By Spain’s growing Muslim population has led that country’s bishops’ conference to address concurrent pastoral challenges.
The standing committee of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference (CEE, by its Spanish acronym) has approved the creation of a department for relations with Islam, intended to address the growth of the country’s Muslim population.
This new body is part of the Bishops’ Subcommittee for Interconfessional Relations and Interreligious Dialogue, chaired by the auxiliary bishop of Seville, Ramón Darío Valdivia.
The spokesperson for the CEE, Bishop Francisco César García Magán, stated to the media that the mission of the new department is “to respond to the pastoral challenges posed by the growing presence of Muslim faithful in Spain.”
Among these challenges are supporting spouses in mixed marriages and training priests, seminarians, and laypeople for pertinent dialogue. García noted that the bishops are “aware of the need for trained personnel in this area” and that priests have been trained for this purpose at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome.
The department for dialogue with the Muslim world will also develop catechetical materials for converts to Christianity from Islam and will seek to foster “the strengthening of institutional relations with Islamic groups.”
This type of organization is not new in Europe. As Magán noted, the bishops’ conferences of France and Italy also have such structures and have produced a significant body of doctrinal work.
2.5 million Muslims in Spain
The Union of Islamic Communities of Spain (UCIDE, by its Spanish acronym) estimates in its 2024 annual report that approximately 2.5 million Muslims live in the country, representing about 5% of the population.
According to the same source, the majority of Muslims are Spanish citizens, either by birth or naturalization (approximately 600,000 naturalized in 56 years), followed by Moroccans, Pakistanis, Senegalese, and Algerians. The municipalities with the largest Muslim populations are Barcelona, Ceuta, Madrid, and Melilla, followed by El Ejido (Almería) and Murcia. Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish autonomous cities on the Moroccan coast in North Africa.
This presence has also resulted in an increasing number of students studying the Islamic religion each year, exceeding 390,000 since the curriculum for the subject was published in 1996. This program has over 300 teachers, more than a third of whom are based in Andalusia, the southernmost area of peninsular Spain.
Spanish schools are required by law to offer courses in religion, although it is optional for the student to take the class.
The country’s Islamic community also includes a military imam (akin to a chaplain) who ministers to inmates at the military prison in Madrid; five imams who provide assistance in hospitals and detention centers for foreigners and minors; and 11 prison imams serving in prisons in Catalonia, Madrid and Valencia, the Canary Islands, Ceuta, Melilla, and the Basque Country.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.
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As someone born in a Muslim country may I say the foot once in the door, the body is surely next.
A dechristianized Spain is a blank canvas for Islamic reconquista.
Are the bishops of Spain obtuse, purblind, stupid?
We read: This new body is part of the Bishops’ Subcommittee for Interconfessional Relations and Interreligious Dialogue.”
With respectful best wishes, these three points:
FIRST, gratefully, the approach is “interreligious” rather than “ecumenical.” But, now, will the new “catechetical materials” clarify that the symmetrical comparison is NOT between the Bible and the Qur’an, but rather between the incarnate Christ (“the Word made flesh”) and the seemingly dictated Qur’an (“the word made book”)?
SECOND, Islamic “scholarship” replaces Christ with the Qur’an: Even Christ’s reference to the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete and the Comforter (Jn 14:15-17, 14:26, and 16:12, 13, 17), is understood by Muslim scholars as referring to the coming of the final Prophet Mohammed. The Greek term “Paraclete” (Holy Spirit) is substituted by Muslim commentators with the presumably correct “Periclyte,” the Greek form of Ahmad or Mohammed (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, “The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary,” Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1983/1938, Q 7:157, fn. 1127, p. 388). Moreover, might we also pause on the related observation that Islam also replaces Mary and her “fiat” with Muhammad? Mary as the creature who receives the uncreated (and Triune!) God into the created universe?
THIRD, the term “interconfessional” is, in a sense, a political “middle ground” between what are in fact alternative universes— the ever-new Christian by which humanity is giftedly elevated into the freedom of Self-disclosing divine life, versus the 7th-century Islamic by which mankind submits to an inscrutable, unknowable, deterministic and ever remote Allah.
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Clearly, the societal mix in Spain, especially, calls for something solid and sensitive, but is the agnostic, secular-ist and therefore vulnerable West now surviving on only the vapors of forgotten Truth?
Islam is on jihad. Islam want to drive ALL Christianity out of Europe. If you think negotiating with terrorists is possible, you’re either:
1. Satanic
2. Insane
3. Stupid
Some Westerners are all three.