Spanish Catholic Church Research Articles

An Interpretive Approach to Religious Ambiguities around Medical Innovations: The Spanish Catholic Church on Organ Donation and Transplantation (1954-2014).

How do institutionalized religions solve moral ambiguities around controversial medical innovations and public health issues? Most religions have moral guidelines about what can and cannot be done to people's bodies, but these guidelines are not always straightforward and, when faced with certain scientific advances, can come into contradiction with other doctrinal principles. I address this theoretical puzzle through the empirical case of the Spanish Catholic Church's discourse on organ donation and transplantation during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on an interpretive analysis of official statements by the Spanish Catholic Church, and of the media coverage of the religious debate over organ donation and transplantation in Spain from 1954 onwards, I show that the first experiments in organ transplantation faced the Church with a contradiction between its altruistic teachings and its beliefs in the sacredness of human life. Faced with an interpretive dilemma, the Church produced a context-specific version of its official doctrine friendly to organ donation and transplantation. It did so by activating its altruistic elements and suppressing sacralized meanings of the body, thus aligning organ donation with Catholic values of generosity and fraternal love. My study theorizes this moral alignment as a semantic overlap realized through historically situated institutional discourse. Additionally, it incorporates 24 primary and secondary sources on comparative cases to propose three facilitating factors that enabled and encouraged the Spanish Catholic Church to embrace a controversial medical practice.

«Todo menos mirar con indiferencia»: la Iglesia católica y la prensa británica ante el turismo y los trajes de baño femeninos en España (1950-1965)

From the beginning of the 1950s, the visits of tourists from abroad to the Spanish coasts became more and more frequent. The massive influx of visitors meant the arrival of remarkable novelties in fashions and customs, especially in places of leisure, where they had contact with the national population. This paper aims, on the one hand, to analyse the discourses from the Spanish Catholic Church, an institution very concerned about the moral control of Spanish women and women’s summer fashion, but whose arguments have not been studied in detail in relation to tourism. On the other hand, it incorporates a new approach by collecting the opinions expressed in the British press, which allows us to observe the impact of this type of discourse in one of the leading countries in the emission of tourists. For that purpose, we have used different bibliographical sources, archival and newspaper documentation related to tourism and the Catholic religion, as well as British newspapers.

The preference for cooperation over the vindication of religious freedom: The response of the Spanish Catholic Church to the COVID-19 crisis

ABSTRACT The coronavirus crisis has caused a profound impact on different sectors of society. The Spanish Catholic Church has taken upon itself to respond to the overwhelming extent of the tragedy of COVID-19. Through a quantitative analysis, this research begins by defining the actions, and classifying them, into various types of activity, and presents the repercussions on the life of communities and Catholic institutions during the first wave of the pandemic. The analysis goes deeper into implications for religious freedom and health restrictions of the decrees of the State of Emergency in Spain. The official position of the Catholic Church reveals that it has tried to serve the whole of society, working in collaboration with the authorities. In order to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, the institution has respected the rules and avoided legal conflicts in relation to the right of religious freedom.

Electric light and the visualization of Catholic power in Spain during the Restoration Era (1874–1931)

This article analyses the contested adoption of electric lights by the Spanish Catholic church during the Bourbon Restoration era (1874–1931). Through a careful reading of primary sources, namely Catholic popular magazines, and official documents, it will show how Catholic authorities and practitioners resisted, negotiated and, ultimately, engaged with electricity in religious spaces. The article argues that electric light contributed to wider exchanges in a non-monolithic Spanish Catholicism on the observance of traditional values or the possibilities of the church’s modernization. However, amid a particularly tense moment regarding the secular–clerical relations, the systematic use of electric lights in churches at the turn of the twentieth century—but also in other public ceremonies—contributed to the making of religious sensations aimed at attracting new believers and reasserting the presence of the institution in a disputed public space.

Expanding the Mystical Body of Christ and Serving the Empire: Colonial Geopolitics of the Portuguese and Spanish Catholic Church (1933-1975)

ABSTRACT This paper explores the geopolitical imagination of the Catholic Church, particularly in relation to the former colonies of Portugal and Spain during the late imperial period (1930–1975). At that time, authoritarian dictators with strong Catholic ideology ruled both countries. However, the relationship between the Catholic missionaries and the colonial authorities of the Iberian imperial states was not always in harmony. There were sometimes contradictions between them. The geopolitics of the Catholic Church and the colonial geopolitics of the Iberian states were convergent but not always coincident. This paper describes and analyses the Spanish and Portuguese states’ policies towards the missions. It also studies the missionary discourse in the metropolis, and its impact and reflection in the colonies.

