Southern Europe Seeing a Breakup Boom
Divorce rates are rising across the continent, but the three most Roman Catholic countries are exceeding the pace.
By Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2006

ROME — When the Vatican looks out at the state of the Western European family, it is alarmed. It sees parents and children at the mercy of overly secular nations awash in laws and practices that liberalize evils, from abortion to gay marriage.

Church officials now have another trend to fret about. Divorce has been marching ever upward everywhere in Europe, but nowhere more so than in the continent's three most Roman Catholic countries.

Portugal, Italy and Spain, in that order, have registered the highest jump in divorce rates in the last decade, according to a new study.

The institution of marriage, says Eduardo Hertfelder, the study's director, "is in crisis." It is not that these countries have the most divorces (Germany and Britain hold the lead) but that they registered the largest percentage increase. In Portugal, divorces rose 89% from 1995 to 2004, according to Hertfelder's Institute for Family Policies, a nongovernmental organization based in Madrid; the jump was 62% for Italy and 59% for Spain in that period. the rest