Catholicism in Spain: How the Loss of Tradition Means the Loss of Faith
By Joseph Mattone, January 8, 2024
I met a fine young man, 23, named Lucas, in Leon. He was hiking the Camino de Santiago.
It was still early, and the city was just awakening. Mothers and fathers were bringing their little children to school. This was market day in the Plaza Mayor, and the vendors were busy setting up their stalls.
The daily Mass was scheduled for 9 a.m. in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador of Oviedo, and on the way there I met Lucas outside the Cathedral gates. My wife and I and our two girls were busy hurrying to Mass. The night before I had scouted the area and had confirmed that Mass was held in the side chapel (capilla).
I found the entrance door, inconspicuous as it were, on the side of the cathedral through modern glass doors that appeared to be an entrance to an office, not a 600-year-old cathedral.
Because we were trying not to be late, we were walking at full speed. I saw Lucas. He was wide-eyed and had that nervous look, like the one I have when I know Mass is going to start any minute and I am just a lost foreigner trying to figure out quickly where it is.
He was reading the signs on the gates. I called out in Spanish and asked if he wanted to go to Mass, and he said yes and that he was new in town and did not know where to go. We were happy to lead him through the glass doors into the beautiful gothic cloister and then to the side chapel.
The side chapel had room for about 200 people, but today, a weekday, there were only 12 people, one priest, and no altar server. My family and Lucas made up almost half of those present. Nobody was under 60 except us.
The chapel is an impressive miniature of the Cathedral with busy staccato lines and sculptures adorning the walls that graciously and naturally move one’s eyes up to heaven. Unfortunately, our eyes did not see heaven: they had to be satisfied with looking at the ceiling with its characteristic groins supporting the roof.
After Mass, I made it a point to chat with Lucas. I wanted to know why, as a young man, Croatian Lucas was Catholic and was attending daily Mass. His simple answer was, “I was brought up that way.”
Interesting answer, really, because all the young people back in the day were brought up in the faith. Those young people “back in the day” are now old, most do not go to church, and their children do not go either. What happened?
From what I can tell, the younger generation here in Spain is not Catholic at all, but I don’t understand why, when they are surrounded with colossal testaments to the faith of their ancestors: massive churches, basilicas, and cathedrals.
The cities have so many churches. The typical neighborhood church is so much bigger, so much more beautiful, and so much more ornate than St. John in our city of Folsom, California. The neighborhood Spanish churches are more on par with our cathedral in Sacramento. And these neighborhood churches, as well as the basilicas and cathedrals in Spain, are full of saints’ relics and centuries of tradition, including miraculous events.
If the Catholic Church is based on Scripture and Tradition, are not the Spanish traditions a splendid example, witness, and testimony for the eyes to attract these young people to God? Seeing is believing. But not in Spain. Why?
I wondered what had changed. What could be the reason for the abandonment of such an overwhelming and awe-inspiring faith that in two generations is almost completely gone?
Lest we believe that it was always this way, consider my Spanish friend Alfonso. At about 60 years of age, he recalled his childhood to me: “When I was young, in my small town, everyone went to Mass every Sunday, we all prayed the rosary every day, and parents watched their children (and he pointed to both eyes with two fingers to emphasize how children were watched). Today, nobody goes to Mass, nobody prays the rosary, and nobody watches their children, and the children are doing drugs (and he emphasized the use of drugs by imitating a needle injecting the inside of his arm).”
So, what had changed in the two generations? What had changed in Alfonso’s lifetime?
Below I list the changes that might have led to the loss of faith and my thoughts on their impact.
1. Change in church leadership – Naturally, every generation is going to have new church leaders: the pope, bishops, saints, and saint wannabes die and are replaced in every generation. Just the fact that they change, to me, should not be cause to lose the faith.
2. Abuse scandal – Is it that new leaders are bad? For the past 20 years, the abuse scandals and crisis have been worsening consistently all over the world. I could believe one hundred percent that this could be the main reason, even the only reason: faith filled has become faith emptied. I have experienced the emptying of my faith (temporarily) after the disturbing and continuing evil revelations.
