Article

Catholicism Versus Laicism:

Culture Wars and the
Making of Catholic National
Identity in Spain, 18981931

European History Quarterly

43(4) 657680
! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0265691413499283
ehq.sagepub.com

Joseba Louzao Villar

Cardenal Cisneros University College, University of Alcala, Spain

Abstract
This article will argue that the nationalization of the struggle between clericalism and
anti-clericalism in Spain, which began during the revolutionary interlude of the six years
of democracy (186874), reached a climax during the first third of the twentieth century. Despite the variety of different political cultures which developed during the
period, the main confrontation was between two great and mutually incompatible
visions of the nation, which can be defined as adversarial nationalisms.
Keywords
Catholicism, culture war, laicism, national identity, Spain
In September 1929, the Spanish journalist Alardo Prats visited the shrine of
Nuestra Senora de la Balma in the Maestrazgo district of Castellon province, in
north-eastern Spain, where every year thousands of pilgrims gathered for a popular
local religious festival or romera. In and around the chapel an array of traditional
rituals was conducted to expel evil spirits from those who were considered to be
possessed. Reporting on these events Prats, who had been a fervent Catholic in his
youth, presented harsh criticisms of what he saw as a tragic and superstitious
spectacle, which he identied with the ancestral tyranny of the exhausted tradition
of the Catholic Church and its social and cultural dominance. For such reasons, in
the book in which he pulled together his accounts of this experience, he proclaimed
that the struggle against clericalism was a true and authentic patriotic duty.1
There was nothing at all exceptional about such a declaration at this time. The
vast majority of Spanish anti-clerical writings denounced the overweening power of
Catholicism from republican and progressive perspectives, while linking this
Corresponding author:
Joseba Louzao, Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros, Avenida Jesuitas 34, 28806 Alcala de Henares,
Madrid, Spain.
Email: joseba.louzao@cardenalcisneros.es

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

critique with the advocacy of a distinctive version of national identity.2 In Spain,

where a close identication between religion and national identity had been the
norm, such ideas were resisted vigorously from Catholic perspectives, giving rise to
an active struggle over cultural identity throughout the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, in pursuit of the real Spain.3
This mainly historiographical essay will argue that the nationalization of the
struggle between clericalism and anti-clericalism, which began during the revolutionary years of the Sexenio Democratico (the six years of democracy between
1868 and 1874), reached a climax during the rst third of the twentieth century. In
other words, our understanding is that during this period not only was there erce
argument about the proper place of religion in society, but also about the denition
of the nation itself. It is therefore impossible to restrict the debate on this cultural
struggle to given denitions of the nation.4 Unfortunately, and strange as it may
seem, we are still far from achieving an adequate understanding of the complex and
tangled relationship between religion and national identity in modern Spain. The
history of religion has been slow to develop and has remained historiographically a
poor relation, despite the fundamental nature of the questions it raises.5 We lack an
integrated study of these realities, which fed constantly o each other, so that many
analyses are burdened by exhausted cliches, inected by the memory of the institutional weight of the Catholic Church in the Franco dictatorships reChristianization programme and the brutally repressive nature of the dictatorship,
especially in its early years. As the distinguished Italian Hispanicist Alfonso Botti
has recently reminded us, the religious question in Spain has been unjustly sidelined
due to contemporary prejudices in historical analysis.6 It will therefore be necessary
to restore its lost importance to religion, returning to established themes in more
complex ways, in order to understand how religion contributed to the formation of
specic identities, whether related to nation, culture or gender.7
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in spite of the arguments of
contemporaries and of a multitude of social scientists who were convinced of the
inevitability of its decline, religious conviction was resurgent and capable of gathering strength as a consequence (among other reasons) of the unfolding of cultural
and political modernization across diverse European societies, whether in the
multi-confessional environment of northern Europe or the traditional Catholic
settings of the south.8 National and religious identities, together with political
and cultural ones, were articulated reciprocally and inclusively.9 The role of religion in modern nation-building requires multi-dimensional explanations, for it
acted both to fortify and to fragment the nationalist movements of the period.10
The imagined incompatibility between religion and nation was therefore only one
of the main ideological standpoints of western modernizing discourse.11 European
secular nationalism has combined actively with many religious elements and at
times has even been shaped by modern religious solidarity.12 Nor can the nationstate itself be seen as a substitute for religion, despite securing legitimacy in elds
that were previously dominated by religious feeling, for, at the most popular social
levels, religion and nationhood went hand in hand.

