God’s Little Loophole: Spain’s Public Funding of Private Prejudice

One hears, with some regularity, the accusation that Spain remains a nation trapped in its own medieval amber. The Black Legend, that centuries-old smear campaign prosecuted by Spain’s Protestant competitors, painted Torquemada’s homeland as a place where thought crimes were extracted by garotte and the Inquisition functioned less as a theological corrective than as a particularly enthusiastic human resources department. It is, one is told, a calumny. A slander. The fantasies of jealous northern Europeans who have never experienced a proper lunch.

And frankly, the evidence supports the defense. Spend a weekend in Maspalomas, where the dunes host what is arguably Europe’s most magnificently libertine open-air congregation, or in Ibiza, where the sacraments are administered at four in the morning and nobody is entirely sure what they just took, and this image of Talibanic repression dissolves faster than the sheen of lubricant on the surface of the club swimming pool. Tolerance is on display everywhere. Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, a full decade before the land of the Magna Carta got around to it. Its gender equality legislation, is a document of such fastidious progressivism that it would make a Scandinavian blush. No profession, it states with admirable clarity, may bar entry to a person on grounds of their sex.

No profession, that is, except the one the government helps pay for. Spain has outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex. It also funds it—lavishly—when the institution in question is old enough and wears vestments.

Walk into any of the country’s magnificent cathedrals on a Sunday morning — and they are magnificent, which is part of the problem, because it is very difficult to be properly furious inside something that beautiful — and observe the ritual with the detached eye of, say, an anthropologist who has stumbled upon a particularly well-funded cargo cult. There at the pulpit stands a man. Usually of retirement age. If younger, frequently foreign, which raises its own questions about the domestic recruitment pipeline — Spain has hemorrhaged thousands of local conscripts since the sputtering out of their fascist dictatorship, a staffing crisis that the institution has addressed not by reconsidering its eligibility criteria but by importing replacements from Eastern Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. One notes, with some admiration for the consistency involved, that the Church has chosen to solve its shortage of men by finding more men elsewhere, rather than glancing at the 51% of the population that has been waiting quietly in the pews.

This man is delivering to a congregation that is itself largely geriatric, a sermon whose intellectual content has not been substantially updated since the Council of Trent, on the common subjects of: the inadvisability of women wearing skirts above the knee, the spiritual dangers of loving the wrong person, and the eternal importance of a wife’s submission to her husband, her protector, her king. This last point is sourced, we are to understand, directly from the Pauline bits, and is therefore non-negotiable.

The women, meanwhile, are assigned roles commensurate with their theological status: they may arrange flowers, launder vestments, organise the parish raffle. The Church has always found uses for women’s labour. It is women’s authority that presents the doctrinal difficulty.

Now. The Spanish Constitution, Article 14, guarantees equality before the law regardless of sex. The Ley Orgánica 3/2007 closes every conceivable loophole. And yet that pulpit — that publicly subsidized pulpit — remains, by law, by treaty, by the solemn agreement of a supposedly secular democratic state, a Y-chromosome-only establishment.

The theological justification for this arrangement is, it must be said, one of the more ambitious pieces of reasoning in the history of human thought. The female of the species is ineligible for ordination because she is, in the founding mythology of the enterprise, derived from the rib of the first man, created as his companion and subsequently responsible, via a spectacularly ill-advised conversation with a talking snake, for the introduction of knowledge, suffering, and the general inconvenience of history into what had previously been a perfectly adequate garden. The precise date of this catastrophe, according to the seventeenth-century Bishop James Ussher’s admirably specific calculations, was the 23rd of October, 4004 BCE — a Sunday, as it happens, which at least has the virtue of explaining why Sundays feel the way they do.

This is the intellectual foundation upon which a modern democratic state has agreed to rest its employment exemption.

The legal mechanism deserves a moment of appreciation, because it is a genuinely elegant piece of architecture, in the way that a confidence trick is elegant. Nearly five decades ago, just days after Spain’s new post-Franco Constitution took effect, the new government promised the Vatican that despite an official separation of church and state it would continue Franco’s old practice of financially assisting Spain’s Roman Catholic Church until it could stand on its own. Spain is still waiting for that day to arrive. Through subsidies, exemptions and tax breaks, the government has paid the Church an estimated €5 billion per year — for its schools, for the upkeep of its property, for Catholic facilities in prisons and hospitals, and, via the tax return mechanism, for the general operational costs of an institution that exclusively employs men in its senior roles.

The mechanism is, one concedes, fiendishly clever. Taxpayers who submit their income tax return can allocate 0.7% of their total contribution to the Catholic Church (and no other denomination) — an allocation that does not mean they pay more or receive less back. The tax authority helpfully clarifies that your choice “will have no economic cost” and will not change “the amount to be paid or refunded.”

