Modern Spain: the project of a national Catholicism

Abstract

The inseparability of national identity and Catholicism in modern Spain has never been more pugnaciously and confidently affirmed than in the provocative hyperbole of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. ‘Spain, evangeliser of half the globe; Spain, hammer of heretics, light of Trent, sword of Rome, cradle of Saint Ignatius . . .; that is our greatness and our unity: we have no other’. This uncompromising statement undoubtedly owes some of its stridency to the age of the author when he wrote it—he was twenty-five—and something to his abiding convictions and temperament. But one does not have to search very assiduously this most famous defence of catholic orthodoxy as the source of Spanish grandeur in order to realise that Menéndez y Pelayo’s fervour and language are both sharpened by nostalgia. Volumes six and seven of his history of Spanish heterodoxy which trace the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute one long lament for lost catholic unity, lost cultural homogeneity and, lost with them, an irretrievable simplicity and clarity of national self-definition. When he wrote his eloquent and audacious lament in the early 1880s he was well aware that the uniformity of religious belief which he had unhesitatingly discerned beneath minor, and usually imported, heterodoxy in earlier Spanish history already belonged irrecuperably to the past. Moreover, he found himself as many lesser followers were also to do in the uncomfortably Canute-like position of opposing the uncontrollable while asserting an ideal which had to be articulated as a series of negative and necessarily unsatisfactory defensive reactions.