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659

In this respect the confrontation between the Catholic and the secular was one of
the principal fault-lines within Catholic confessional societies, as in Italy, Portugal
or some of the Latin American nations. For this reason we must not regard the
Spanish experience as exceptional, as at and simplistic readings of the violent
episodes of the Civil War have sometimes represented it.13 We should also point
out that a deeper analysis ought to make distinctions between the wide and internally complex range of positions within both broad groups, and the dierent projects and proposals which resulted. In any case, this conict made its own
important contribution to nation-building, presenting the various political and
cultural perspectives (political discourses and mobilization, images and stereotypes,
symbolic redenition, and so on) which directed and integrated, in aective and
emotional terms, the dierent expressions of nationality during the identity crisis
provoked by the loss of the colonies in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. In this
way, and gathering up the advances made in the study of nationalism through the
so-called local turn, we can demonstrate empirically how local conicts between
clericalism and anti-clericalism shed light on a struggle for the denition of national
identity whose importance has hitherto been underestimated. Historical subjects
act, think and feel from a specic place or position from which they perceive the
reality of their world.14 Such an understanding is absolutely necessary for apprehending the varying forms of religiosity in that, although this period did generate a
certain uniformity of spiritual values, religious culture always acquires obvious
local characteristics which provide explanations for regional variations and dierences. Moreover, it was in the local setting that the most direct and immediate
experiences of nationality and religion were intermingled.
Before proceeding with the argument we must emphasize that writing about the
confrontation between the Catholic and the secular in Spain brings sharp and
painful diculties of interpretation and presentation in its train. For this reason
what follows is more than a chronological narrative: it provides an evidence-based
reection on the historiographical implications of this cluster of problems. It does
not present a closed or denitive interpretative schema, but the gathering together
and ordering of certain general ideas which are still in an embryonic state.

Nationalism and Religion: The Limits of Nation-Building

in Spain
Modernist or constructionist approaches to the study of nationalism during the last
three decades have reached an undeniably stable position thanks to the incorporation of various post-modernist preoccupations.15 This is not surprising, as
Dominick LaCapra maintains, because history is always in transit, even if periods,
places, or professions sometimes achieve relative stabilization.16 Taking everything
into account, the abundance of studies and critical analyses is so great that a brief
summary would be impossible. Focusing on the argument that follows, we therefore conne ourselves to indicating that the classic interpretations of nationalism
and the construction of national identity have been dominated by a grand