However, these revelations started too late. The abandoning of faith happened before the revelations of abuse. Perhaps, the abuse scandal was the coup de grâce that made the Jenga tower* collapse, but I do not think the foundation was compromised by the scandals.
3. Other corruption – There is other corruption that has scarred the Church and has contributed to pulling out some Jenga blocks, such as the China scandal, and the banking scandals, and the Vatican drug party scandal, but these media events are too few and too far between to be the cause of the collapse of faith.
4. Type of church leadership – The type of church leadership might have changed. Were the bishops saintlier, more Christ-like, and more convincing leaders in the past compared to today? I don’t know. This would be interesting to research. Ireland recently voted for abortion, and it did not appear that the bishops spoke to the people to discourage the vote for abortion. A hundred years ago, I think they would have. Anecdotes aside, more research needs to be done on this.
5. The culture – Western culture has emphatically changed. Feminism and the sexual revolution from the 1960s have changed the family and hence society. Marxist ideology and socialism have also grown and changed how we think about government, family, money, and labor.
These have been grand and stupendous changes, but maybe they would not have taken root and spread if the faithful that had made up almost all the population of Spain and other countries had remained Catholic. In a Catholic country like Ireland, for example, most people would only vote in favor of abortion if they were no longer a Catholic society. This cultural change is powerful enough to have made the people lose the faith. Its proposed faith, Marxism, is addressed next.
6. Marxism – Marxism, in all its forms, has been steadily spreading and has been accepted by most people, even those who have read not one twiddle of Marx. It is now the culture of the West, supplanting Christianity, of which we are living off the remnants.
Marxism is the alternative faith. Marxism has been around for a hundred years, but the effect on the people of the street has really taken hold since the 1960s. More research needs to be done on Marxism and our current culture, but possibly it has grown in the vacuum left by the Catholic loss of faith and is not the cause of it.
7. The New Theology – The New Theology was many things, including some heartfelt efforts to synergize the Faith with other currents in society, including Marxism. However, at the end of the day and after the smoke is gone so we can see more clearly, the New Theology was a revolution where good men were used as stooges and pawns.
Gaining adherents since the 1800s, the revolution culminated with the pastoral council of Vatican II, which ended in 1965. There was no Saint Athanasius at Vatican II to maintain orthodoxy.
Since then, the counter-revolution embodied by the return of the Latin Mass has been holding on by fingertips.
With the New Theology all types of changes occurred: people marrying outside the faith with little or no challenge; annulments galore; eating meat on Friday; the rise of the “Chreasters”**; nuns abandoning their habits and wearing street clothes; Catholics attending protestant services; just about everyone receiving the Eucharist at every Mass; and popes kissing the Koran. Please hold onto these thoughts about the New Theology as I discuss #8.
8. The New Mass – The New Mass officially began in 1970, given to the common Catholic whether he wanted it or not. He was told that Latin was a language he could not understand, and the bishops were doing him a favor to get rid of it and say Mass in the common tongue of the common man, and he believed them and followed not knowing any better.
The New Mass basically coincided with the feminist and sexual revolutions, which were successfully working in earnest to change society. Is it a coincidence that the two were born together?
The New Mass changed things just as the New Theology changed things, and at the same time. People received communion in the hand and standing instead of on the tongue and kneeling. Some bishops did not allow the poor man in the pew to kneel during Mass when his Lord was elevated, removing all kneelers and requiring him to stand instead.
The prayers changed and so did the language. Now it was Spanish Mass for the Hispanic community, English Mass for the English speakers, and Filipino Mass for the Filipinos. Then twenty-five years later, the prayers were changed again, replaced by “better” translations.
The altars were taken from the wall and put at the center of the stage with the priest behind it and facing the people. Unfortunately, the baby boomers required more churches, and ugly churches were built for their new form of worship. Gone were the myriad of awe-inspiring saints’ statues but born was the bare church-built amphitheater style with a stage for a band.
