The governance of religious diversity in stateless nations: the case of Catalonia

ABSTRACT

Academic literature dealing with the governance of religious diversity in Europe has gained saliency in recent years. However, most existing research is based on state-level policies, while the role of regional government is receiving far less attention. To address this lacuna, this article focuses attention on the role of the regional government in the regulation of religious diversity in Catalonia. The article reflects on the increasing relevance of religious affairs in the Catalan policy agenda and examines the emergence and configuration of a specific, distinct and prominent regional policy programme on religious diversity. The case of Catalonia is especially relevant since its ongoing nation-building project bestows additional complexity and strategic relevance on the policy approach towards religious issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Secularisation
• religious minorities
• national minorities
• public policies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Avi Astor for his insightful comments. I am also grateful to anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Statute was legally challenged in the Constitutional Court of Spain by the Spanish conservative party (Partido Popular) and by other political actors.

2. The English translation I am quoting from is at http://www.gencat.net:8000/generalitat/eng/estatut/titol_4.htm

3. The same Article in the Statute continues: ‘The Generalitat has executive authority over religious freedom. This power includes in any case: (1) Participation in the management of the State Registry of Religious Entities in relation to churches, confessions and religious communities that carry out their activities in Catalonia, in the terms determined by law. (2) Establishment of agreements and cooperation conventions with the churches, confessions and religious communities registered in the State Registry of Religious Entities within the jurisdiction of the Generalitat. (3) Promotion, development and execution, within the jurisdiction of the Generalitat, of agreements and conventions signed between the State and the churches, confessions and religious communities registered in the State Registry of Religious Entities…. The Generalitat collaborates in bodies at State level to which functions have been attributed concerning religious entities’.

4. A more nuanced analysis would show, however, that despite the fact that the majority were Catholics, the ways of living religiosity in Catalonia and Spain were quite different, and this generated several local controversies (Griera 2009).

5. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Protestant churches increased their presence significantly and even opened several schools across the country and a hospital in Barcelona. However, the Franco dictatorship made life difficult for Protestants as well as for other religious minorities such as the Jews (Estanyol 2002; Martínez-Ariño 2012). The dictatorship was strongly supported by the Catholic Church and religious minorities were proscribed as ‘enemies’ of the nation. As a result of international pressures, the Franco regime adopted a more permissive policy towards religious minorities in its last decades, and this facilitated the arrival of new missionaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Estruch et al. 2007).

6. The Ecumenical Centre of Barcelona was set up in 1954 by a group of Christians committed to Christian ecumenical dialogue. In the 1990s the Centre also fostered activities for encouraging interreligious dialogue.

7. The Secretariat was created by Decree 184/2000. It has undergone various changes and its name today is the General Directorate of Religious Affairs (Direcció General d’Afers Religiosos).

8. This campaign started in 1966, under the Franco dictatorship, with the slogan ‘We Want Catalan Bishops’ (Volem bisbes catalans), and aimed at asking the Vatican to nominate bishops who could speak the Catalan language and had some familiarity with (or sensibility towards) Catalan culture. The campaign becomes salient again every time there is a vacancy (Griera 2009).

9. Ignasi Garcia-Clavel, Montserrat Coll and Jordi López Camps are the three former directors I interviewed. I also had informal conversations with the other two (Xavier Puigdollers and Enric Vendrell).

10. The General Directorate (see note 7) has carried out several projects to promote the use of Catalan within minorities, many of them in collaboration with the civil society organisation ‘Plataforma per la Llengua’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio Español de Ciencia y Competitividad under Grant CSO2010-21248; Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) under Grant RELIG 2014/0026.

Notes on contributors

Mar Griera

Mar Griera is an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. She is the director of the research group ISOR (Centre for Studies on Sociology of Religion) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and research associate at the Centre de Sociologie des Religions et d’Éthique Sociale at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France. She has been a visiting fellow at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (Boston University), at Exeter University and at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (Amsterdam University) among others. Her main research areas are the politics of religious diversity and holistic therapies and spirituality in prisons and hospitals.