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

narrative which accepted a one-dimensional reading of the role of religion in

modern society, too closely linked with the contested theories of modernization
and secularization.17 It was therefore not surprising to nd statements that represented nationalism as a religion, as Carlton Hayes did in his classic work, or exalted
it, as did the anthropologist Josep R. Llobera, as the God of modernity.18
In this international context, a considerable sector of Spanish historiography
developed an interpretation of the nation-building process, mediated through contemporary political problems, which emphasized the limitations of its development
in the Spanish case, going so far as to label it as weak.19 This narrative was situated
within a particular Spanish intellectual discourse, inherited from the pessimism
derived from the loss of the Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, and from an anomalous interpretation of the history of Spain in which the Catholic Church was
singled out as an object of blame. Moreover, this interpretation was seen as a
historiographical corollary of the old argument about the alleged failure of the
bourgeois revolution in Spain.20 Consciously or unconsciously, this sustained the
rm conviction that Spain was dierent, that it was backward in pursuing the path
to modernity.21 To some extent these interpretations remained in thrall to a rigid
interpretation which represented Spanish history as a confrontation between tradition and modernity, and set up a comparison with an international model that did
not exist.22 Among the arguments advanced in defence of such a thesis was the
weakness of a Spanish education system undermined by the lack of resources from
the state, as well as by the strength of private education in the hands of the Catholic
Church, which was thereby converted into one of the main enemies of the development of Spanish national consciousness, while frustrating the modernization
process more generally.
In recent years, however, novel and provocative revisionist interpretations have
appeared which challenge arguments based on the weakness of the nation-building
process.23 The most important contribution has come from the local turn in the
study of nationalisms within Spain, and a new perspective has become established
which emphasizes that in the absence of any dened model or route towards what
might constitute progress, Spains trajectory was not so very dierent from the
other European nations.24 The persistence of regionalist movements or of the languages of double patriotism did not automatically indicate a weakness in the
nation-building process. Moreover, the analysis now moves beyond the classic
state-building agencies of nationalization, such as the army or the education
system, to open out perspectives on informal aspects which have been neglected
until recently but are highly inuential.25 Obviously this revision has also aected
views of the nation-building work of the Catholic Church, as recent studies on this
theme have highlighted that it was always fully involved in the modernizing and
nation-building processes of the modern world.26
Within this general picture of historiographical evolution, critiques of the secularization paradigm have introduced alternative explanatory mechanisms which
focus attention on the remaking of various institutions and spiritual perceptions
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.27 In this way they seek to take

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661

account of the complexity and ambivalence of the relationships between religion

and modernity. Robert Wuthnow has emphasized the elasticity of modern religiosity and the complex ways in which it adapts to surrounding circumstances.28
These adaptations are not without resistances or contradictions, but the forces of
modernity overcome those who do not carry them out.29 As William Callahan
indicated in his overview of the history of the Catholic Church in Spain, during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Spanish Catholics began a struggle
to adapt to the new economic conditions imposed by capitalism and political
liberalism.30 This turn of events generated a variety of initiatives, involving
the clergy, religious orders and laity, which were infused with the idea of
national Catholicism.31
This process of reconstitution was directed by normative conicts within pluralistic societies, in which fundamental aspects of self-denition and collective identity were to be resolved through political and cultural confrontation.32 As summed
up by the sociologist Peter L. Berger, the two key questions involved who we are
and how we are to live together. According to Berger conict usually generates a
binary division between simply-presented opposites, in political cultures dominated
by Monist interpretations (as in the Spanish case), which at the same time permitted the development and strengthening of multiple identities within a landscape
dominated by political polarization. At specic junctures in such antagonism, when
normative cleavages were at their most pronounced and produced direct ideological oppositions, it is no exaggeration to identify the outbreak of a genuine
cultural war, a political metaphor of satisfying resonance.33 Moreover, since its
origins in the German Kulturkampf this mode of analysis has been linked to debates
on the denition of society in religious terms. It therefore provides a descriptive
approach to understanding in specic circumstances where the radicalization of
postures promotes a permanent state of hostility, which may extend to outbreaks of
political violence. As a consequence of this, no political discourse in Spain was able
to overcome this division or to pull together a denition of the nation which might
override partisan divisions.
In turn-of-the-century Europe this cultural war would be strongly inuenced by
the confrontation between contrasting denitions of the nation. Any debate on
aspects of how to live together in such societies came up against dierent ways
of understanding how nations were constructed. Small, local everyday disputes
over real, concrete issues aected individuals considerably and mobilized the subjects of the emergent mass society. Symbolic struggles over national identity must
be an examination of the multiple dimensions of religious conict.