Even though Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium wanted Latin and Gregorian chant to be the center of the liturgy, they disappeared, to be replaced with John Talbot and Michael Joncas. Please hold onto these thoughts about the New Mass and the New Theology as I discuss #9.
9. Other changes – As I walk into the breath-taking Cathedral at Oviedo or among the ruins of huge Pueblo churches built to reach almost to heaven in the middle of nowhere near Mountainair, New Mexico, all I can think of is that the people do not believe anymore, which brings me to change.
Catholicism is a tradition-based religion. The foundation of the Church is built on Christ, the unchanging Truth incarnate. The walls of the Church are made of dogmatic Truth slowly built stone by stone at the hands of master builders over two millennia. The roof covers our heads as Mary’s mantel wraps us all in the Truth of the virtues just as the roof’s vaulted ceilings are held by buttressed walls, flying buttresses at that, and groins, and columns, all laid out by master engineers over centuries. The statuary and the sculpted stone are the True disciplines that we live by and that point to heaven.
This entire Cathedral in Oviedo, this universal Church, has been made by God through His master builders and is True. Truth cannot change: that is the guarantee that the Church has given all men, including the common man, including the non-Catholic.
And then the Church changed. The fact that the Church that could not change did change bewildered the Spanish people and made them think that the Church’s guarantee was never true in the first place, and then they quietly walked away.
In Spain the people didn’t turn to any other religion; they became “nones”, now almost 80% of the population.
The only solution, in Spain as everywhere else, is a resolute return to Tradition.
** Jenga tower refers to a pixelated tower and is known colloquially as Jenga Architecture after the popular wood block game. In the game participants try to make the tower increasingly more precarious and unstable as the tower grows. Precarious is a description sometimes applied to these buildings as they appear in our cities’ skylines.
** Chreaster is a slang term used to refer to people who attend church twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. The word is a portmanteau (or blend) that combines the words Christmas and Easter.
By Joseph Mattone, January 8, 2024
I met a fine young man, 23, named Lucas, in Leon. He was hiking the Camino de Santiago.
It was still early, and the city was just awakening. Mothers and fathers were bringing their little children to school. This was market day in the Plaza Mayor, and the vendors were busy setting up their stalls.
The daily Mass was scheduled for 9 a.m. in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador of Oviedo, and on the way there I met Lucas outside the Cathedral gates. My wife and I and our two girls were busy hurrying to Mass. The night before I had scouted the area and had confirmed that Mass was held in the side chapel (capilla).
I found the entrance door, inconspicuous as it were, on the side of the cathedral through modern glass doors that appeared to be an entrance to an office, not a 600-year-old cathedral.
Because we were trying not to be late, we were walking at full speed. I saw Lucas. He was wide-eyed and had that nervous look, like the one I have when I know Mass is going to start any minute and I am just a lost foreigner trying to figure out quickly where it is.
He was reading the signs on the gates. I called out in Spanish and asked if he wanted to go to Mass, and he said yes and that he was new in town and did not know where to go. We were happy to lead him through the glass doors into the beautiful gothic cloister and then to the side chapel.
The side chapel had room for about 200 people, but today, a weekday, there were only 12 people, one priest, and no altar server. My family and Lucas made up almost half of those present. Nobody was under 60 except us.
The chapel is an impressive miniature of the Cathedral with busy staccato lines and sculptures adorning the walls that graciously and naturally move one’s eyes up to heaven. Unfortunately, our eyes did not see heaven: they had to be satisfied with looking at the ceiling with its characteristic groins supporting the roof.
After Mass, I made it a point to chat with Lucas. I wanted to know why, as a young man, Croatian Lucas was Catholic and was attending daily Mass. His simple answer was, “I was brought up that way.”
Interesting answer, really, because all the young people back in the day were brought up in the faith. Those young people “back in the day” are now old, most do not go to church, and their children do not go either. What happened?
