Walking on Water

This article considers why the Catholic Church in Spain, unlike in several other jurisdictions, has been unwilling to accept responsibility for historical wrongs committed by it, or in its name, in connection with the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Rather than apologize for its complicity in human rights abuses the Church has adopted a strategy of confrontation and denial, on one hand criticizing historical memory activists for endangering Spanish democracy, and on the other hand memorializing its own victims of the conflict through the canonisation and beatification of the Catholic ‘martyrs’. Drawing on historical and sociological perspectives, this article argues that four factors bear heavily on this issue: (i) Church mission and pastoral strategy; (ii) whether the conflict was symmetric or asymmetric, in other words, whether the church in question was victim or perpetrator, or both; (iii) transformations in the wider socio-religious context; and (iv) the impact of theological change within world Catholicism.

Human rights · Political science · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law

• Neither oblivion nor reconciliation. An analysis of post-Francoist Spanish historical memory and Transitional Justice

  Open Access•Ivan Escobar Fernández•Revista Historia Autónoma•2023

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• Exhuming memory

  Open Access•Bill Rolston, Amaia Alvarez Berastegi•Race & Class•2018

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