Religión y sociedad en España (siglos XIX y XX) (review)

The essays contained in this volume were first presented at a seminar held at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid during 1994 and 1995. The contributors are for the most part well-known Spanish and French scholars who have published extensively on the role of religion and the Church in modern Spain, including Paul Aubert, Gérard Dufour, José Manuel Cuenca Toribio, Manuel Revuelta González, and Manuel Suárez Cortina The book's focus is not on the social history of Catholicism and the Church. It does not consider questions such as popular religions, clerical demography, or the resurgent organizational activities of the Church from the late nineteenth century onward. It concentrates on the broader question of the place of religion and the Church within a society affected by the political changes introduced by liberalism, the emergence of new secularizing intellectual currents, and the social tensions introduced by capitalist economic development.

Three themes predominate. Four essays concentrate on relations between Church and state from the concordat of 1753, a triumph for the strongly regalist government of the day, through the transition to democracy following the death of Franco in 1975. Taken as a whole, these essays provide a compact and well-documented survey of what was a complex and ongoing attempt to define the precise place of the Church within a state that was officially Catholic until the 1931 constitution of the Second Republic separated church and state for the first time in the nation's history.

A set of three essays discusses the second theme, the ideological struggle waged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over the place of religion and, by extension, of the Church within society. In the work of figures such as Donoso Cortés and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, a new and more sophisticated Catholic conservative ideology emerged to replace, at least in part, an older tradition based on the historic identification of Throne and Altar under absolute monarchy. The new direction taken by conservative Catholic thinkers did not go unanswered as intellectuals moved by a commitment to rationalism and progress saw religion and the Church as an obstacle to the realization of this grand design. Between these opposing views a debate began that would persist well into the twentieth century.

A third set of essays considers the development of anticlericalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors note the complex and sometimes contradictory sources of modern anticlericalism in Spain. They argue persuasively that the primarily political anticlericalism of nineteenth-century liberal governments and occasional outbursts of violent popular anticlericalism, primarily between 1834 and 1843, moved in new directions after 1898 and became an essential part of reforming projects advanced by politicians, intellectuals, social reformers, and revolutionaries. Anticlericalism and the corresponding reaction to it of the Church and its supporters became central to debate over the nation's future and finally emerged in passionate discussion and violence following the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931.

The essays in this volume set a high standard. They provide an intelligent and well-argued survey of some of the key questions involving the place of the Church within modern Spain.