One almost misses the medieval frankness.

The state is not, you understand, the employer. It is merely the cashpoint. It processes the transaction; the Church decides, on the basis of a rib extracted in a garden approximately six thousand years ago, who may receive the proceeds. This distinction, we are assured, makes all the difference. The public funding that the Episcopal Conference receives through this tax allocation exceeded 250 million euros as recently as 2016, a figure that actually increased during the years of austerity when the government was cutting public services. Nurses were being laid off. Teachers were losing their jobs. But the institution that believes women were created as a derivative of man was doing rather well, thank you.

And if anyone wants to play semantic tennis about whether the state is “the employer,” Spain has also baked Catholic chaplaincies into public institutions: hospitals are funded “through the corresponding budget allocation,” with pay scales explicitly set out in the published agreement, and prisons historically included even a Cuerpo de Capellanes mechanism and state-funded personnel subsidies.

The theology stays private; the pay structure is public.

One observes, in the spirit of completeness, that an overseers report concluded that some 440,000 adults may have suffered sexual abuse in Spain by people linked to the Church, with roughly half of those cases committed by clergy. The exclusively male clergy, one might add, though one appreciates that this is considered bad form to mention.

Which brings us, with the grinding inevitability of a homily approaching its third point, to Sagunto.

In this ancient Roman city on the Valencian coast, the Cofradía de la Purísima Sangre de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo — a brotherhood, the name doing precisely the theological labor one might expect — claims to have been organizing Holy Week processions since 1492. That year being, for anyone keeping score, the same year Spain expelled its Jewish population and Columbus sailed to the Americas, which gives some sense of the vintage of the traditions under discussion.

The institution counts 1,700 members, of whom 1,200 may vote, and in a recent ballot 267 members expressed themselves explicitly against allowing women to join, versus 114 in favor. This was, remarkably, the third time the question has been put forward. In 1999, a similar vote was held in which only nine cofrades supported inclusion. In 2022 the experience was repeated with the same result, though the yes votes climbed to 135. The direction of travel is clear; the speed suggests we should not hold our breath.

The reaction from the Equality Minister, Ana Redondo, was swift, righteous, and — if one is in the business of applying consistent principles — rather magnificently ironic. She declared on social media that cofradías cannot place themselves outside the constitutional framework and must guarantee the equality recognized in the Constitution. ” Holy Week must also be equal. We are going to take action.” The government duly announced it would begin proceedings to strip the Sagunto Holy Week of its designation as a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Nacional, citing a Ministerial Order which requires that such celebrations demonstrate broad civic participation — a requirement that excluding half the population might, one hesitatingly suggests, complicate.

This is all, in isolation, entirely correct. The Instituto de las Mujeres has reminded the cofradía that preventing women’s participation does not constitute a tradition, but a form of discrimination prohibited by law and contrary to fundamental rights.

Quite right.

One agrees completely.

And all of it is beside the point.

The same government that will strip Sagunto of its tourist designation for barring women from a procession continues to channel hundreds of millions of euros annually to an institution that bars women from ordination on the grounds that they are ontologically inferior to men — and has declared this position to be a matter of divine revelation not subject to democratic revision. The Arzobispado de Valencia, for its part, avoided pronouncing on the Sagunto vote entirely, citing respect for the autonomy of the cofradías — the autonomy, one notes, that the Church vigorously defends for itself while declining to extend it to women who might wish to celebrate mass.

The Ministry of Equality versus a Valencian brotherhood founded in the times of the Inquisition is, cinematically speaking, a compelling duel. The Ministry of Equality versus the Vatican concordat of 1979 is, apparently, a different film entirely. One that nobody in the government seems to have commissioned.

El País, the nation’s newspaper of record, has published a suitably indignant editorial about Sagunto. It is, one must concede, well-argued. It correctly identifies the vote — 267 against admitting women, 114 in favor, a margin that actually widened compared to the last time the question was put — as an “exhibition of power over women.” The article invokes Article 14. It cites a Constitutional Court ruling on a similar cofradía in La Laguna, Tenerife, in which the Court found that private associations cannot hide behind their own autonomy when they occupy a dominant position in cultural and social life. It quotes, with appropriate tartness, the cofrades‘ defence — “la tradición es la tradición” — before responding: “y la Constitución es la Constitución.”

Bravo. Quite right. One agrees with every word.

The editorial also finds space to note what women are permitted to do within the Sagunto cofradía: they may clean the ermita, repair the vestas — the ceremonial robes worn by the men — and help those men dress before the procession. They are, in other words, permitted to launder, mend, and assist with the costuming for a ceremony from which they will then be excluded. This is not tradition. It’s a job description—one the Church has been posting for two millennia, with a benefits package that includes cosmic justification for the wage gap.

