For the first time in its history, Spain now has more atheists, agnostics, and non-believers than it does practicing Catholics, according to a new report by the Research Center of Spanish Sociology (CIS).
While a third of Spaniards reported being Catholic, only 22.7 percent of them said that they attend mass and go to confession regularly.
In Catalonia, just 10.9 percent of believers reported regularly attending mass and going to confession, while in Rojia, south of Basque country, about 40 percent of people are still practicing Catholics, FranceInfo reports.
The secularization of Spanish society has been substantially more pronounced in industrialized areas where cultures mix more often like Madrid, Catalonia, and the Basque Country.
In response to these figures, the Spanish newspaper El Diario wrote: “These figures, 80 years later, finally give reason to Manuel Azana: Spain has ceased to be Catholic.”
