Spain and Catholicism: a Work-in-Progress Relationship. Church Transformations in an Increasingly Secular Society and State (1939-2018) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Political Catholicism and the Secular State: A Spanish Predicament
RECODE Working Papers Nr. 20 (reprinted in Francisco Colom González and Gianni D'Amato (eds.): Multireligious Society. Dealing with Religious Diversity in Theory and Practice, Abingdon – New York, Routledge, 2017, pp. 77-91), 2013
This paper explores the origins of the religious/secular cleavage in Spanish modern politics. Such cleavage emerged within a broader historical process, namely the response of the Catholic Church to political secularization. ‘Political Catholicism’ appeared in this context as a reaction against modernity and as an attempt to create a new social and political environment for the Catholic worldview. Here, this term does not merely refer to the involvement of Catholics in political activities, but to the political strategies that have consistently and steadily claimed a Catholic inspiration for their aims and values. The paper concludes that the historical status of the Catholic Church in Spain reflects the changing cleavages of Spanish society and the corresponding weight of organized religion in it. Although Catholicism is still a prevailing cultural force in the country, it has lost much of its former clout as a political lever. Nonetheless, the organizational expertise of the Catholic Church and its mobilization vis a vis the state, combined with the inertia of its historical hegemony, have compensated for this loss of influence. This is a doubled-faced process though, since it also reveals the deep-rooted dependency of the Church on public resources and state cooperation.
The Spanish Catholic Church and the Secular Institutions
2020
The inquisitorial institution of the Iberian Peninsula (XV-XIX) was the instrument of the society's religious control in the hands of the absolute monarchy, while its mixed nature was recognized in its dual character based on the status of an ecclesiastical court concerning to the origin of its legitimacy and functions. At the same time was presenting a royal court due to the administrative framework. This article will analyze the relationship between the Spanish Catholic Church of the Iberian Peninsula, mainly referring to the regions of today's Spain, towards the secular institutions of the society with an emphasis on the processes conducted by the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition that was authorized by the Pope's in supperssing heresy. In the narrower plan, the elements of the procession of the auto da fé will be analyzed where its dual origin, intertwined with liturgical and profane elements will become more prominent in the typology of sanctions and penalties that transcend the legal frameworks of the canon law and transposed under the jurisdiction of the secular authorities. This study will try to present an analysis of these dual courts, whose systems of operation lead to the confrontation of different strategies, but also to their cooperation.
Constitutional Politics and Religious Accommodation: Lessons from Spain
Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2015
This article sketches the struggles over and the shifting role of Catholicism in the Spanish body politic. It begins by providing a brief overview of the deep historical ties between Catholicism and Spanish identity. It continues by recounting the dialectical process through which a serious social cleavage on the role of religion in politics emerged and percolated over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This cleavage ultimately pit a militant and reactionary brand of authoritarian Catholicism on the right against an equally militant group of secularist ideologues associated with both bourgeois-republican and revolutionary working class (mainly anarchist) political forces. Following Juan Linz, the article emphasizes the nefarious role played by constitutionmakers who pursued a partisan secularizing agenda on questions of Church and state in the breakdown of democracy and tragic onset of Civil War. It then delineates the ideology and institutionalization of "national-Catholicism" under Franco, before turning to contrast republican-era constitution-making dynamics with those of the transition to democracy following Franco's death. It concludes with a discussion of the content of post-transition conflicts over religion and politics, highlighting the constitutional resources for coping with the somehow new yet very old challenge posed by the presence of Islam. Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate the once "axiomatic" assumption "that modernization inevitably leads to … secularization." In the process, it has begun to recognize that "religion can sometimes play" a positive, even "fundamental role in issues of political representation and
Completing the Religious Transition? Catholics and Muslims Navigate Secularism in Democratic Spain
In Europe, Muslims are often seen as the enemies of secularism and laïcité, the strict separation of church and state pioneered in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. Yet the Spanish experience shows that European Muslims should not prima facie be considered opponents of secularism. Indeed, a majority of devout Spanish Muslims have demanded, rather than opposed, state neutrality on religious matters—this in direct opposition to a concerted effort by the Catholic Church and its supporters to maintain a privileged position vis-à-vis other confessions. In the protracted debates over the role of religion in the public sphere in Spain, devout Muslims have shown a preference for the secular Socialist Party over the militant Catholicism of Spanish conservatives. The leaders of the Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic federations demanded in 2011 that Spain complete its “religious transition” so as to ensure the equal treatment of all religious confessions by the state. Muslims in Spain, while they have echoed Catholic demands for the preservation of religion in the public sphere, have opposed Catholicism’s privileged status in the country. By demanding consistency of treatment and state neutrality on religious matters, Muslims have assisted, rather than hindered, the construction of secularism in Spain.
