The OAR is celebrating twenty years of building bridges between the public administration, religious communities and citizens
The Office of Religious Affairs (OAR) celebrated its two decades of efforts to promote and defend religious freedom and religious and spiritual pluralism in Barcelona with three panel discussions that addressed this municipal service’s work over the past twenty years and the way the public administration can approach the management of religious pluralism. This day of exchange and reflection was complemented several days later with the ‘Religious pluralism, memory and urban transformations’ route in the district of Ciutat Vella.
Check the picture gallery of the event #20OAR here.
The construction of the Centre Abraham in the midst of the Barcelona Olympics (1992) was the first step in Barcelona City Council’s commitment to protect and promote religious and spiritual pluralism. This commitment, which has gained ground alongside other initiatives like the Fourth Parliament of the World’s Religions (2004), culminated with the creation of the Barcelona Interreligious Centre (CIB) in 2005, which since 2008 has been called the Office of Religious Affairs (OAR).
Today, twenty years later, and having joined the Department of Interculturality and Religious Pluralism in 2019 as part of the Barcelona Interculturality Plan 2021-2030, the OAR has become a local, national and international touchstone in including the perspective of religious pluralism in public policies.
To celebrate this milestone with all city residents, on 11 June the OAR held an event past and present members of the office, representatives of different public administrations and members of the city’s religious and spiritual communities participated in three panel discussions to exchange impressions and experiences about the government’s efforts to promote and defend religious pluralism and diversity in the city of Barcelona. The event was held at Barcelona City Council’s Saló de Cròniques and was hosted by Clara Fons i Duocastella, a sociologist and expert in religious diversity.
Sara Belbeida, Commissioner for Citizen Relations and Cultural and Religious Diversity, offered the participants the institutional welcome and thanked them for attending the event to commemorate a track record that she described as ‘pioneering, courageous and very necessary in cities’.
The first panel, moderated by Sara Belbeida and entitled ‘Past, present and future of the OAR’, aimed to summarise the office’s evolution over its two decades of life, the challenges it has had to face and its future projects. This was accomplished through the perspectives of three people who have been crucial members of the OAR during this period: Cristina Monteys, coordinator of the OAR from 2008 to 2017; Ignasi Garcia Clavel, Commissioner for Religious Affairs between 2013 and 2015; and Lola López, Commissioner for Immigration, Interculturality and Diversity in 2015 and 2019. Monteys reviewed the origin of the OAR, which she said was the result of a series of milestones: Barcelona’s recreation of the World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi (1986); the creation of an interreligious centre for athletes during the Barcelona Olympics (1992); a UNESCO meeting on the role played by religions in peace-building (1994); the first the study on Barcelona’s religious diversity (1999); and the Fourth Parliament of the World’s Religions (2004), an ‘interreligious bomb with the participation of 8,000 people from all over the world and all the religions’. ‘The religious pluralism was palpable’, said Monteys, ‘and something had to be done, so the idea was hatched of a service that would be able to create equal conditions in terms of religious diversity’. With that purpose in mind, the Barcelona Interreligious Centre was created in 2005, which was renamed the Office of Religious Affairs three years later.
The 2012 creation of the figure of Commissioner of Religious Affairs, linked to the OAR, was essential to the development of the office. ‘The goals of that job, which I held at that time’, Clavel explained, ‘were to carry on the good work done by the office and facilitate coordination with the political side’. López, in turn, was the person who brought the intercultural perspective into this role starting in 2015, which ‘was necessary to normalise the presence of religion in society’, she said. In this sense, all three speakers concurred that the main challenge facing the OAR and the public administration has been and continues to be addressing a misunderstood secularism which fosters a keen racism that hinders the joint work needed to progress towards real equality.
The second panel discussion of the day was entitled ‘Managing religious plurality from public administrations’ and it was moderated by Núria Serra, head of the Department of Interculturality and Religious Pluralism. It was a chance to reflect on the role of the local government in managing religious pluralism and to present strategies. The participants included Inés Mazarrasa, director of the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation; Agustí Iglesias, officer from the Government of Catalonia’s Directorate-General for Religious Affairs; Olga Jiménez, adjunct coordinator of the Area of Presidency and People Services in Sabadell City Council; and Júlia Quintela, director of the People and Territorial Services Department in the district of Ciutat Vella. They all agreed that society’s increasingly prominent pluralism requires responses from the government in different spheres, and that secularisation in no way implies leaving behind cooperation with religious or faith communities. ‘The mistake’, Iglesias argued, ‘is that many public administrations think that religious equality is not their issue because many of their employees are not believers’. However, managing religious diversity should be an essential issue for public administrations, because it means ‘asking what kind of city we want’, Jiménez said.
