On a cultural level, Spain is still Catholic, but sociologically, it is becoming less and less so. This is how sociologist Rafael Ruiz sees it: “In the near future the most appropriate thing would be to say: the majority of the Spanish population will be non-Catholic“.

The data also confirms this: citizens who consider themselves Catholic have gone from 90% at the end of the 70s to 52% today. Social changes, experts say, have led to a third wave of secularization in the 21st century. These changes caused us to go from believing and practicing grandparents to believing but non-practicing parents and from there, to children neither believers nor practitioners.

“It is outside their cultural universe. They do not identify with it, they do not marry in the church and he does not plan to baptize his children or educate them in the Catholic faith,” says the sociologist. A statement shared by Jesús Bastante: “Those rites are very outdated.”

Like vocations, which have fallen 40% in the last 40 years. In fact, there are more parishes than priests because there is no generational change. Something that worries Pope Francis and that he communicated it a few days ago to the young people of the Madrid Seminary. “If they don’t believe at home, it is difficult for a child to develop their faith right away,” defends seminarian Álvaro Simón, who explains that “evangelization is one to one”: “People no longer come to Church, “We have to be the ones to get out.”

A change to which, according to experts, the Church has not known how to adapt andThe trend will be that Spain It is a country with fewer and fewer Catholics.