Catalunya (It’s not Spain)

For this next post, I’m going to describe the world I was about to move into after university. It’s important to me for you to understand this context as I go on to share the stories of the people I came to know and love in my time there.

Catalunya is an autonomous region of the country of Spain. While it is part of the Spanish country, Catalunya is not Spain. They have their own dialect of Catalán, they have their own cuisines, and their own way of doing things.

Catalunya (unlike Spain) does not really identify with Catholicism. This is because of Catholicism’s financial support of the Franco regime during the Spanish Civil War. Catalunya is also a strong socialist city. In Spain itself, all political parties are legal. Catalunya has a strong communist party movement within that region and a strong movement that wants to be independent from Spain. You are more likely to see the Catalán flag flown there than you are the Spanish flag.

Social issues are much more liberal there. Nudity, sexuality, and drug useage are seen as not a big deal. It is common for most Catalanes to have experimented with all these things in a much more liberal way than in the United States and at a younger age. You are more likely to see Catalanes cringe at violence in a movie and not flinch at all when nudity and sexuality is on the big screen. Additionally, politics are freely discussed between friends and acquaintances without much intense emotional connection to it.

Catalunya is also very (what I call) post-Christian. In their minds, they’ve tried Christianity for decades and it didn’t work. Because of that, they’ve moved past it to something else. Pluralism in spirituality is abundant there and throughout all of Europe.

This is the world in which a young man from a small conservative town in a conservative state was going into…