The Catholic Church and consolidation of democratic civil society in Spain

ABSTRACTThis article examines how the Catholic Church assisted the transition to democracy and consolidation of democratic civil society in Spain through a position of political neutrality. By abstaining from any active role in political parties, abandoning pretence of moral monopoly and embracing pluralism, it helped facilitate the establishment of civil society. Analytically, the path dependence mechanism, Huntington’s theory of democratization and the secularization of religion theory are used to explain the how the Spanish Catholic Church helped establish the bases of civil society in democratic Spain.

The Spanish Catholic Church, the public sphere, and the economic recession: rival legitimacies?

ABSTRACTSpanish society was severely affected by the post-2008 economic recession. The country’s political institutions were faced with a major crisis of legitimacy that gave birth to new social and political movements. In this context, the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the recession was threefold. Firstly, the recession had an impact on the Church itself, as it reactivated the recurring public debate on Church–State relations and the institutional benefits enjoyed by the Church. Secondly, the recession also provided a limited opportunity for the Church. On a normative level, the Catholic hierarchy used the recession to give voice to its discourse on the moralization of the economy and politics, relating it to recurrent campaigns by the Church on family policies and the territorial unity of Spain. In addition, the social sector of the Church responded to the recession through a program of social work intended to offset the failures of both the market and the public authorities. Thirdly, the social work undertaken by specific sectors of the Church unexpectedly led to forms of political advocacy, independently or alongside anti-austerity or pro-migrant social movements. All these effects sharpened previously existing dividing lines within the Catholic landscape.

La patologización del celibato en la medicina española (1820-1920)

En la España de la Restauración, la novela naturalista y la prensa anticlerical insistían en que la causa principal de la depravación sexual de los sacerdotes era el voto de castidad. ¿En qué medida las tecnologías de saber y de poder médicos de la época permitían defender esa tesis? Este es el asunto abordado en el artículo. En primer lugar se examinan los antecedentes ilustrados de la ofensiva higienista contra el celibato sexual. En segundo lugar se analiza la controversia suscitada por Monlau con su defensa higiénica de la castidad sexual. Los argumentos de Monlau tienen lugar en un contexto de propaganda a favor del celibato suscitada por la Iglesia Católica. En tercer lugar se exploran los argumentos médicos que conectaban causalmente la continencia absoluta con las desviaciones sexuales, en particular la pederastia. Por último se indican las circunstancias que, a comienzos del siglo XX, llevaron a reactivar la defensa médica de la abstinencia sexual entre los jóvenes, anunciando un nuevo prototipo de masculinidad.

«Por el triunfo de la causa de Dios». La reacción de la Iglesia ante el Frente Popular de 1936

Este artículo aborda el papel de la Iglesia católica durante los primeros meses de 1936. Su objetivo principal es contribuir a una mejor comprensión de la reacción de los obispos, los párrocos y las juntas de Acción Católica ante la formación de la unidad electoral de Frente Popular, teniendo presente la indisimulada división de algunas candidaturas antirrevolucionarias durante la campaña. Se han utilizado fuentes primarias y referencias de estudios locales y nacionales para alcanzar una perspectiva general de esa cuestión.

Martyrs, memory and misrepresentation: The Spanish Catholic Church, religious persecution and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract This article explores the ways in which the victims of anticlerical violence during the Spanish Civil War have been represented and remembered by the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy and Catholic hagiographers, examining the period from the Spanish Civil War up to the present day. It sustains that the discourse of martyrdom forged by the Catholic Church during the Civil War and the Dictatorship played a crucial role in legitimating the rebel war effort and the Franco Dictatorship, and in justifying repression against those associated with the Second Republic. It argues that the key tenets of the martyrdom discourse survived the Transition to Democracy and continue to characterize present-day Spanish ecclesiastical discourse. Against this backdrop, a re-evaluation of the Spanish episcopate’s assertions that the martyrs of the Civil War are non-political symbols of reconciliation between Spaniards is necessary.

