Migrants fuel evangelical surge in Catholic nation
SALAMANCA, Spain — 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.
“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.”
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. And there’s a distinctive feature to the worshipers: Most are not Spanish-born — they’re immigrants from Latin America, including about 80% of Albright’s congregation.
The numbers reflect huge surges in Spain’s migrant population and evangelical population in recent decades, profoundly changing how faith is practiced in a country long dominated by the Catholic church.
With the arrival of the euro currency two decades ago, Spain experienced a boom that fueled migration. In 2000, there were 471,465 legally registered migrants in Spain; there are now about 7.2 million.
Albright was so intrigued that he wrote a Ph.D. thesis about the phenomenon, estimating that 20% of the migrants are evangelicals.
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. That’s up from 96,000 tallied in 1998.
The steady growth of the Protestant population coincides with a steady drop in the number of churchgoing Catholics. According to the Sociological Research Center, a public institute, 62% of Spaniards define themselves as Catholics, down from 85% in 2000.
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. Francisco Franco, who called his regime National-Catholic, in the 20th century.
Of the 23,000 Catholic parishes in Spain at present, more than 6,000 have no full-time priest. Some churches had to be grouped together and served by traveling priests who minister to multiple parishes.
The church’s challenges are evident in the province of Zamora, just north of Salamanca, which has lost 16% of its population since 2000. There are 304 parishes and only about 130 priests.