Spain: Catholic Church fights legal battle to stop mass exodus

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

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.