An Introduction to Elinor Glyn: Her Life and Legacy

This special issue of Women: A Cultural Review re-evaluates an author who was once a household name, beloved by readers of romance, and whose films were distributed widely in Europe and the Americas. Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) was a British author of romantic fiction who went to Hollywood and became famous for her movies. She was a celebrity figure of the 1920s, and wrote constantly in Hearst's press. She wrote racy stories which were turned into films—most famously, Three Weeks (1924) and It (1927). These were viewed by the judiciary as scandalous, but by others—Hollywood and the Spanish Catholic Church—as acceptably conservative. Glyn has become a peripheral figure in histories of this period, marginalized in accounts of the youth-centred ‘flapper era’. Decades on, the idea of the ‘It Girl’ continues to have great pertinence in the post-feminist discourses of the twenty-first century. The 1910s and 1920s saw the development of intermodal networks between print, sound and screen cultures. This introduction to Glyn's life and legacy reviews the cross-disciplinary debate sparked by renewed interest in Glyn by film scholars and literary and feminist historians, and offers a range of views of Glyn's cultural and historical significance and areas for future research.

Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain's Development Years, 1960-1975 by Jorge Pérez

Reviewed by: Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain's Development Years, 1960-1975 by Jorge Pérez Diana Roxana Jorza Pérez, Jorge. Confessional Cinema: Religion, Film, and Modernity in Spain's Development Years, 1960-1975. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: U of Toronto P, 2017. 260 pp. Confessional Cinema is, in many ways, a remarkably fresh and necessary book in the field of Spanish cultural studies, undoing many entrenched presuppositions about cinema and religion during the last years of Franco's regime. The author seeks to analyze the changing role of religion in the technocratic modernization of Spain during 1960-1975, dwelling not on a theological point of view, but on a cultural and sociopolitical understanding of religion as a key force of the public sphere of the time: religion, argues Jorge Pérez in the Introduction, remained relevant and operative and it did not just vanish in the development years from the public scene, as axiomatic secularist positions have maintained. Furthermore, the confessional cinema of this time (a term that the author prefers to that of religious cinema) actively engaged, much more than the literature of the age, with this shifting role of religion in the public sphere, which means that these films can become a surprisingly fruitful realm of cultural analysis, being much more than a mere ideological residue of political propaganda. Moreover, Pérez's non-doctrinal approach to movie analysis is hermeneutically productive also as it avoids an elusive common ground (e.g., what religious films are as a rigidly defined, auteurist-based, aesthetic genre that would partake of a sublime in the depicted relation with divinity). Pérez chooses to address movies that feature religious communities and characters that are [End Page 720] intricately linked to the broader sociocultural milieu of the late Franco regime, at a time when modernization and secularization were rapidly changing the country and transforming the traditional values of National Catholicism. These profound transformations also took place within Spanish Catholicism, following the aggiornamiento recommendations of the Vatican II Council (1962-65), meant to renew the structures of the Catholic Church by reconfiguring a stronger, more accessible presence of the Church in the modern world while supporting a bolder social activism, religious liberty, political pluralism, etc. This modernized conception of intervention in society clashed not only with the earlier, reviled position of the Spanish Catholic Church in the power structures of the Franco regime, but also with the Opus Dei technocrats' view of economic modernization, which was not meant to change the authoritarian foundation of the regime. Despite their formulaic commercial layout, the popular religious films that Confessional Cinema analyzes seem to delve into these conflicting discourses much more than the contemporaneous oppositional, auteurist movies of the New Spanish Cinema that engage with religion and its role in the public sphere of the time: the latter "narratives of suspicion," as Jorge Pérez terms them in his fourth chapter, tread the all too familiar path that tends to monolithically conflate the role of religion and of the Catholic Church with a repressive cultural and political anachronism that is incompatible with modernity. This hermeneutic cliché also sadly pervades the field of Spanish cultural and film studies, whose institutionalized criteria of distinction tend to follow the politicized legacy of the hegemonic oppositional culture and of its elitist cultural capital against the alleged propaganda contamination blindly ascribed to all mainstream, commercial cultural products during Franco's regime. Confessional Cinema never disregards, however, the undisputed pro-regime ideological bias of the popular religious films examined in the first three chapters of the book, showing their transparent intentions to reconcile traditional religious and moral values with economic modernization, a staple of all "comedies of development," for instance, that is, of the broader genre that comprises some of the analyzed movies from this book. This acknowledged bias notwithstanding, the in-depth study of these popular religious films reveals they were much more complex, sometimes verging on the potentially subversive, than mere vehicles of ideological propaganda. One of the remarkable contributions of Pérez's multilayered study is to show how these movies illustrated the regime's change of political discourse in the development years. Cogently appropriating...