THE SPANISH CATHOLIC CHURCH, DICTATORSHIP AND TRANSITION
Academia Letters, 2021
Between 1939 and 1977 relations between Spain and the Vatican were highly controversial, marked by the influence of the Second Vatican Council on the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy that culminated in the separation of Church and State. There is not much specific literature on Church and State relations in the Transition and the one there is from within the Church itself. Jesús Iribarren, Secretary of the Episcopal Conference from 1977 to 1982, delved into the position of the Church when he wrote in 1992 "Papers and memoirs: Half a century of Church-State relations in Spain (1936-1986)" reflecting the official position of the Episcopal Conference in 1977 and the tensions experienced within the Church. Likewise, in the works on Transition there are not many references to the Church and those who mention it show contrary points of view. On the one hand, there are those who recognize that the Church was one of the sectors that contributed most to the search and settlement of the new political configuration-as the journalist Victoria Prego affirms in her work "This is how the Transition was made" (1995) explaining the conflicts of Francoism with the Church (1)-. And that same year, Abel Hernández analyzed in "The Fifth Power: The Church, from Franco to Felipe" (2) some of the reasons that led to the change in the political configuration, such as the influence of the Second Vatican Council, the position of progressive Catholic intellectuals or the contact of some Christian militants with clandestine political opposition groups. In more recent years Carmen Molinero and Pere Ysás in "The Transition: History and Stories" will analyze the role of the Church and its hierarchy in political change (3). In contrast, there is another current that hardly gives importance to the role of the Church in the Transition. José Félix Tezanos, Ramón Cotarelo and Andrés De Blas mention in "The Spanish Democratic Transition" that it was the very process of secularization of Spanish society that contributed to the change in the Church (4)). And in more recent years there is talk of the
Religious Freedom and Democratic Change in Spain
BYU Law Review, 2006
I. INTRODUCTION It is probably not pretentious to assert that in the second half of the 1970s Spain experienced one of the most successful democratic transitions in history. The metamorphosis of Spain's political system was achieved very efficiently, quickly, peacefully, and with the consensus of the vast majority of Spanish citizens and political forces. This is certainly unusual considering Spain's political history, during which democracy had neither deep nor long-lasting roots. Within Spain's turbulent twentieth century, the mid-1970s political reform had been preceded by thirty-six years of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, which began in 1939 after three years of civil war that put an end to the Second Republic.2 Shortly after Franco's death in 1975,3 Spain rapidly transformed into a democracy, fully complying with all international standards both on paper and in practice.4 The most important instrument of that transformation, and the pillar of the s...
Religious affairs have gained prominence in Spanish politics in recent years. Two factors have played a crucial role in raising the profile of religion in the policy agenda: first, the growth of religious diversity due to the rapid influx of immigrants from the global south that has led to the emergence of multiple challenges and controversies concerning the accommodation of religious diversity; second, the effects of the Al-Qaeda attacks on Spanish soil that fostered policymakers’ perception of the need to “do something” to reinforce Muslim newcomers’ loyalty to the host country. In light of these events, the Spanish policy approach has changed considerably in the last years, being the creation of the public foundation Pluralismo y Convivencia in 2004 being the most illustrative case in point. The aim of this paper is to explain the tranfromations in the governance of religious diversity in Spain. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork done between 2010 and 2013, we argue that three different political logics underlie the developments leading to the current policy outcome: the logic of democratization, the logic of securitisation of Islam and the logic of the Europeanisation of politics. In this paper we explain these transformations by using a sequential combination of three theoretical approaches: a) the church-state relations approach, b) the theory of control and c) the European convergence perspective.
Banal Catholicism, Morality Policies and the Politics of Belonging in Spain
2021
The articulation between religion, politics and the law in contemporary European societies is a complex matter. In this article, we argue that classical secularization approaches fail to capture the ambivalent form of Catholicism in Europe, and we advance an alternative approach that reconsiders two elements: temporality and social space. Firstly, we propose to adopt an “eventful temporality”, which enables the consideration of the impact of unexpected social and political events in altering the direction as well as shaping the public presence and form of religion. Secondly, we stress the need to focus on understanding the specificity of the different fields in which religion is mobilized, and the configuration and dynamics of each of these fields to explain the current weight of Christian majority churches in European societies. Drawing on empirical data from Spain, we examined the role and influence of Catholicism in three fields of public life: that of public services, that of mo...
IX-112 Religion and Politics in Spain : From Conflict to Consensus above Cleavage
Social Compass, 1980
Les données empiriques fournies par l'Auteur de cet article montrent clairement que, dans la société espagnole, la dimension religieuse des attitudes est tout a fait fondamentale pour comprendre les enjeux de la vie politique. Face & a g r a v e ; la persistance actuelle des clivages de la société espagnole & a g r a v e ; cet égard, il est remarquable que les forces politiques organisées ont tout fait pour éviter, lors de l'ela-boration de la nouvelle constitution, que l'on passe brutalement du cléricalisme caractéristique de la période franquiste & a g r a v e ; une renaissance des positions anti-cléricales et & a g r a v e ; une sécularisation extrème. Par ailleurs, la hiérarchie religieuse elle-même, tout en militant pour la défense des droits de l'Eglise catholique, n'a pas refusé d'assouplir certaines de ses positions vis-à-vis de la gauche en vue de permettre la paix religieuse dans la jeune démocratie hispanique. Celle-ci continue d'être potentiel-lement divisée par les attitudes religieuses tout au long du continuun gauche-droite. Mais les elites evitent soigneuse-ment qu'une mobilisation & a g r a v e ; propos d'un tel conflit potentiel puisse se produire.