Church and State in Spain from the Civil War to the Return of Democracy

Abstract

Spanish catholicism faced the crisis of the 1930s with a strange mixture of weakness and strength. National-Catholicism would be one of the many factors that would make the emergence of a Christian Democratic party impossible in 1975–1977. Separation of church and state is one of the ideas that many associate with democracy. In Europe conflicts between church and state generally have been a result of policies of the state, liberal or Left anticlericalism, efforts of secularization, and “state paganism.” The self-definition of the Republic as a regime one of whose priorities was the laicization-secularization of Spain and whose leaders insisted on the support of that republic in order to participate in the polity obliged Catholics to mobilize all their resources in the electoral struggle of 1933. The national-Catholic project in Spain, in spite of its apparent success, encountered limits and resistance within the regime itself.