La gestión del miedo por la Iglesia católica española en los manuales de religión: cambios y continuidades que implica el Concilio Vaticano II

espanolEl presente articulo, a traves de boletines oficiales eclesiasticos y manuales de Religion, compara la gestion del sentimiento del miedo que hace la Iglesia catolica espanola antes y despues del Concilio Vaticano II. Comprueba la erosion de los miedos naturales, a las epidemias, el hambre, la guerra… (la humanizacion de Dios no parece compatible con su ira), de los miedos escatologicos, donde mas pesaban los elementos sensitivos del miedo (la repolitizacion de la religion catolica situa el miedo cada vez mas en lugares profanos), o incluso el miedo al otro no catolico (ecumenismo). Pero comprueba tambien, especialmente en los manuales de la Iglesia neointegrista, el mantenimiento de otros miedos inducidos, donde se imponen claramente los elementos cognitivos del miedo: miedo a la secularizacion de la ciencia y del pensamiento, a la perdida de influencia en la sociedad, a las novedades del Concilio Vaticano II, a la teologia de la liberacion, al laicismo o a la perdida de la proteccion del Estado con que cuenta la Iglesia catolica espanola. Es problematico, por tanto, afirmar, como hacen algunos autores, que el Concilio Vaticano II supone el paso de una institucion estatalmente orientada a otra orientada a la sociedad. EnglishThis article uses ecclesiastical records and textbooks of Religion to make comparisons regarding the way in which the Spanish Catholic Church administered the emotion of fear before and after Vatican Council II. We see evidence of the erosion of natural fears: epidemics, hunger, war... (the humanization of God does not seem compatible with his anger), of scatological fears, where the sensory elements of fear weigh most heavily (the repoliticization of the Catholic religion increasingly puts fear in more profane places), or even the fear of the non-Catholic other (ecumenism). But the texts also corroborate, especially in the neo-integrationist Church manuals, the perseverance of other induced fears, where the cognitive elements of fear are clearly imposed: fear of the secularization of science and of thought, of the loss of the Church’s influence in society, of the reforms coming from Vatican Council II, of the theology of liberation, of secularism or of the loss of the state protection that the Spanish Catholic Church had always enjoyed. As a result we find it contentious to state, as some authors do, that the Vatican Council II signaled a change from a Stateoriented institution to a society-oriented one.

Fighting against the Moral Agenda of Zapatero's Socialist Government (2004–2011): The Spanish Catholic Church as a Political Contender

AbstractEven though not all European churches can be ascribed a political profile, moral issues have unleashed the protest of some of them alongside Christian-inspired groups and advocacy coalitions. Mobilization against these issues is not surprising in democracy but the different role that churches might play is. Unlike other European churches, the Spanish Catholic Church has acted as a political contender under Zapatero's rule (2004–2011). The new Socialist agenda, with its emphasis on morally-liberal reforms, has triggered a protest in which the church has invested significant resources and helped mobilize the more Conservative quarters of the Catholic society. This adversarial role is distinctive but not unique: the Italian and Polish churches have also opted for confrontational strategies in the face of similar challenges. However, the Spanish case is most relevant because, unlike other predominantly Catholic societies (Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Poland), it has experienced a most profound and fastest secularization process. Confrontation can then be explained by the supply (a well-endowed Church that enjoys a privileged relationship with a non-confessional state) and not by the demand.

Plan de reforma de la iglesia española impulsado por Napoleón Bonaparte

This article deals with a subject unknown up to the present, the plan of reformation carried out by the Spanish Catholic Church. This plan was promoted by Napoleon Buonaparte in 1808 and put into practice by a team led by Monsignor de Pradt, who was at the basis of the religious policy followed by Buonaparte’s gouvernement. The article analyses the Spanish clergy, and presents the reformation measures that were undertaken, together with a critical assessment of the said reformation.

Spanish Catholic Church in Franco Regime: A marriage of convenience

Zusammenfassung Der vorliegende Aufsatz beschaftigt sich mit der Beziehung zwischen der katholischen Kirche und dem Regime General Francos in Spanien. Als der spanische Burgerkrieg mit dem Sieg Francos endete, ubernahm die katholische Kirche ihre neue Rolle als ideologische Fuhrerin des diktatorischen Regimes, was insoweit folgerichtig war, da die uberwiegend katholische Bevolkerung Spaniens loyal zu Franco stand. Zu Beginn war diese Beziehung hochst zweckmasig, aber mit der Zeit begann sie, sich aufzulosen. Dieser Aufsatz analysiert in einem ersten Schritt die Grunde, weshalb Kirche und Staat sich zuerst gegenseitig unterstutzten und in einem zweiten Schritt, warum diese beiden gesellschaftlichen Krafte spater voneinander abruckten.