According to Quintela, that’s why it is the public administration’s job to promote mutual knowledge, as well Mazarrasa says, as generating the conditions for the egalitarian exercise of the right of religious freedom, because ‘laws may exist, but they have to be put into practice. It’s a matter of knowledge, mechanisms and practices.’ Jiménez said something similar, but focusing on the resources needed to enforce the law, which many local governments don’t have. Quintela agreed with them and expressed her appreciation for the OAR’s efforts at promoting a framework of action and for the support it has specifically provided in Ciutat Vella in the form of advice, training and coordination. All the speakers viewed the OAR as a bridge between communities and public administrations, and among the different administrations. ‘We at DGAR’, Iglesias said, ‘have always worked with the OAR, I think because we speak the same language and are aware of the same reality’. This is why Mazarrasa views the OAR as a role model: ‘Many city councils don’t even have a service dedicated to religious pluralism, and in Barcelona we have an entire office’. The need for services like this one is beginning to be important at a time when many communities have been living here for years, and in the near future public administrations will have to make an effort to ‘facilitate social cohesion’, Quintela said, to address ‘the rise in hate’, Jiménez continued, to ‘adapt public services to both their users and their workers’, Jiménez said, and ultimately to ‘build an inclusive model of coexistence that does not instrumentalise beliefs’, Mazarrasa concluded.
Before the last panel discussion, which concluded the event, Maria Eugènia Gay, Second Deputy Mayor for Social Rights, Culture, Education and Life Cycles, gave a speech in which she underscored the OAR’s contributions within a more aware city, and she praised its work because of its ability to ‘generate trust between the public administration and religious communities, among the different faiths and ultimately between the city and its plural citizenry’.
Finally, the panel entitled ‘20 years of interaction between the OAR and Barcelona’s religious communities’, moderated by Ariadna Solé, closed the event on 11 June. It included a dialogue with representatives from different religious communities in the city to reflect on the work done over these two decades and to propose initiatives to work towards a more effective relationship between the public administration and the communities. The participants were Antoni Matabosch on behalf of the Archbishopric of Barcelona; Ashi Devi Dasi, from ISKCON Barcelona; Guillem Correa, from the Evangelical Council of Catalonia (CEC); and Mohammed Halhoul, member of the Islamic Council of Catalonia and president of the Permanent Working Group on Religions (GTER). In the opinion of Ashi and Halhoul, the opening of the OAR was a turning point. It signalled the public administration’s interest in managing religious affairs, ‘a real relief’, Halhoul said, and ‘proof that we are in the right place at the right time’, given that there were no precedents for an office of its kind. Ashi and her husband, a fellow ISKCON member, came to Barcelona with the 2004 Parliament of Religions, and when they decided to move permanently to the city the interreligious dialogue activities and workshops organised by the OAR became a part of their daily lives. ‘They helped us to grow, to build a bridge with the community and with our neighbours, to create a life in the neighbourhood’, she said. This is why Correa expressed appreciation of the political authorities of Barcelona for not only supporting the creation of the OAR back then but also maintaining that decision. ‘This shows’, Matabosch continued, ‘ the vast importance and need for the seeds to be sown. Nothing is born from nothing.’
During these twenty years, Barcelona has become a plural city, which has highlighted the need for services like the OAR. All the speakers agreed on this point. ‘In the past there were very few minorities, but today we find incredible pluralism’, Halhoul said, ‘and this is because the Catalan people are a magnet for different people’, Ashi claimed. However, Correa argued that even today diversity has to be defended: ‘We are very happy with our social cohesion, with the peace among us, but we have to really value this diversity, because you don’t have to watch the news much to see what’s happening around us’. This is why one of the OAR’s future challenges, according to Matabosch, is to focus more on spreading knowledge about religion, making it visible to citizens and to the City Council and advising it on diversity. ‘We have to make the fact that religion is a positive thing in our society visible’, Correa agreed, a job that is often difficult for the communities to do. This is why Halhoul asked the OAR to lend its communicative capacity to the communities and to offer more religious attention, more information, a broader scope. This speaker ultimately believes that this could help address two urgent problems: the lack of relief in religious and spiritual organisations and the increase in hate speech in society.
After the event’s three panel discussions, Núria Serra offered the institutional closing by speaking about the challenges that had been brought forth and promising to address these and other issues that exist or may arise in the future: ‘We’re rolling up our sleeves to continue working alongside you in the upcoming years, alongside the communities and all these alliances we have created, which are clearly utterly necessary’.
The celebration of the OAR’s twentieth anniversary concluded on 18 June with the ‘Religious pluralism, memory and urban transformations’ route, organised jointly by the OAR and the Espai Avinyó. It consisted of a walk through the district of Ciutat Vella with Víctor Albert-Blanco, a sociologist who belongs to the Sociology of Religion Research Group (ISOR). The footprint that the spiritual and cultural past of different faiths have left on the urban landscape were pointed out along the route. Via this journey through time, he shared reflections on religious pluralism in the city today, which is reflected in its urban planning, especially regarding the guarantee of the right to religious freedom and freedom of worship.
Along the route, participants had the opportunity to see the city from the standpoint of different referents of religious communities that participate in this public space and their everyday lives that shape it. The participants were: Zahra Bakhtawar, lawyer and member of the Al Qaim Islamic Centre; Father Robert Baró, director of the Diocesan Secretariat of Cultural Heritage; and Marta López, pastor at the Barcelona-Centre Protestant Church. You can read an account of the route on the Espai Avinyó and OAR websites.