From what I can tell, the younger generation here in Spain is not Catholic at all, but I don’t understand why, when they are surrounded with colossal testaments to the faith of their ancestors: massive churches, basilicas, and cathedrals.
The cities have so many churches. The typical neighborhood church is so much bigger, so much more beautiful, and so much more ornate than St. John in our city of Folsom, California. The neighborhood Spanish churches are more on par with our cathedral in Sacramento. And these neighborhood churches, as well as the basilicas and cathedrals in Spain, are full of saints’ relics and centuries of tradition, including miraculous events.
If the Catholic Church is based on Scripture and Tradition, are not the Spanish traditions a splendid example, witness, and testimony for the eyes to attract these young people to God? Seeing is believing. But not in Spain. Why?
I wondered what had changed. What could be the reason for the abandonment of such an overwhelming and awe-inspiring faith that in two generations is almost completely gone?
Lest we believe that it was always this way, consider my Spanish friend Alfonso. At about 60 years of age, he recalled his childhood to me: “When I was young, in my small town, everyone went to Mass every Sunday, we all prayed the rosary every day, and parents watched their children (and he pointed to both eyes with two fingers to emphasize how children were watched). Today, nobody goes to Mass, nobody prays the rosary, and nobody watches their children, and the children are doing drugs (and he emphasized the use of drugs by imitating a needle injecting the inside of his arm).”
So, what had changed in the two generations? What had changed in Alfonso’s lifetime?
Below I list the changes that might have led to the loss of faith and my thoughts on their impact.
1. Change in church leadership – Naturally, every generation is going to have new church leaders: the pope, bishops, saints, and saint wannabes die and are replaced in every generation. Just the fact that they change, to me, should not be cause to lose the faith.
2. Abuse scandal – Is it that new leaders are bad? For the past 20 years, the abuse scandals and crisis have been worsening consistently all over the world. I could believe one hundred percent that this could be the main reason, even the only reason: faith filled has become faith emptied. I have experienced the emptying of my faith (temporarily) after the disturbing and continuing evil revelations.
However, these revelations started too late. The abandoning of faith happened before the revelations of abuse. Perhaps, the abuse scandal was the coup de grâce that made the Jenga tower* collapse, but I do not think the foundation was compromised by the scandals.
3. Other corruption – There is other corruption that has scarred the Church and has contributed to pulling out some Jenga blocks, such as the China scandal, and the banking scandals, and the Vatican drug party scandal, but these media events are too few and too far between to be the cause of the collapse of faith.
4. Type of church leadership – The type of church leadership might have changed. Were the bishops saintlier, more Christ-like, and more convincing leaders in the past compared to today? I don’t know. This would be interesting to research. Ireland recently voted for abortion, and it did not appear that the bishops spoke to the people to discourage the vote for abortion. A hundred years ago, I think they would have. Anecdotes aside, more research needs to be done on this.
5. The culture – Western culture has emphatically changed. Feminism and the sexual revolution from the 1960s have changed the family and hence society. Marxist ideology and socialism have also grown and changed how we think about government, family, money, and labor.
These have been grand and stupendous changes, but maybe they would not have taken root and spread if the faithful that had made up almost all the population of Spain and other countries had remained Catholic. In a Catholic country like Ireland, for example, most people would only vote in favor of abortion if they were no longer a Catholic society. This cultural change is powerful enough to have made the people lose the faith. Its proposed faith, Marxism, is addressed next.
6. Marxism – Marxism, in all its forms, has been steadily spreading and has been accepted by most people, even those who have read not one twiddle of Marx. It is now the culture of the West, supplanting Christianity, of which we are living off the remnants.
Marxism is the alternative faith. Marxism has been around for a hundred years, but the effect on the people of the street has really taken hold since the 1960s. More research needs to be done on Marxism and our current culture, but possibly it has grown in the vacuum left by the Catholic loss of faith and is not the cause of it.