Discourse and the construction of society: comparative studies of myth, ritual, and classification

In this bold theoretical work, Bruce Lincoln explores ways in which myth, ritual, and classification hold human societies together--and how, in times of crisis, they can be used to take a society apart and reconstruct it. Without overlooking role of coercive force in maintenance (or overthrow) of social structures, Lincoln argues his thesis with compelling illustrations drawn from such diverse areas as Platonic philosophy, Upanishads of India, African rituals of kingship, ancient Celtic banquets, English gentlemen's clubs, Iranian Revolution, St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, professional wrestling, and Spanish Civil War. Professional wrestling, Lincoln shows, can be viewed as a drama of classification in which American dream of opportunity is set forth, challenged, and finally firmly reestablished in good-versus-evil encounters between wrestlers categorized by their relative Americanness. The exhumation of nuns' mummified corpses by leftist forces and their sympathizers during Spanish Civil War, often dismissed by liberal historians as an embarrassing aberration, is more readily understandable as a ritual in which Spanish Catholic Church, which had long played role of the religion of status quo, was symbolically exposed as corrupt in both a moral and concretely physiological sense. Discourse and Construction of Society draws on work in fields of history, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, classics, indology, and semiotics to demonstrate multiple uses of myth, ritual, and symbolic classification in effecting ideological persuasion and evoking sentiments that bind people to one another within distinct social groupings while separating them from others, who are thereby defined as outsiders. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary study provides challenging new insights into complex dynamics of social cohesion and change.

The Church and the Patriarchal Family: Marriage Conflicts in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century New Spain

Traditional European families have long been presumed to be char acterized by parental control over their children's choices of a marriage partner; a control aided by the support of the Catholic church. This essay focuses on the role of the Catholic church in family conflicts over marriage in the Spanish New World colony of Mexico. It demonstrates that the Spanish Catholic church not only failed to support parental authority over their offspring's marriages but that it intervened decisively to prevent families from interfering in the young couple's decision to marry. The Spanish Catholic church's actions stemmed from.a strong commitment to traditional Catholic orthodox views on matrimonial freedom as well as from a cultural heritage opposing marriages for social or economic gain.

Church and State in Spain: Transition Toward Independence and Liberty

mounting tensions during the last years of the Franco government, have led to efforts by the Spanish Catholic Church to alter the Concordat that has existed since 1953. Negotiations over the agreement, which began in 1969, bogged down completely in the last two years of Franco's rule; but with the death of Franco (November 20, 1975) and with the inauguration of Juan Carlos as the new head of the Spanish state, serious conversations over the Concordat resumed and a partial but important revision was agreed to.1 In place of the close union and mutual recognition that existed between church and state, independence and freedom of action are being sought by most of the hierarchy and by a large number of the younger generation of priests. Since 1965, the accord has been particularly strained; now all special privileges of the Catholic Church and all special powers over it by the Spanish state are being questioned. The tensions between church and state that manifested themselves in the last decade of Franco's regime were but one sign that it had not effectively resolved its major problems. There is a widespread agreement in the literature in classifying the Franco regime as authoritarian, and, therefore, as differing from both the democratic and the totalitarian types, as these are usually defined.2 One of the elements of the limited, pluralistic character of Franco's authoritarian regime is the considerable set of powers and social functions assigned to the Catholic Church. A series of agreements, culminating in the Concordat, gave public and juridical recognition to the Church's role in the regime. As will be detailed below, there were mutual

Political Positions and Opposition in the Spanish Catholic Church

THIS STUDY HAS BEEN WRITTEN DURING THE STAGE OF BROAD political transition inside the Spanish State, following the death of General Franco, in November 1975. The new monarch, Juan Carlos I, has already carried out some acts that will define Spanish politics in the near future, by confirming the men who governed during Franco's last years: but what attitude the political system will take under the monarchy is still unforeseeable; and, although everyone is waiting for a certain liberalization of the regime, the real scope that liberalization will have in the short and medium term remains problematical.