“Now it is the other way around,” Rivera said. It’s a reversal of the pattern several centuries ago, when hundreds of Catholic missionaries embarked for Latin America from Spain. Edgardo Rivera, a 42-year-old missionary from El Salvador, joined him in November. It’s a hectic agenda, but Ortega recently received some help - Rev. At age 40, he has been active on YouTube since the pandemic began, and is now back on the streets trying to stay up to date with his parishioners. Francisco Ortega, manages six parishes - trying to adapt as the number of churchgoers steadily declines. There are 304 parishes and only about 130 priests serving them. The church’s challenges are evident in the province of Zamora, just north of Salamanca, which has lost 16% of its population since 2000. Some churches had to close when a priest died or retired, or be grouped together with other churches served by traveling priests who minister to multiple parishes. Of the 23,000 Catholic parishes in Spain at present, more than 6,000 have no full-time priest.
Francisco Franco, who called his regime National-Catholic, in the 20th century. It’s a striking development in a country where Catholicism, for centuries, was identified with near-absolute power - from the long, often brutal era of the Spanish Inquisition to the 36-year dictatorship of Gen. Only about a third of those Catholics say they’re actively practicing the faith. According to the Sociological Research Center, a public institute, 62% of Spaniards define themselves as Catholics, down from 85% in 2000 and 98% in 1975. The steady growth of the Protestant population coincides with a steady drop in the number of churchgoing Catholics. The last official census conducted by the Justice Ministry’s Observatory of Religious Pluralism found 1.96% of Spain’s population was Protestant in 2018 - more than 900,000 people. He estimated that 20% of the migrants are evangelicals. thesis about it at the University of Salamanca.
In 2000, there were 471,465 legally registered migrants in Spain there are now about 7.2 million.Īlbright was so intrigued by this phenomenon that he wrote a Ph.D. With the arrival of the euro currency two decades ago, Spain experienced an economic boom that fueled migration. The Catholic church feels static to them.” “They need to have an active part in the celebration. “Latinos generally have a desire to participate in worship,” he added. When they go to a Catholic church, he says, “they don’t feel that their problems are understood.” You’re not committing any sin.”Īlbright sees similar reactions among other Latin American immigrants. She recalls him responding, “If it makes you feel at peace with yourself, go. “It allows me to live more freely, with less inhibitions.”īefore she and her husband were baptized at Albright’s church, she visited a Catholic priest. “I definitely feel better here than in the Catholic Church,” she says. She commended Albright’s approach to pastoring, including services with lively music and less emphasis on repetitive prayer. I went to several churches - I felt absolutely nothing.“ “When I arrived in Salamanca, I entered the church, looked everywhere, said hello, and they ignored me. “I was a lifelong Catholic,” says Escalante. His wife does nursing in a retirement home. While the couple wait for their status to be resolved, Perozo works in the laundry of a hotel. One of the newest members of his congregation is Luis Perozo, 31, a former police officer from Maracaibo, Venezuela who arrived in Spain in February 2020 and applied for asylum with his wife, Narbic Escalante, 35. He marvels that in a course he teaches for deacons, his six students include one each from Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. I don’t go down the street asking, nor do I ask for passports at the church door.” Albright said. “The Bible says there are no ethnicities, there are no races.
The numbers reflect huge surges in Spain’s migrant population and evangelical population in recent decades, producing profound changes in how faith is practiced in a country long dominated by the Catholic church. And there’s a distinctive feature to the worshippers: Most of them are not Spanish-born - they’re immigrants from Latin America, including about 80% of Albright’s congregation. He couldn’t have imagined that 25 years later, he would be pastoring an evangelical congregation of 120 and count about two dozen other thriving Protestant churches in the northwestern city. “Social animosity was big - they had never seen a Protestant in their life,” said Albright, recalling one woman who whispered, “Be thankful we don’t throw stones at you.”
SALAMANCA, Spain (AP) - When Kent Albright, a Baptist pastor from the United States, arrived as a missionary to Spain in 1996, he was unprepared for the insults and threats, or the fines from the police for handing out Protestant leaflets on the streets of Salamanca.