A budget of almost 2 million euros per year to support initiatives of faith minorities in Spain should disappear.

This is the proposition that Vox, the hard-right party close to the Roman Catholic Church, has brought to the national parliament. The initiative came just days after a ‘lone wolf’ Salafist jihadist killed a priest and wounded others in an attack against two Roman Catholic churches.

Vox says the money administred annually by the state-sponsored Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation (in Spanish: FPyC) should go to support “Spanish families in social or economic emergency”. According to the them, FPyC only “disseminates and promotes faith confessions that are, in some cases, hostile to democratic coexistence and attack the dignity of women”.

The annual report of the FPyC shows that the main beneficiaries of the subsidies are the Federation of Evangelical Religious Entities (FEREDE) with around 500,000 euros, followed by the Islamic Commission (400,000) and the Federation of Jewish Communities (200,000).

“An attack on our Spanish identity and roots”

In its motion, which still has to be accepted for debate in the Spanish Congress, Vox argues that under the “apparently laudable” aims of the state-owned foundation there is a hidden intention of “promoting faith confessions hostile to democratic coexistence”.

Vox even defines the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation as an “ideological space at the service of the sectarian purpose of the Government that uses the money of the Spanish people” to “perpetrate a frontal attack on our identity and roots” and spread “dogmas and pretensions of globalist social transformation represented by the 2030 Agenda”.

For Vox, supporting faith minorities with public money helps these confiession to “acquire a greater influence in our society, perpetrating the call effect of illegal immigration”. The FPyC is therefore “completely distant from the real needs of Spaniards, the common good, coexistence, the rule of law and the identity of Spain, and that only serve the purpose of placing and subsidising people and entities related to the dissolving postulates of the left”.

The evangelical federation responds

The proposal of what is the second largest party in the opposition came as a surprise to evangelical leaders of the Ferede.

In a statement issued the day after, Ferede underlined that “the Evangelical or Protestant denomination (…) is not hostile to democratic coexistence, nor attacks the dignity of women. On the contrary, its historical trajectory in the defence of freedoms and human rights, especially religious freedom, in our country is widely accredited”.

The evangelical federation defended the work of the FPyC in “supporting initiatives aimed at promoting religious freedom, dialogue, peaceful coexistence and the fight against intolerance in our society”.

Ferede also used the opportunity to publicly ask if “VOX plans to present a proposal or alternative to improve the situation of discriminatory treatment that still persists in Spain in terms of funding and public aid to non-Catholic religious denominations”.