Andorra’s Property Registry: When the Church Gets a Door of Its Own

<p>Andorra is preparing to create something every modern state needs: a Property Registry capable of establishing, with legal certainty, who owns what. That should be the simple part. The harder question is why a system supposedly designed around equal rules is being born with a special route reserved for one institution: the Catholic Church.</p><p>At the centre of the controversy is Article 90 and what the bill calls <strong>“immatriculation by ecclesiastical certification.”</strong> The defence of the provision sounds reassuring: the Church must still provide a written title of ownership, therefore no real privilege exists. But that argument creates an obvious contradiction. If the title is already valid and sufficient, why does the Church require a separate legal procedure? If the special route changes nothing, it is unnecessary. If it changes something, citizens have the right to know exactly what advantage it provides and why.</p><p>This is not a debate about faith. It is about constitutional hygiene.</p><p>Andorra’s Constitution guarantees equality before the law while recognising a special historical relationship with the Catholic Church. But history is not a blank cheque. Ceremonial recognition does not automatically justify procedural advantages in property law, particularly in a country where the Bishop of Urgell is not merely a religious authority: he is also one of the two Heads of State.</p><p>That dual role matters.</p><p>The Church in Andorra is not simply the guardian of Romanesque chapels and parish houses. Ecclesiastical structures have managed assets worth extraordinary sums. The inheritance of Maria Dolors Maestre, publicly valued in the hundreds of millions of euros, and the subsequent sale of important real-estate assets such as Borda Nova demonstrate that religious institutions can operate in exactly the same property market as developers, investors, banks and major fortunes.</p><p>There is nothing illegal about that. But when an institution behaves as an economic actor, the argument for exceptional treatment becomes weaker, not stronger.</p><p>Spain should serve as a warning. For years, the Catholic Church enjoyed extraordinary powers to register property through ecclesiastical certification. Tens of thousands of assets were eventually registered, including not only churches but land, homes, commercial premises and other properties. The controversy reached the European Court of Human Rights and Spain ultimately abolished the privile