massAUDIENCE figures for Spain’s televised Sunday Mass soared after Podemos called for it to be scrapped.

The far-left party had proposed a bill that would end the broadcast of the Roman Catholic Mass on La2 television in a bid to make Spain more ‘multicultural’.

The bid came despite the broadcaster also showing secular, Jewish and Muslim shows.

But after the conservative Partido Popular campaigned against the initiative, the broadcast raked in 1.2 million viewers, its largest audience since 2004.

The 13-year high saw the programme’s share of Spain’s audience reach 21%, some three times bigger than usual.

Podemos argued that while it does not oppose religious programming, religious rituals should not be shown on state-funded television in an era of increasing multiculturalism and secularism.

Pablo Iglesias
Pablo Iglesias

Party leader Pablo Iglesias has stood by his action, posting a video on Twitter showing Antonio Reig, the arch-conservative bishop near Madrid, declaring that gays who prostitute themselves or go to gay nightclubs ‘will go to hell’.

Iglesias said: “In a mass, sending someone to hell for being gay? On public television, which we all pay for. No thanks.”

Meanwhile, an online petition to protect the programme has garnered almost 100,000 signatures.

Church attendance is down in Spain as the most recent survey saw 59.3% say they ‘almost never’ go to Mass.

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12 COMMENTS

      • No doubt as an atheist you aren.t into magic but the term priest and mag are synonymous. As an aside, wearing priestly clothing without the training gives bad luck. Similar to the magical order of the Garter if into kingships.

        • The Catholic church has had to pay around four billion dollars so far, to victims of their abuse, sexual and physical. Now THAT’S magic. Your religious convictions seem to render you blind and deaf zabaot. Or was that just “bad luck” due to wearing the wrong frocks? Get your head out of the clouds man.
          Pay attention to Podemos, they know the truth in this case.

          • So other religions and politicians, including anglicanism, had to pay as well. in the case of catholicism is attributed to the lack of training in the sublimation of the sexual force in the postwar period, now solved with pranayama and other oriental techniques. So, why putting all the blame on catholicism?

  1. ” 3`And why dost thou behold the mote that [is] in thy brother’s eye, and the beam that [is] in thine own eye dost not consider?

    4or, how wilt thou say to thy brother, Suffer I may cast out the mote from thine eye, and lo, the beam [is] in thine own eye?

    5Hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. ” Mathew 7.

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