Alberto Jose Ferrari Puerta is a lecturer at the Department of International Law, Ecclesiastical Law and Philosophy of Law, Complutense University of Madrid Law School.
Many national legal systems provide for the existence of an official registry for the recognition of religious denominations. In Spain, the Register of Religious Entities was introduced by the Organic Law on Religious Freedom of 1980. This law gave substantive development to the fundamental right enshrined in Article 16 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution, which reestablished religious freedom after nearly 40 years of its suppression under the Franco dictatorship. Article 5 of the Organic Law explicitly provides that religious denominations acquire legal personality upon registration in the Register.
At first glance, this provision appears to offer enhanced protection for the collective exercise of religious freedom. However, for years the Register served as a discretionary instrument in the hands of public authorities, who unilaterally decided which entities merited classification as “religious” and which did not. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, legal scholars criticized this practice.[1] They argued that the state lacked the legitimacy to determine which entities should or should not be deemed religious. Instead, they maintained that the public authorities’ role should be limited to verifying whether an entity meets the formal legal requirements for registration and, if so, proceeding accordingly.
2001 Judgment on the Scope of Public Authorities’ Assessment of Religions
The Spanish Constitutional Court addressed this issue in its ruling judgment of 15 February 2001, which arose from public authorities’ refusal to register the Unification Church in the Register of Religious Entities.[2] The Register’s officials based their refusal on two grounds: first, that the Unification Church allegedly lacked essential characteristics of a religion, such as adherence to a body of dogmas and engagement in ritual practices (worship); and second, that several police reports had classified the group as a “destructive cult.”
After exhausting all other judicial avenues, representatives of the Unification Church brought the matter before the Constitutional Court, alleging a violation of their right to religious freedom. The Court ruled in their favor. In response to the first objection, it held that public authorities were not entitled to perform a substantive assessment of an applicant’s religious nature. Its role was limited to verifying whether the formal legal requirements for registration had been met.
Regarding the second ground, the Court acknowledged that public order can, under Article 16 of the Constitution, serve as a legitimate limit on religious freedom. However, it clarified that such a limitation, particularly when invoked preventively, absent a criminal conviction, must be applied only in exceptional circumstances, supported by concrete evidence indicating a real threat to public order. In this case, the Court found no such evidence, only unsubstantiated suspicions derived not from judicial findings but from police reports. On this basis, the Constitutional Court recognized the Unification Church’s right to be registered in the Register of Religious Entities.
At first glance, one might assume that, following the Constitutional Court’s ruling, no significant obstacles remain for religious entities seeking registration in the Register of Religious Entities. However, this is not the case: The Constitutional Court’s 2001 ruling incurred a certain contradiction because, while affirming that public authorities were only responsible for formal control of the Register’s requirements, it considered Article 3.2 of the Organic Law on Religious Freedom to be constitutional.[3] This article, however, excludes from the law’s scope and denies qualification as “religion” the following: “activities, purposes and entities related to the study and experimentation of psychic or parapsychological phenomena or the dissemination of humanistic or spiritualist values or other analogous purposes unrelated to religious ones.”
Therefore, the 2001 judgment raises serious concerns regarding the legitimacy/constitutionality of Article 3.2, since the Article effectively requires the Register’s authorities to conduct substantive, not formal, evaluations to determine whether an entity falls within any of the excluded categories. Furthermore, the terms humanistic and spiritualist values are highly indeterminate, rendering their application problematic. No principled justification exists for excluding entities that promote such values from recognition as religious denominations, particularly when those entities identify themselves as such. Why, indeed, should the state deny religious status to a group that claims it?
Royal Decree 594/2015 of 3 July 2015, which currently governs the Register of Religious Entities, was enacted in part to align the Register’s functioning with the Constitutional Court’s 2001 judgment. However, the Decree has not resolved the underlying issue. Article 6.1(d) requires that any application for registration include a statement of the entity’s religious aims, along with any information deemed necessary to substantiate its religious character. This Article lists elements such as the entity’s doctrinal foundations, its nonprofit nature, and its specific religious activities, particularly the performance and promotion of worship. As a result, the regulation continues, at least implicitly, to require public authorities to assess, on a case-by-case basis, whether the applicant qualifies as a religious entity. In doing so, it perpetuates a substantive, rather than merely formal, evaluation of the application, contrary to the Constitutional Court’s asserted principle of administrative neutrality.
