The Socio-Political Role of the Spanish Church — A Case Study

All historians of pre-Civil War Spain are faced with the task of explaining how and why Spanish politics and society became 'a system of exclusions'.' Historians of the Spanish Church are no exception: on the contrary, an analysis is required of them and none has yet appeared of the role of the Catholic Church in the long process of polarization which eventually led to the outbreak of Civil War in July 1936.2 One kind of polarization was expressed in the contemporary selfimage of the Church as a defensive fortress besieged by enemy forces. Although this image was not peculiar to Spain,3 the selfunderstanding it conveyed was both particularly pervasive and impervious to change there. In spite of the notable concessions made to the Church in the monarchical constitution of 1876 which remained in being if not in force until superseded by the republican document of 1931 ecclesiastical thinking never moved far away from the notorious final repudiation in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors of any responsibility on the part of the Pope, and therefore of the Church, to 'come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization'. The Church was a beleaguered tower in hostile territory. Yet it could not avoid communication with the outside world it so forcefully denounced; nor could it avoid reflecting that world, however unintentionally, in its own life. An ecclesiastical enclosure which could neither restrain the Church from addressing itself to the surrounding world nor free it from its manifold dependence, sociological, political, economic and psychological, upon it, is the essential starting point for any analysis of the

Political science · Politics · History · History of Education in Spain · Law · Media, Journalism, and Communication History · Spanish History and Politics

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