Government statistics from 2026 show that 40% of people identify as “nones”. Although church weddings continue to decline, more young people say they believe in God.
A young woman at a Catholic mass. / Photo: [link]Jana Doro[/link], Unsplash CC0.
Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain is making headlines across the media, with massive gatherings with tens of thousands in several cities. But is Spain still a mostly Roman Catholic country?
According to the latest survey by the Barometer of the Centre for Sociological Research (CIS), over 55% of the Spanish population identify as Roman Catholic when aked about their religious views.
This represents a drop of 40 percentage points over the last 40 years, compared to the 90% of Spaniards who identified as Catholic in the early 1980s.
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Among those surveyed in spring 2026, only 18.3% say they practice their faith. Of these, 25.5% never attend mass and 24.1% almost never do.
The survey shows that 23.1% say they attend several times a year; 8.9%, two or three times a month; 12.2%, every Sunday; and 4.6%, several times a week.
The figures also reveal that secularism is on the rise in Spain, with 13% of respondents describing themselves as agnostic, 12% as indifferent, and 15.1% as atheist. Altogether, non-believers are 40% of the population.
Unlike private research agencies, the CIS survey of the Spanish government never asks about minority faith groups. This makes it impossible to determine exactly how many evangelicals there are in Spain. However, other research agencies have suggested that Protestants account for between 2% and 5% of the Spanish population.
Despite the decline, the number of those who say they are Catholic has grown among those under the age of 25, the CIS found, rising from 31% in 2023 to 47% in May 2026.
Church weddings continue to lose weight in Spain's society: over the last 15 years, they fell from 41% to 15%.
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