stop mass exodus

Thousands of Spaniards wish to quit the Roman Catholic Church. But the church does not want to let them go. In Madrid and Valencia, the bishops have gone to court to fight a legal battle against the mass exodus.

This is the last step in the ongoing fight between the Catholic Church and the growing anticlerical movement in Spain. It started, when 47 former Catholics decided to leave the flock and seek formal termination of their church membership. Since there is no bloody Inquisition any more to force apostates into submission, the church authorities tried to stop them by pure arrogance. They blatantly refused to delete their names in the church records. The would-be-apostates alerted the national Data Protection Agency, which classified entries in baptism records as private data under the protection of the law that have to be deleted on demand. The church did not move. This obstinate refusal to respect people’s decision to quit became the rallying point for all those, who were unhappy with the church. When the Pope visited Spain in July 2006, 1500 people took to the streets and demanded that their names be deleted from church records.

Protesters with stop-the-Pope sign during Pope visit in Valencia

Meantime the Spanish Data Protection Agency has won a high court ruling against the church. But rather than accepting the limits of their power, the bishops went for a legal battle against apostasy and filed an appeal. Their hair-splitting argument: baptism records are historical documents that cannot be changed!

The Catholic Church is loosing ground in Spain. Though officially 82 per cent of the population are Catholics, only 48 per cent are practicing their belief. And believers or non-believers: according to recent surveys by the government, 75 per cent of the population are convinced that the church hierarchy is out of touch with today’s reality and want to see their influence curbed. The great majority supports the social referendum introduced by the Socialist government under Prime Minister Zapatero, that paves the way for stem cell research, faster and easier divorce, same sex marriages and gay adoption.

[Bulletin # 164]