Sadie Sack
Madrid temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints on a cloudy day.
In the heart of the Ríos Rosas neighborhood in Madrid, Spain, a crescent of 30 formally dressed women analyze the words “Sois mis amigos,” written on the whiteboard at the front of their post-service education classroom. In English, this quote from the New Testament means “You are my friends.” The congregation discusses what friendship with others and with Christ have in common, until an older woman in the back of the room stands.
Voice heavy with emotion, she describes how she struggled upon her arrival in Madrid from the Philippines before two congregation members, or “Hermanas,” approached to ask her how she was during a service.
She gestures to the women beside her, “These two angels are the reason I am here.”
This church member, who declined to share her name, shares a similar story with many other members of Madrid’s Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Known most for its following in Utah, the colloquially named the Mormon church has grown more visible through popular media in recent years through “The Book of Mormon” Broadway musical and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” Hulu docuseries featuring LDS influencers. In some cases, this representation has been used as a tool by the LDS community to reach new members and share their beliefs.
The LDS church began to take root in Spain after a 1967 law established religious freedom, said Reverend Melanie Mitchell. Mitchell, a pastor at the Community Church of Madrid and professor of theology at Saint Louis University–Madrid (SLU-Madrid), explains that historical protestant and non-Catholic churches were established after this law was passed in response to the Vatican’s Dignitatis Humanae doctrine calling for religious freedom.
Despite this delayed establishment of the LDS church in Madrid, the faith has amassed a community of around 63,500 followers in Spain’s largest city. The LDS church has become a popular place of worship for immigrants and foreign missionaries.
Celine Cerda, a member of the LDS church from Galicia, Spain, recently completed an 18-month mission in Madrid and Southern Spain. Cerda was surprised that many Madrileños respect the LDS religion.
“People in Madrid are more open to having a different faith than Catholicism,” she said.
However, when having conversations about her church with people in Southern Spain, Cerda found that the higher percentage of practicing Catholics led to fewer LDS baptisms.
“In this city called Cadiz,” Cerda recalled, “they were open to people but not to their beliefs. They were staying to their own thing, and that was hard because as missionaries, we try to preach the gospel.”
This attitude towards the LDS religion among the Catholic Spanish population might be attributed to different understandings of the definition of Christianity. Mitchell explained that, like Catholics, the LDS church uses the Bible. However, they use an additional religious text called the Book of Mormon, an idea opposed by Catholicism.
Benjamin Jenkins, a political science master’s student at SLU-Madrid, theorizes that the attitudes Cerda encountered towards the LDS church in Southern Spain could be related to the perception of the church as a cultural importation from the United States. Originally from Virginia, Jenkins has now spent over five years in Madrid, where he has noticed, “there’s a lot of anti-American sentiment … even [when] talking to [other] Americans.”
Jenkins connected with various church members over six months during his undergraduate studies as part of an interfaith project. He noted that the association of the LDS church with American culture and the relative newness of the LDS faith in comparison to Catholicism resulted in the church being “seen as…American fanaticism spilling over into Europe.”
Despite some reluctance towards the LDS church in more Catholic areas of Spain, Madrid’s multinational LDS congregation encompasses 136 geographically based wards, or “barrios,” which were made up of 51% Spanish members and 49% international members, according to the 2007 study by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Alberto Fernandez-Calvillo, Bishop of Madrid’s sixth ward, explains that as the LDS church has grown in Madrid over the last few decades, so has the diversity of its members. Fernandez-Cavillo was born in Madrid and raised Catholic until his baptism into the LDS church at age 10.
“At that time, all of us were from Spain,” he says. “Now we have, because of immigration, you can look around and see a lot of people from South America.”
Spain has the highest population of South American immigrants of all European countries, according to a 2020 report by the International Organization for Migration. Today, Fernandez-Calvillo estimates that his ward is made up of 10% Spanish members and 90% people of other nationalities.
Hermana Warren, an American missionary in Madrid, is one of the many international members of the congregation.
Warren says that even though the language barrier in Spain is hard for her, she is thankful for the LDS church, where she can go to almost any country to “find [her] people, [her] faith, and to be loved as [she is].”
Warren has taken comfort in the similar community that the LDS church provides. However, she notices differences as well. At home in Utah, the Mormon community is much larger. In Madrid she has discovered a more relaxed, come-as-you-are LDS culture.
“I don’t have to worry if I’m speaking well enough,” she says, “In Utah, sometimes you worry if you’re wearing the right thing, but here you don’t have to be the best singer.”
Cerda, whose family immigrated to Spain from Chile, has experienced a similarly welcoming and devoted community in the LDS church.
“As a South American, I feel like we are more open-minded. We have more faith,” she says. “We pray to God. We go to church. Most South Americans do that, but Spaniards don’t really go to church.”
Jenkins, whose family is from Bolivia, agrees that the LDS church has “a very sincere message.” He says it is “well received compared to the Catholic church, which is seen as a little bit bureaucratic.”
Despite values of universal acceptance associated with the LDS church, Jenkins believes the church’s history is tainted by a racist past.
“I think they maybe stepped away from certain interpretations,” he says. “But the [previous] narrative [was] that the Israelites sinned and therefore were turned darker. And those dark people were the Native Americans.”
Jenkins refers to “2 Nephi 5,” a passage in the Book of Mormon where “unbelievers” are cursed with dark skin, which leads them to become “idle people, full of mischief and subtlety.”
For Jenkins, this passage comes into conflict with the church’s tradition of welcoming immigrants from South America.
“It was a bit odd having the Latin American people in the church say, ‘wow, look, you have this, you know, Israelite background, but you’ve become so white, like your soul has been redeemed by this inner marriage with white people,’” he says.
This negative association with non-white skin is part of the history of the LDS church more broadly, as the institution did not allow Black people to enter the priesthood or “participate in temple endowment or sealing ordinances” until 1978, according to the LDS church website.
In Madrid, this complex interaction between inclusion and exclusion in the LDS church impacts members and non-members in different ways. Still, Fernandez-Calvillo continues to welcome all people into his congregation.
“In the church you find everybody … good people, not as good people, more patient, impatient, you find every type of [people],” he says. “We are as imperfect as anybody else. But we do the best that we can.”