The Cultural Struggle for National Identity

The confrontation between clerical and anti-clerical factions at national level began
during the Sexenio Democratico between 1868 and 1874, a period of revolutionary disturbance during which Queen Isabel II was forced into exile and Spain
became a Republic. The rival forces of Catholics and anti-clericals had been

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

dening their positions during the whole of the nineteenth century, but it was to be
the revolutionary dynamic that gave the conict a new signicance for national
identity. On one side we nd the defenders of a liberal, lay denition of the
nation, as expressed in the Constitution of 1869.34 In direct opposition was the
Church, which had resisted the idea of the liberal nation. The Catholic Church
had not begun its complex involvement in dening the nation until the Concordat
of 1851 and the Churchs embrace of conservative dynastic politics. The new engagement was mainly due to the careful ideological construction undertaken by the
Catalan cleric Jaime Balmes, which culminated in the classic work of the polymath
Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos espanoles (188082).35 This
version of the nation saw itself as attacked and wounded by the revolutionary political agenda, denouncing the loss of religious unity and stirring up Catholic popular
feelings. The development of this civil strife brought discussion of the nature of the
nation-state into daily usage and promoted active political mobilization. Moreover,
the restoration of the monarchy after the Sexenio Democratico marked a clear
defeat for the republican project and its secular agenda. The Restoration regime
did allow freedom of worship, but it distanced itself from any further extension of
religious toleration and from the separation of Church and state, as had been envisaged by the constitutional project of the First Republic (1873).
But the Spanish Church was not satised, remaining distrustful of liberalism and
aspiring towards a confessional society and political life. This frame of mind produced the gradual construction of a Catholic and nationalist political culture
towards the end of the nineteenth century, in which the Church was interwoven
with the Spanish nation in a process that contained its own problems and contradictions. The concept of National Catholicism was born out of the self-critical
accusations that were levelled at progressive Catholic elements within the
Franco regime, encouraging the error of analysing National Catholicism as if it
were a closed body of ideology, rooted in the Franco dictatorship and based on the
restoration of a confessional Christianity, without paying attention to the multiple
nuances generated by this discourse over a long period.36 A few brief denitions are
necessary to avoid imprecision. National Catholicism was an integrative political
culture in which Catholic faith became the constituting element of national identity, in which it was in no sense alien to developments in other national Catholic
traditions. Thus it was not only identied with counter-revolutionary thought, but
was also a vector for introducing elements of modernity such as capitalist ideas and
industrial development.
Through this alliance Spanish National Catholicism became the central element
of one of the traditions of the nationalist Right which has been astutely dened as
teologico-pol tica.37 In other words, it became an authentic political theology of
reconquest, in that it advocated a combination of the recovery of a glorious past
and a redemptive vision of the future through the imposition of the Kingdom of
Christ, basing itself on an organic, corporativist vision of society. We must not
forget that as a response to liberal nationalism and international socialism the
Catholic Church, in the second half of the nineteenth century, began to articulate

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663

a theology of the nations which attributed a particular role to each country in the
divine plan.38 Thus this was not an idea peculiar to Spanish Catholicism, as several
examples demonstrate a similar capacity for inventing national characteristics in
countries with Catholic traditions, including Portugal, Poland, Ecuador and
Mexico.39 This concept of a theology of the nations was apparent in a papal
encyclical of Leo XIII:
The two attachments, to Church and Nation, are compatible. Moreover, if we wish to
feel this rightly, the supernatural love for the Church and that which is naturally owed
to the Nation are two loves that proceed from an identical eternal principle, given that
God is the cause and author of both; from which it follows that there can be no
conict between them. Certainly, we can and must do certain things: love ourselves
and desire the wellbeing of our neighbours, love our country and its governing authorities; but at the same time we must honour the Church as our mother, and love God
with all our hearts.40

