Religion and History in Andorra

Andorra is the last surviving example of a European prince-bishopric arrangement. Its head of state is shared, under an agreement first struck between the Bishop of Urgell in Catalonia and the Count of Foix in 1278 and 1288, between the President of France and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Urgell, making a sitting Catholic prelate the joint sovereign of a modern parliamentary state. Roman Catholicism, introduced to the Pyrenean valleys in the early medieval period, has remained central to Andorran identity ever since, centered on devotion to Our Lady of Meritxell, the country's patroness, and on parish churches that predate the state's own thirteenth century constitutional origins.

Andorra's 1993 constitution transformed the ancient co-principality into a parliamentary democracy while preserving the co-princes as titular heads of state, and it acknowledges a special relationship with the Catholic Church in accordance with Andorran tradition. A resident population swelled in recent decades by tourism and finance-sector migration has diversified the country's religious makeup, adding Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and nonreligious minorities alongside the historic Catholic majority, even as the co-principality's Catholic constitutional character has remained unchanged.