The political treatment of immigration puts under scrutiny the national and transnational identities and patterns of integration, including the religious dimension. At the European Union (EU) level, Casanova (2006) regards the question of immigration, in addition to other issues such as Poland’s accession to the EU, the debate about Turkey’s admission (see Haynes on this issue, Chapter 11 in this volume) or the mention of religion in the Constitutional Treaty, as one of the key factors for contemporary restructuring of the relations between religion and politics. From a religious perspective migratory flows have two main consequences. First they change the religious landscape of the host societies. The level of religiosity of some immigrant groups alters the local paradigms of secularization and the institutional arrangements that stem from them. Second, immigration also offers an opportunity for religious actors to strengthen their position in the public arena (Menjívar 2006). This has notably been the case for the Catholic Church in its efforts to welcome and support immigrants in Southern Europe. Catholic associations have been among the most active groups working with immigrants, thus acquiring true expertise in that domain. Such activism has led to ambivalent relations between the religious actors and the political and administrative authorities, ranging from competition to subsidiarity. In Southern Europe as elsewhere, the religious actors not only help migrants but are also led to take positions publicly on that issue. Religion thus interferes with politics but in a rather original way on account of the social emergency. Much research has been done on the effects of immigration on transnational, national and local religious landscapes, on church-state relations and on the role of churches in the shaping of immigration policies (see, for example, Minkenberg 2008). Much attention has also been devoted to Islam, both at national and EU levels and, to a lesser extent, to other minority religions. Mourão Permoser et al.2 investigate how immigration and concerns about immigrants’ integration have been changing the established modes of cooperation between religions and state in Austria by strengthening the political role of faith-based organizations speaking in the name of the immigrant community. Paradoxically enough, however, not much has been said about the attitude of the majority religions in the host countries, which have to face immigration as both a new opportunity and a new constraint. For the Catholic Church in Europe, faith-based assistance o contemporary immigrants goes with a certain concern about the emergence of new religious competitors. For example, De Galembert (1994) has emphasized the tension existing within the French Catholic church between compassion for the excluded and fear of the religious rival. We aim at transferring such questions to the Spanish case, a country which is deeply marked by Catholicism and has experienced rapid secularisation since the 1970s. This chapter will give particular attention to the attitude of the Catholic church in the context of the politicization of the immigration issue in Spain. By politicization, we mean that immigration has evolved from a social issue to a public problem and a political stake, both in terms of government policies and domestic political rivalries, thus receiving high attention from the media. Conceptually, we treat the Church as an institution, which means giving special attention to: (a) what has been objectivized (that is, practices, knowledge and roles); (b) various forms of belonging; and (c) internal conflicts (Lagroye 2006). This perspective aims at combining a rationalist approach with historical institutionalism. A purely strategic approach would consider the Church first as an interest group ‘whose actions can be modelled as if it were a firm in a market seeking a supplier of goods’ (Warner 2000: 4). The functional approach makes it possible to address the strategies of the Church in the competition generated by immigration on the religious markets. However, this strategic approach is insufficient when it comes to analysing the specificity of the Church and needs to be completed, as does Warner, by a historical-institutionalist perspective. The Catholic Church is an atypical interest group in several respects (Warner 2000: 7). First, it claims that its principles are universally applicable. Second, it is usually regarded by its followers as being the ultimate moral authority and, third, its interactions with democratic, secular political systems have been troublesome since the Church has been unwilling to relinquish control over individuals’ consciences. Such tension between corporate interests and universalistic ambitions makes the Church an ambivalent pressure group. Moreover, the Catholic Church distinguishes itself from other interest groups by its conception of democracy, irreducible to a purely majoritarian approach. As Warner puts it, it [the Church] cannot agree that some of its tenets are valid and others not; that some people may divorce while others cannot; or that some religions have equal standing with it, but others do not; or that secular education is acceptable for some negotiable segment of the population.< Réduire