But similar ideas could also be found among other Christian denominations, and in
1917, for example, the United States evangelical pastor Billy Sunday asserted that,
Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms and hell and traitors are synonymous.41 In this vein, a few decades later the Bishop of Vitoria in the Basque
Country, the Galician Leopoldo Eijo y Garay, summed up the ideological bases of
this theology of the nations in a sermon:
It is not that the Catholic religion identies itself with the nation: no indeed. Just as we
do not mix or heap up the love owed to God with that owed to our parents . . . nor
does religion, in imposing patriotism along with its morality, identify with a nation,
reduce itself to a single territory or conne itself within its frontiers; no; being Catholic
itself, it transcends national divisions, and being One and the same for the children of
the various countries, it lights up the love of ones own country in every breast,
inspires it with noble ideals, makes it burn with holy enthusiasm, urges it to co-operate
in the improvement and enhancement of ones country by means of virtue, labour, and
the cultivation of all the human faculties, in such a way that the more Christian you
may be, the more useful you will be to your country, and the better a patriot you are,
the better you will full your Christian duties.
Thus Religion and Nationhood were united in all the new daughter nations
of the Church which were placed under its maternal direction, and as far as
Spain is concerned, we see the illumination of Religion and Nationhood,
bright as noon, united closely and intimately with unbreakable ties, and joining
its laurels fraternally to weave the imperishable crown of glory of the Spanish
people.42

For his part, the priest and teacher Andres Manjon, in one of the most
applauded contributions to the Catholic Congress of Santiago de Compostela

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(1902), emphasized the central role of the Catholic family in sustaining the nation,
because:
the nation is not formed out of employees and bureaucracy: its root, base and trunk,
spirit and soul, its strength and reserves for the days of special trial, are to be found in
the family, and thus whoever deforms, confuses, disturbs, weakens, disheartens, dissolves or demoralizes families is the rst and most important enemy of the nation.43

We shall need to locate this conceptual position within its historical context, where
we can nd answers to the problem of how National Catholicism was understood
and experienced. In this political culture a wide and heterogeneous array of often
conicting people and ideas came together. It was not understood in the same way
by intellectuals such as Ramiro de Maeztu and V ctor Pradera, as by the clergy,
from bishops to seminarians, or by broad sectors of the middle class or the peasantry. Moreover, not all Spanish Catholics, or even all those on the political Right,
fell into this category.
In any case, Catholicism, whether at institutional level or experienced informally
(reecting Michael Billigs concept of the importance of the banal), secured enormous creative and mobilizing potential.44 This is largely because, following the
French sociologist Danie`le Hervieu-Leger, we can suggest that religious belief
pulls together the expression of a faith, the memory of a continuous past, and
the legitimating reference to an authorized version of that memory: in other
words, a tradition.45 This means that we must not disdain a movement like the
Catholic Church which, when it saw its moral universe as in peril and itself as under
siege, had a great capacity for promoting collective action.46 In such developments
we can see the national level of understanding and action superimposed on the
local. But even when the conict between clerical and anti-clerical positions was of
general signicance, it was played out through the most diverse of local dynamics
and was given added strength by municipal stimuli.47
As evidence of the close relationship between Catholicism and nation, we can cite
the erce polemical conicts about education which developed at the end of the rst
decade of the twentieth century.48 The secular schools which were closed as a consequence of the anti-clerical actions of Tragic Week in Barcelona, when in summer
1909 churches and Catholic schools were burned and several clergy assassinated,
reopened in 1910 thanks to the new government led by the liberal Segismundo
Moret.49 The Catholic movement exerted strong political pressure at street level
against the reopening, organizing well-attended demonstrations and meetings
across the whole of Spain. To sum up, the message transmitted by these activities
left no room for doubt: seen through this lens, the defence of Catholic education
against the perils of secular inltration could only be a work of patriotism.50
Obviously these mobilizations encouraged the proliferation of articles, pamphlets
and books against the advance of secularism in the Spanish educational system. In
1911, Domingo Miral, educationalist and professor in the University of Salamanca,
expressed horror at the very thought of how education without religion might aect

