One in five people living in Catalonia does not know what is celebrated at Christmas and one in three is not able to say what periods of the day Muslims fast during Ramadan. 37% cannot answer who is the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church and 60% cannot list a single country where Orthodox churches are the majority. The data reflect that there is a great lack of knowledge of the fifteen confessions that coexist in Catalonia, especially the most minority ones.
It is one of the conclusions drawn from the Barometer on religiosity and on the management of its diversity, a study prepared periodically by the General Directorate of Religious Affairs and the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO), which allows to know the positioning of citizenship before the religious phenomenon. The study also highlights another interesting fact related to the disastrous level of knowledge of the different confessions. 74% are in favor of having a subject on religious diversity in the classroom. More studies more sensitivity on this measure. “It is important for coexistence to know the religious practices of citizens”, says the general director of Religious Affairs, Carles Armengol.
The Baròmetre, which is based on a sample of 1,600 people, leaves other headlines such as that the number of believers does not reach 50% and that the rate of new believers is much lower than that of people who stop being believers. 19% of those surveyed indicate that they are not currently believers, although they had been; while only 3% indicate that they now believe in a God. Armengol states that these mobility phenomena demonstrate that “the religious fact is not linear, nor monolithic, nor predictable” unlike what happened before, when there was hardly any evolution in this sense.
About 57% of the Catalan population identifies with Catholicism (that does not mean that they are necessarily believers), a figure that has changed little in the last decade. There have also been few changes with the percentage of citizens of other religions, which is around 16% (the majority are Islam, with 6.8% and Evangelicalism, with 3.6%) and the sum of atheists and agnostics represents, in the latest Baròmetre, 26.3% of the total.
Where notable changes can be seen in the last ten years is in the influx to places of worship, which has fallen more than ten percentage points. About 57% of those surveyed affirm that they never attend acts of worship, except for ceremonies such as weddings, communions or funerals. 13% indicate that they attend at least weekly. The percentage is lower among those who consider themselves Catholic. Less than 7% go to church every week, according to this barometer. The most practicing are Muslims, with 53% and to a lesser extent, evangelical/Protestant Christians, with 37%.
Another fact that the survey has brought to light is that men between 18 and 24 years old are as believers as those over 64 and even more than women of the same age group. Although it is early to draw conclusions, since it is not a consolidated trend, those responsible for the study point out that one of the answers could be found in the weight of the Muslim population, which in general has a much younger profile than Catholics.
