What will be the place of new spiritualities?
One of the fields that has changed the most in recent decades is how the personal and collective sense of life is experienced. What we also call religiosity. Perhaps more so than politics. So much so that it now offers an extremely complex, not to say confusing, panorama. And wanting to approach it with opinion polls based on how the old schemes of belief and institutional ecclesiastical belonging have been only adds confusion to confusion. The question is no longer even whether one believes in God. The social phenomenon of belief and spirituality overflows all the models used until now.
We came from that poorly named Francoist “sociological Catholicism” which, mixing forced adhesions with honest ones, allowed for the maintenance of a narrative of conservative moral homogeneity for the benefit of the regime. Its discrediting and subsequent collapse in the 1960s gave way to a country that, according to scholars, could be considered one of the most –if not the most– secularized in Europe and the entire world. Professor Joan Estruch, however, unmasked that illusion of a country of disbelievers from the outset, with an insurmountable critique of the very concept of secularization, to which, incidentally, it would have been very useful to have paid more attention.
And it is that the retreat of the space occupied by the official Catholic Church, in the first place, went hand in hand with the explosion within it of spiritual lines so contradictory that they ranged from Christians for Socialism, reflected in Latin American liberation theology, through worker priests, the consolidation of an increasingly open Opus, to the most reactionary organizations, such as the Legionaries of Christ. And I'm leaving out a lot! A multiplication of options that, instead of adding, subtracted. But, secondly, the wasteland left by the Church was being occupied by all sorts of experiences inspired by the East and that allowed one to be outside –if not at least apparently– the old structures of ecclesiastical power. It was the so-called, globally, new age (nueva era). Of course, without forgetting the solidity of more stable and discreet institutions such as evangelical Churches, among others.
But this 21st century has complicated things further. First, due to migratory flows, which have led to the entry of Islamic organizations in their various currents. And then, at a gallop, the arrival of both Churches of Latin American origin and, even more subtly, the penetration of their forms of spirituality within the old Catholic Church. An entry that was received with open arms because it offered a respite from the decline in clientele, but which has forced it to turn a blind eye to foreign styles of belief and morality, apart from the massive introduction of Spanish in the liturgy.
Is this all? Not at all. In recent years, moreover, expressions of a new spirituality have been reborn among young people, formally around the Catholic Church itself, but difficult to fit into its traditional patterns. The magnitude of this resurgence is difficult to measure due to its positioning on the border of the most traditional structures and forms of participation. In any case, it is much greater than is perceived. That it has come to manifest itself musically and aesthetically in works such as Lux by Rosalía, regardless of whether it is a frank or opportunistic expression, is a clear symptom of the relevance of a state of mind that seeks warmth in these new spiritualities, let's say, more than traditional, classical ones. Experiences for which the old classifications between progres and old-fashioned types are of no use.
Possibly, within the framework of these new spiritualities, whether they take shelter under the wing of Christian Churches or other confessions, the similarity of the personal and collective meaning-making needs they seek could make possible new forms of interreligious communion, which we could call new ecumenism and which now, with great difficulty, occupy the old organizations.
Only the continuity over time of these new youth manifestations will tell us whether we are facing a passing rebound or something substantive. It will depend on their capacity for autonomous organization or on seeking and finding shelter – if they are to be welcomed – in the old ecclesiastical structures, provided they have the desire and capacity to renew themselves and understand the value of those who now knock on the door.
And I don't think I'm talking about anything marginal or irrelevant. I'm talking about the search for new ways to give solid meaning to life to confront this world intent on making us all weak, fragile, and vulnerable.
