The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875-1998 (review)

Nearly two decades have elapsed since William Callahan brought out his prize-winning study on Church, Society and Politics in Spain, 1750-1874 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984). Since then he has published a number of seminal articles in scholarly journals on the trials and tribulations of the Spanish Church during both the Restoration monarchy (1875-1931) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). This impressive new monograph brings us up to date.

To its secular critics, the author informs us, the Spanish Church appeared a single-minded monolithic institution orchestrating a campaign to impose a highly traditional form of Catholicism on a society in the throes of profound economic, social, and political change. Yet the rise of liberalism, republicanism, socialism, anarchism, and intellectual pluralism challenged the clergy's view that Spain had always been and would always be Catholic. Gradually and fitfully, Callahan argues, a number of clergy and laity realized that traditional responses to changing circumstances were insufficient. Instead they looked to models developed in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy in order to deal with the religious effects of urbanization and industrialization. Discussion of the 'social question' reached extensive proportions in the period 1880-1920, following the publication of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, as the Church struggled to respond to signs of religious alienation among the urban proletariat. South of the Pyrenees, indifferent results at attempts to organize industrial workers were offset by the success of social Catholicism in the countryside.

Callahan contends that the foundation of the Spanish Church's influence rested in part on its status as the established Church of the State. Conflict developed from the ambiguities inherent in the legal status of an institution which was neither too powerful nor too weak. The Church remained dissatisfied and resentful that the political elite, even under Conservative governments, refused to extend its privileges significantly. By and large, it succeeded in blocking any substantial alteration of its privileges under the Restoration system and saw them modestly enlarged during the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930). However, it paid a high price, viz., the growing opposition of liberals, republicans, socialists, anarchists, and intellectuals.

The arrival of the Second Republic in April, 1931, caused the Spanish Church to focus its concern on the new regime's commitment to the separation of Church and State. While the hierarchy carefully adopted a position of "complete prudence and caution," it was obliged to confront violent manifestations of anticlericalism in the streets. In May, 1931, a wave of incendiarism swept through Madrid, Andalucía, and the Levant, as dozens of religious buildings, including churches, friaries, convents, and schools, lay in ruins. Early 1933, however, saw the foundation of a mass party—the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA)—something that had eluded the grasp of Spanish Catholics for generations. Defending a Church under attack and a society deemed on the verge of revolutionary upheaval within the framework of a pragmatic ambiguous acceptance of the Republic constituted, to Callahan's mind, a powerful but negative program capable of appealing to diverse Catholic constituencies. Its formation appeared to realize the old dream of a "Union of Catholics" committed to defending the Church within a modern parliamentary system. Even so, three years later the Spanish Church chose to sanctify a military rebellion which resulted in a bloody and protracted civil war. So why back Francisco Franco and his fellow conspirators? The clergy, he contends, fully expected the war to alter the rules of a game long regarded as prejudicial to its interests. The conflict offered an unexpected opportunity to stack the deck in the Church's favor by creating the conditions for attaining a goal that had eluded generations of clergy, the re-Christianization of the nation.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) gave rise to a...