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665

the Spanish people, in the preface to a book on the question which he himself had
translated from German.51 A few years later, at the height of the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Jesuit Ramon Ruiz Amado, who conceived of secularism as anti-patriotic and secular education as anti-patriotic education, responded
conclusively to Miral: the spread of the secular school would be the veritable nis
Hispaniae; the end of the Catholic Nation; which is, if it has any signicance in the
world and in history, the country in which we were born.52
Subsequently the Catholics responded to an educational directive of Conde de
Romanones (1913), another liberal politician, in which the children of non-Catholic
parents were exempted from learning the catechism in school, by organizing massive
simultaneous collective communion services for children on 1 May, promoted across
the whole of Spain by the primate cardinal archbishop.53 This was intended as a
denitive response to a measure which many Catholics saw as threatening the overthrow of national identity, following the denunciations of the Carlist pretender to
the throne, Don Jaime, and lling devotional and liturgical activities with political
signicance.54 These debates on the teaching of the catechism were the nal repercussions of a phase of intensive anti-clerical mobilization which had begun in the
context of the wars in Cuba and the Philippines, where the defeat of 1898 had
generated a deep identity crisis which fed into the cultural war over the position of
the Church in Spanish society.55 The monarchical system of the Restoration, as
envisaged by Antonio Canovas del Castillo, gave great assistance to the re-establishment of the Church, although it had changed a great deal since the early nineteenth
century. During the rst decades of the Bourbon restoration political stability was
the dominant concern, based on the ctitious and corrupt alternation in oce of
conservatives and liberals, and on religious peace. Nevertheless, with the loss of the
last vestiges of Empire, anti-clericalism returned to the centre of the political stage.
On the one hand, liberalism, which was recognized in the agreement that the parties
should alternate in power, embraced the secularizing forces which had hitherto been
identied with the radical republicanism which was shut out from the monarchical
political system; and on the other hand, both socialists and anarchists identied with
and were incorporated into, the anti-clerical movement, becoming important disseminators of political ideas in this eld.56 There is no doubt that disputes about
religion revived strongly and became the dominant concern of the Spanish political
agenda during the rst decade of the twentieth century.
In this conict-ridden setting, there emerged a reinvention of devotion to the
Virgin Mary in Spain, linked to the strengthening of regional Catholic identities
and to the developing dynamics of religious confrontation. In fact, the period
under investigation lies within the central decades of what might be regarded
from a Catholic perspective as the century of the Virgin Mary, which was closely
linked to the developing feminization of religion. This century spanned Pius IXs
proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and Pius XIIs
denition of the dogma of the Assumption in 1950. In this way the gure of the
Virgin Mary was constructed as the central counter-secularizing myth of
Catholicism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making use of what

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

was already an important element of traditional Catholic worship. There is no

doubt that, by means of pilgrimages and sanctuaries, guilds, religious orders and
the array of visions of the Virgin Mary which were constructed over the period,
from Lourdes to Fatima by way of La Salette and Marpingen, the Church intended
to oer a lively response to the challenges of the modern world.57
In the Spanish setting there are numerous examples of this symbolic construction of the Virgin Mary, as in the cases of the sanctuary of Covadonga in Asturias,
that of Montserrat in Cataluna, of the Bien Aparecida in Cantabria and the double
regional and national symbolism erected around the cult of the Aragonese Virgin
of the Pillar.58 Bearing all this in mind, the present analysis will concentrate on the
Basque Virgin of the sanctuary of Begona, which was then a small rural settlement
on the outskirts of the commercial and industrial centre of Bilbao. This was a focus
of worship which had been gathering strength for more than two centuries, and in
the Vizcaya of the turn of the century developed into a unifying symbol of regional
Catholic identity, thanks to a lengthy reconstruction which took place throughout
the nineteenth century.59 In September 1855 the image of the Virgin was brought
down to the settlement, in procession, as an attempt to ward o an epidemic of
Asiatic cholera. After the procession the epidemic ended, and this was, of course,
attributed to divine intervention. From then on, collective thanks were given every
year for the Virgins intercession.
On the twenty-fth anniversary of the procession, a great pilgrimage was organized from every locality in the province, to demonstrate the Catholic fervour of the
people of Vizcaya. However, the pilgrimage turned into an electoral confrontation
between Carlists and Liberals (187276), as the provincial elections were close at
hand, with the result that the corporation of Bilbao, the provincial capital, denied
the procession passage through the town. The memory of the last Carlist war, in
which a Liberal army had defended the city from the counter-revolutionary forces
who backed the dynastic ambitions of the alternative Carlist Bourbon succession,
remained strong. At the same time, the Carlists sought to maintain the Basque
regional fueros, a distinctive set of norms, laws and privileges which had been established by the ancien regime monarchy. This expressed the symbolic confrontation
between the rural universe of traditionalist politics, which was to draw in the new
Basque nationalism of the end of the century, taking on much of its political and
cultural baggage, and the urban liberalism associated with the new industries, as
highlighted by the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in his novel Paz en la guerra.60
At the dawn of the twentieth century the canonical coronation of the Virgin of
Begona was organized for September 1900, following the earlier Barcelona precedent of the Virgin of la Merced (1888). The region had undergone profound socioeconomic changes. Bilbao, the capital of Vizcaya province, had been transformed
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century from a small provincial town of
20,000 people, its growth held back by two civil wars, into an important industrial
and nancial centre with a rapidly expanding population. The municipal corporation of Bilbao distanced itself from the celebrations, just as it had twenty years
earlier, incurring the accusation that it did not respect the Catholic sentiments of