7. The New Theology – The New Theology was many things, including some heartfelt efforts to synergize the Faith with other currents in society, including Marxism. However, at the end of the day and after the smoke is gone so we can see more clearly, the New Theology was a revolution where good men were used as stooges and pawns.
Gaining adherents since the 1800s, the revolution culminated with the pastoral council of Vatican II, which ended in 1965. There was no Saint Athanasius at Vatican II to maintain orthodoxy.
Since then, the counter-revolution embodied by the return of the Latin Mass has been holding on by fingertips.
With the New Theology all types of changes occurred: people marrying outside the faith with little or no challenge; annulments galore; eating meat on Friday; the rise of the “Chreasters”**; nuns abandoning their habits and wearing street clothes; Catholics attending protestant services; just about everyone receiving the Eucharist at every Mass; and popes kissing the Koran. Please hold onto these thoughts about the New Theology as I discuss #8.
8. The New Mass – The New Mass officially began in 1970, given to the common Catholic whether he wanted it or not. He was told that Latin was a language he could not understand, and the bishops were doing him a favor to get rid of it and say Mass in the common tongue of the common man, and he believed them and followed not knowing any better.
The New Mass basically coincided with the feminist and sexual revolutions, which were successfully working in earnest to change society. Is it a coincidence that the two were born together?
The New Mass changed things just as the New Theology changed things, and at the same time. People received communion in the hand and standing instead of on the tongue and kneeling. Some bishops did not allow the poor man in the pew to kneel during Mass when his Lord was elevated, removing all kneelers and requiring him to stand instead.
The prayers changed and so did the language. Now it was Spanish Mass for the Hispanic community, English Mass for the English speakers, and Filipino Mass for the Filipinos. Then twenty-five years later, the prayers were changed again, replaced by “better” translations.
The altars were taken from the wall and put at the center of the stage with the priest behind it and facing the people. Unfortunately, the baby boomers required more churches, and ugly churches were built for their new form of worship. Gone were the myriad of awe-inspiring saints’ statues but born was the bare church-built amphitheater style with a stage for a band.
Even though Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium wanted Latin and Gregorian chant to be the center of the liturgy, they disappeared, to be replaced with John Talbot and Michael Joncas. Please hold onto these thoughts about the New Mass and the New Theology as I discuss #9.
9. Other changes – As I walk into the breath-taking Cathedral at Oviedo or among the ruins of huge Pueblo churches built to reach almost to heaven in the middle of nowhere near Mountainair, New Mexico, all I can think of is that the people do not believe anymore, which brings me to change.
Catholicism is a tradition-based religion. The foundation of the Church is built on Christ, the unchanging Truth incarnate. The walls of the Church are made of dogmatic Truth slowly built stone by stone at the hands of master builders over two millennia. The roof covers our heads as Mary’s mantel wraps us all in the Truth of the virtues just as the roof’s vaulted ceilings are held by buttressed walls, flying buttresses at that, and groins, and columns, all laid out by master engineers over centuries. The statuary and the sculpted stone are the True disciplines that we live by and that point to heaven.
This entire Cathedral in Oviedo, this universal Church, has been made by God through His master builders and is True. Truth cannot change: that is the guarantee that the Church has given all men, including the common man, including the non-Catholic.
And then the Church changed. The fact that the Church that could not change did change bewildered the Spanish people and made them think that the Church’s guarantee was never true in the first place, and then they quietly walked away.
In Spain the people didn’t turn to any other religion; they became “nones”, now almost 80% of the population.
The only solution, in Spain as everywhere else, is a resolute return to Tradition.
** Jenga tower refers to a pixelated tower and is known colloquially as Jenga Architecture after the popular wood block game. In the game participants try to make the tower increasingly more precarious and unstable as the tower grows. Precarious is a description sometimes applied to these buildings as they appear in our cities’ skylines.
** Chreaster is a slang term used to refer to people who attend church twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. The word is a portmanteau (or blend) that combines the words Christmas and Easter.