Pastafarians and “Cromians” Under the Public Authorities’ Assessment
In the past decade, two notable cases have illustrated the ongoing challenges surrounding the registration of religious entities in Spain. The first concerns the refusal to register the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, commonly known as the Pastafarian Church. This movement originated in the early twenty-first century in the United States, founded by Bobby Henderson as a satirical response to education policies favoring creationist doctrines in Kansas. Pastafarianism is characterized by overtly humorous dogmas, including belief in a deity called the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” (Monesvol) and a heaven and hell featuring beer kegs and strip shows. These elements reflect a clear intent to parody religion rather than promote genuine religious belief. As a result, Spanish authorities have consistently denied its registration as a religious entity. The most recent denial, issued in 2016, was challenged before the High National Court (Audiencia Nacional). In 2020, the Court upheld the administration’s decision, concluding that, based on the content of its statutes, the Pastafarian Church constitutes a parody rather than a bona fide religious confession.
The second example, which is somewhat more complex, involves the organization Colegueo de los Infieles a Crom(which literally translates to “Buddyism of the Unfaithful to Crom”). This entity applied in 2019 for registration in the Register of Religious Entities but was denied. It should be noted that, although the name of the entity itself and the videos of its “acolytes” are satirical, the entity’s statutes submitted to the administration are not humorous in nature, unlike those of the Pastafari Church. They refer to the duty of the faithful to spread the existence of the God Crom, an entity that embodies values such as “the thirst for life,” critical thinking, and the fight against slavery “in any form.”[4] However, when representatives of this entity appealed the refusal to register before the High National Court, the Court upheld the administration’s decision, stating that, despite references to the “God Crom,” the entity’s statutes did not contain consistent dogmas or specify its moral principles and worship activities and, therefore, had not accredited its religious character.
The High National Court’s decision regarding the Pastafari Church is legally sound. It is evident that the so-called “acolytes” of this group do not genuinely believe in the dogmas they claim to profess, such as spaghetti with meatballs as a deity or a hell filled with beer and sensual dancing. Since its inception, the movement has aimed to satirize religious dogmatism through parody. It is precisely this animus iocandi (intent to joke) that justifies the refusal of registration. The critique of religion is, of course, a legitimate form of expression, but it does not, by itself, qualify Pastafarianism as a religion under the law.
In this respect, the Spanish court’s reasoning aligns with that of U.S. courts, such as in Cavanaugh v. Bartelt (2016), where the judiciary upheld the prison administration’s refusal to recognize a Pastafarian inmate’s right to religious worship, citing the parodic nature of the claim.[5] It is also in line with the subsequent doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights in De Wilde v. Netherlands (2021), according to which the prohibition on having an ID card photograph taken with a colander on one’s head (typical attire of Pastafarians) did not violate religious freedom, given that Pastafarianism lacked the seriousness required to invoke the right of religious freedom (paras. 51–52).
However, the decision rendered by Spanish courts in the case of the organization Colegueo de los Infieles a Crom is far more questionable. Unlike Pastafarianism, this entity does not appear to be parodic, at least not according to its statutes, which express a series of existential values that are neither satirical nor frivolous. While the group’s beliefs may not align with conventional notions of religion and may resemble a form of Nietzschean individualism more than any recognized creed, it is not the role of administrative or judicial authorities to define what constitutes religion.
Yet this is precisely what the High National Court does when it questions the coherence of the group’s dogmas and the alleged absence of defined moral principles, an objection that is, in fact, inconsistent with the content of the group’s statutes. The Court here oversteps its mandate, engaging in the kind of substantive assessment that the Constitutional Court explicitly rejected in 2001. Nevertheless, this “material control” persists in practice, sustained by provisions such as Article 3.2 of the Organic Law on Religious Freedom and Article 6.1(d) of Royal Decree 594/2015.
Conclusion
In light of the ongoing practice of Spain’s public authorities exercising substantive control over what qualifies as religion, the question arises: how can this issue be effectively resolved? The solution lies in a fundamental reform: transforming the current Organic Law on Religious Freedom into an Organic Law on Freedom of Conscience. Such a law would afford equal protection to all forms of belief, whether religious or nonreligious, and would allow any entity organized around a shared belief system to be registered in the appropriate register, regardless of whether that belief is classified as religious. Only through this broader, more inclusive legal framework can the systemic problems surrounding registration in the Register of Religious Entities be definitively addressed.
References:
[1] See Juan Ferreiro Galguera, Protección jurídico-penal de la religión (Universidad de A Coruña 1998).
[2] S.T.C. Feb. 15, 2001, No. 46 (B.O.E., no. 65 (supp.), Mar. 16, 2001, p. 83) (Spain).
[3] José Ramón Polo Sabau, ¿Derecho Eclesiástico del Estado o Libertades Públicas? (Universidad de Málaga 2002).
[4] Carlos López Segovia, La reforma de 2015 del Registro de Entidades Religiosas. Causas, consecuencias y aplicación (Edisofer 2022).
[5] Óscar Celador-Angón, Definición de religión y organización con fines religiosos en el ordenamiento jurídico estadounidense, 61(122) Ius Canonicum 595 (2021).