In the report “Spain 2025”, just published by the José María Martín Patino Chair of the Culture of Encounter, sociologist Rafael Ruiz Andrés wonders if the category that best explains the religious processes of Spanish society is that of hybridization. … Let us not forget that the French sociologist Bruno Latour (1993) asserts that one of the characteristics of modernity is the production of hybrids.
Hybridization is a reality with diffuse contours in which the sacred and the profane, the religious and the profane, the cultural and the popular mix. Beyond the reproduction of the statistical tables which support what I am going to assert – and which I will be permitted not to reproduce here for reasons of space – we are talking about two preeminent profiles: that of those who declare themselves non-spiritual religious, who underestimate doctrinal content in favor of cultural, identity and ritual dimensions, which generate “culturalized religion”, that of so-called non-practicing Catholics, and, in a different sense, people who declare themselves “non-religious spiritual”. who are interested in spiritual, prayerful research, and who manifest a dissociation between the religious, also organized, and the spiritual. It is true that the number of the former is decreasing and that of the latter is increasing, particularly among young adults.
As an example of the first, we have participation in Holy Week processions. 60% of the Spanish population participates, with more or less frequency, in these expressions of popular religiosity, although in certain autonomous communities such as Castilla y León or Andalusia the rates are higher. Among other trends, the fact that religiosity in Spain, and not only that which affects the Catholic religion, is a mixture in which cultural Catholics, or non-practicing believers, and non-religious spirituals are not negligible, must challenge the ecclesiastical conscience. Will the bishops speak in the next Pastoral Plan of the Episcopal Conference about these sociological types who are not foreign to the religious dimension of existence? Or will they continue to think about the usual things?
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