What El País’s editorial does not do — in 500 words of otherwise admirably clear constitutional reasoning — is mention the priesthood. Not once. The word sacerdote does not appear. The Acuerdos with the Holy See are not referenced. The annual subsidy, conservatively estimated at five billion euros, is not discussed. The Constitutional Court’s principle — that private associations cannot claim autonomous self-organization when they occupy a dominant position in cultural life — is deployed with precision against 1,700 men in Sagunto and then, apparently, retired from service before it can be pointed in any other direction.

This is, in its own way, a masterclass in the architecture of selective principle. The editorial’s implicit argument, stripped of its elegance, is this: discrimination is discrimination, the Constitution is the Constitution, tradition cannot override fundamental rights — unless the tradition is old enough, the institution large enough, and the treaty complicated enough that challenging it would require a different kind of editorial altogether. One published, perhaps, on a weekday rather than a Sunday, when the readership is smaller and the Church less likely to notice.

The editorial’s silence is not an oversight. It is the unspoken bargain of Spanish transition politics: the Church’s constitutional exemption is not a legal loophole but a political settlement, one that neither major party has an interest in disturbing—and that therefore does not appear in editorials.

“La tradición es la tradición,” say the cofrades of Sagunto. Indeed. And the concordat is the concordat. And five billion euros a year is five billion euros a year. The Constitution, one recognizes, is also still the Constitution — it does not contain an asterisk directing the reader to the footnote where the Vatican exemption is explained. That footnote lives elsewhere, in the comfortable silence between what Spain’s institutions say and what Spain’s institutions do.

And yet — and here the argument performs the turn that makes it genuinely thought provoking — one is compelled to ask the question that the indignant editorials conspicuously avoid. Even if one grants the legal argument entirely—and one should—there remains a more uncomfortable question:

Why, precisely, would any woman want this?

This is not a counsel of despair or a concession to the misogynists. It is a genuine inquiry into the nature of the prize being contested. We are speaking of an institution that allegedly debated, with full theological seriousness and relatively recently in historical terms, whether women possessed souls at all — a question which, one discovers, no one thought to put to the women. An institution whose foundational narrative casts the first woman as the vector of original catastrophe. Whose current doctrinal position — that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is a matter of divine revelation rather than mere custom — is not an accident of history but a considered and, in Rome’s view, permanently settled commitment.

Demanding admission to this establishment in the name of equality is, one submits, a little like a committed vegan launching a legal challenge to gain entry to a nose-to-tail supper club on the grounds that exclusion is discriminatory. Technically, perhaps. But one wonders what victory looks like. A front-row seat at a ceremony you find theologically repellent, conducted by an institution that has spent two millennia systematically refining its justifications for your secondary status? One finds themselves wondering—perversely, perhaps—whether a Black plaintiff suing the Klan for membership wouldn’t at least have the satisfaction of bankrupting them. What does a woman win by joining a club whose founding document attributes the fall of man to her? A seat at the table, or a place on the menu?

The question of whether women should be allowed to serve as priests is entirely distinct from the question of whether women should wish to. The former is a matter of law, consistency, and the intellectual hygiene of not maintaining simultaneously that no job may bar applicants by sex and that this particular job may do so, provided the employer is old enough and well-connected enough. The latter is a matter of whether, having won the argument, you actually want the prize — membership of an institution who blames you for paradise lost, and whose current leadership considers your exclusion to be the direct will of God.

Spain is, genuinely, one of the more remarkable social experiments in modern European history — a country that moved, within a single generation, from Francoist theocracy to constitutional pluralism. The speed of that transformation deserves respect.

What it does not deserve is the comfortable pretense that the transformation is complete. That subsidizing gender discrimination is legally coherent because the discriminating institution is large enough and old enough. That being outraged about a Valencian brotherhood while maintaining respectful silence about the Vatican concordat represents a principled position rather than a political one. That denouncing a thousand-odd-man cofradía that was supposedly founded in 1492 is progressive whilst the 1979 deal with the Holy See — signed, let us not forget, while the country was still warm from forty years of theocratic fascism and perhaps not in the optimal condition for cool-headed treaty negotiations — remains above scrutiny.

The Black Legend, as we established, is a slander. But the White Legend — the one in which Spain has fully resolved its relationship with institutional misogyny and the state subsidy thereof — is a comfort blanket. And it is, on Sunday mornings, publicly funded to the tune of a quarter of a billion euros a year.

The Inquisition, it turns out, never ended.
It reorganized.
It acquired a legal department.
And it learned to file for VAT exemptions.

And somewhere in the Vatican, a man in a dress is still explaining why the rib came second.

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