Religión y política en la España contemporánea (review)

This book is based on an international conference held in Madrid in 2005. The twelve contributions are "stand-alones" but given a certain cohesion by the way they are grouped (under four headings) and at times intersect. The first section, "La religión y el estado," leads with a discussion by William Callaghan of the privileges of the Church under the Restoration, showing how no liberal government between 1812 and 1923, even during times of greatest tension, contemplated the separation of Church and State. Ismael Saz disputes the tendency to assume that the Falange had always been part of National Catholicism; there was a Falangist "political religion" that was fascist, distinct from Catholicism or other forms of "religious politicization. "Giuliana Di Febo observes antecedents of National Catholicism in the militant and aggressive Catholicism of the 1870s and 1880s, a period of crisis for Carlism. In "Cultura religiosa y cultura política," Mary Vincent focuses on the "legitimacy" of the Franco regime, before presenting the Caudillo as custodian of all sociopolitical order, in a largely congenial alliance with the pre-Vatican II Church. Manuel Suárez Cortina grapples with the conflict among faith and science, Catholic orthodoxy, and freedom of conscience as the leitmotiv of the religious question for Krausian intellectuals. Krausianism clashed with both moderate and conservative Catholics, but also the more radical secularism of the federal left. Feliciano Montero points out that self-criticism within 1950s Catholicism was heralded by the resumption in 1947 of the "Conversaciones de San Sebastián," questioning the appropriateness of an established church and the Catholic Church's professed "political neutrality"; self-examination was also a hallmark of some Catholic intellectuals and journals. In "Religión y movilización política," Julio de la Cueva Merino shows how anticlericalism, from the Restoration through to the Second Republic, was intended by political elites to bring about secularization via measures implemented by a modernizing state. Inmaculada Blasco Herranz surveys participation by women in the development of social and political Catholicism in the 1920s. Paradoxically, the feminization of religion was a factor barring women from the political arena and yet an opportunity to challenge the status quo. Pamela Radcliff's outline of Spain's transition to democracy "from below" centers on the voluntary associations of the 1960s and 1970s, linked to parishes and—often courageous—parish priests. In "Religión y política de la memoria," Benoit Pellistrandi scrutinizes turn of the nineteenth-century floribunda episcopal pronouncements that were intended as a counterblast against those who wanted to dissociate Spanish identity from Catholicism. Jordi Canal investigates how 1889 witnessed two symbolical—and opposing—commemorations: the thirteenth centenary of the conversion of Recaredo and the first of the French Revolution. The Carlist Pretender—"the new Recaredo"—used them to revitalize Carlist activities in an affirmation both Catholic and political. The national/regional question is addressed also in Carolyn Boyd's consideration of the sanctuary of Covadonga as a symbolic space claimed by nationalists as the deposit of "shared collective consciousness" and by regionalists as their "patria chica." The Church and political elites of all persuasions used it for their own, sometimes shifting, purposes.

The twelve articles under review show that the historical study of religion and politics in Spain is alive and well. Its relevance is clearly ongoing: for example, in the fall of 2007 a Law of Historical Memory, designed by the PSOE government to honor Republican victims of Francoism during and after the civil war of 1936–39, coincided with the beatification as martyrs by Pope Benedict XVI of 498 priests, religious, and lay Catholics killed by Republicans. Old wounds fester still.