Religious diversity is posing new and urgent challenges to local authorities and there is no solid foundation of expertise in dealing with this issue at the local level. In some European cities, interfaith platforms are providing local authorities with new governance tools to cope with the challenges of religious diversity and are generating new ways of framing and representing religion in the public sphere. The author takes the city of Barcelona as a case study with the aim of exploring the emergence of a new model for dealing with religious minority issues that goes beyond State–Church relations and the political legacies in this area.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the reformulation of the place and role of religion in Spanish public institutions after the constitutional disestablishment of the Catholic Church and religious diversification of society. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork in six Spanish prisons, we argue that there is a process of the realignment of forces between the religious groups that provide services in such institutions, the Catholic Church adopting an attitude in between adaptation and subtle resistance to the loss of a number of its previous prerogatives. This incomplete demonopolisation of public organisations can be explained as the result of two opposing forces: (a) convergence towards the European standards of accommodation of religious diversity; and (b) Catholic resistance to the loss of established advantages.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract