Spain no longer is the house by the Church – RT in Spanish – international News

In Spain, fewer and fewer couples are opting for marriage, and to do so, choose the civil courts. The current Spanish society that has nothing to do with the year 2000, when the National Institute of Statistics (INE) recorded the highest number of catholic marriages, approximately 160,000, about 75% of the total.

however, 17 years later, the situation has changed radically. During the first half of 2016, were recorded 68.560 marriages, according to the latest data published by the INE, which means 2.7% less compared with the previous year. Of the total number of unions, only 15.204 were catholic marriages, compared to almost 53,000 exclusively civilians.

A change of mind

Gemma and Louis are the ones who choose the option of celebrating a wedding church. They were married in 2012, in a ceremony that had nearly 170 guests. “I’m from a catholic family, and I don’t know, nor do we consider another option. I guess that we are pretty traditional in matter of family,” Gemma explains.

Different was the case of Lucy and Paul, newlyweds on the courts. “The wedding was very small. Our parents, my sister, and two brothers of Lucia, and a family member very close,” says Paul, who adds that his wife is not catholic and “I’m not very religious“. In addition, neither wanted to celebrate a wedding mass that is required to “waste” their free time in the organization.

In any case, since the entry into the new century, the number of marriages formalized experience a downward trend, and the couples that choose to receive the sacrament by the Church is steadily decreasing. In fact, in 2010, the INE reported that for the first time in the history of Spain the number of civil marriages exceeded that of catholic marriages (94.993 front 80.174).

religion no longer regulates the marriage

in an article published In ‘The Country’, the sociologist Alfonso Pérez-Agote, author of the book “religious Change in Spain: the ups and downs of secularization”, argues that the decline in the number of marriages is due to the economic crisis, which has delayed the passage of youth to adulthood 25 to 30 years, as well as a shift in the culture of the family: “The young people of today, are the children of disinterested in religion, when you think of getting married do not think of the Church, is something very distant for them,” he says.

For his part, Juan Ignacio Martínez Pastor, professor of the uned and expert in the sociology of the family, considers that for some generations born during the TWENTIETH century, the trajectory of marriage typical was married almost all, and in the youth. That pattern began to vary between those who were born above all from the sixties that started a trend that has been strengthened in subsequent generations, so that the spaniards marry less and more age.

the Author of the book “Marriage and social change in Spain”, for Martinez Pastor has been a loss of the Church’s influence in Spanish society, where the people claim to be catholic but only a 10% is a practitioner, so that religion no longer regulates marriage.

María Jesús Vigo Pastur