Regalism, Liberalism, and General Franco

Abstract

On July 15,1976, the marques de Mondejar, head of the royal household, arrived secretly at the Vatican where he was received immediately by Pope Paul VI. The marques carried a letter from King Juan Carlos, installed as head of state following Francisco Franco's death the preceding November. The monarch informed the pope that he would refrain from exercising the patronage rights over episcopal appointments granted the Spanish state under the concordat of 1953.1 The royal decision broke a diplomatic logjam that had developed since 1970 between the Franco regime and the papacy over the drafting of a new concordat. On July 28, the first government of the monarchy and the papacy reached a formal agreement (acuerdo) in which the Spanish state renounced its ecclesiastical patronage rights, while the Church abandoned certain juridical privileges contained in the concordat of 1953.2 The 1976 agreement combined with the separation of church and state established in the democratic constitution of 1978 ended the confessional identification of church and state that in one way or another had existed for centuries except for the period of the Second Republic (1931-1939).3 The efforts of Spanish governments to control ecclesiastical patronage and finances took different institutional forms depending on the political organization of the state at any given moment. During the eighteenth century, the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons pushed the Crown's historic claims to control the Church's temporal administration to new heights through the movement known as regalism, an aggressively promoted policy of state intervention in ecclesiastical affairs.4 The concordat of 1753, wrested from a weak papacy, granted the Crown the right of universal patronage over virtually all ecclesiastical benefices, a right previously shared in tense relationship with the Holy See. During the reign of Charles III (1759-1788), regalism reached its fullest stage of development.5 In 1767, the king expelled the Jesuits from his dominions in spite of the Order's historic importance in the Hispanic world. For all practical purposes, the Crown appointed the bishops and appropriated a significant proportion of ecclesiastical revenues. King Charles III, who was esteemed for his personal piety, founded seminaries and regulated the affairs of the religious orders and the secular clergy, guided by the regalist theory that the monarch derived his authority from God and was responsible, therefore, for the spiritual well-being of his subjects, both clerical and lay. Napoleon's invasion of Spain beginning in 1807 initiated a period of upheaval that ended the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime. Between 1810 and 1813, the kingdom's first parliamentary assembly met in the city of Cadiz, the only area of peninsular Spain free of French domination. The liberal Cortes of Cadiz carried out a political revolution which limited royal authority and dismantled the institutions of the Bourbon monarchy. Liberal deputies broke new political ground, but they followed an ecclesiastical policy inspired by the regalism of the past. The union of Throne and Altar was recast into an alliance of Constitution and Altar. The 1812 constitution declared unequivocally that the religion of the nation is and will be perpetually the Catholic,Apostolic, Roman, the only true religion.6 But the constitution also asserted that the kingdom would protect religion through wise and just laws. This apparently innocent phrase meant, as conservative deputies realized, that the new liberal state intended to continue the regalist tradition of maintaining control over ecclesiastical affairs.7 In fact, the changes imposed on the Church by the Cortes of Cadiz were modest, save for the suppression of the Inquisition. But the rudiments of more far-reaching reforms surfaced in parliamentary debate. Liberals wished to rationalize the Church's sprawling organization of dioceses and parishes. They believed that the number of clergy should be reduced in accord with the kingdom's pastoral needs. …