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667

the city. The organized Catholics of Vizcaya province, mostly drawn from the
emerging middle classes in the capital together with middling farming families in
rural areas, immersed themselves in the celebrations to conrm the Catholicism of
the region. The local Catholic periodical Ecos Religiosos dedicated a special themed
issue to the festival, in which can be found the powerful and active expression of
National Catholic ideas, based on a confessional defence of regionalism which had
been gaining ground during the nineteenth century. The vast majority of the articles were fervent in their adherence to the Virgin Mary as Reina coronada y
Madre de Vizcaya [crowned Queen and Mother of Vizcaya], and some contributors, such as the Augustinian canon Eustoquio de Uriarte, denounced:
the invasion of exotic customs . . . a thousand times more dangerous and prejudicial to
national or regional independence than the invasion of the most savage hordes,
because while it multiplies a hundredfold the energies and qualities of the race, it
dissolves and discolours the red corpuscles of the most intense aspects of regional
or national life.61

The rapidity of the modernization process in the region had brought about a social
divide, and generated a fear of immigrant workers bringing disorder and impiety. It
was indeed in the mining and industrial areas that the anti-clerical minority was
making headway among members of labour organizations and the Republican and
Socialist parties. The myth of the Catholic Basque Country was being undermined,
leading Arturo Menan y Garibay of the Claretian order to assert that in its breast
are growing and multiplying germs which kill holy traditions; building plots where
foreign or bastard peoples have erected dwellings, forming a people which does not
belong here. And he concluded his homily thus: Vizcaya is always the same. The
hour will strike for a new Gothic re-conquest, and Vizcaya would respond [sic] to
its heroic traditions. Among all this, it will accomplish its mission. There was
nothing extraordinary about this utterance, in that it connected the present work
with the Basque contribution to defending the nation against the Muslims, in the
Gothic re-conquest.
These statements drank from the neo-Catholic ideas which the writer Francisco
Navarro Villoslada had advocated in his successful novel of 1879, Amaya o los
vascos en el siglo VIII, which had been so much to the taste of Spanish Catholic
circles. Thus the novel put these words in to the mouth of Garc a Jimenez, rst
King of Navarre, in the face of the Muslim invasion: If Spain, if religion is in peril,
the Goths are as Christian as the Basques. So much are we obliged, each as much as
the other, to save them both.62 But this discourse did not only emanate from the
Basque Country, in that the Madrid daily newspaper El Debate, which became
the unifying voice of Spanish Catholics, repeated this idea in the crisis of the
Restoration settlement in 1917: in so far as the personality of that region is able
to become more clearly dened, stronger and recognized by law, we shall have
greater guarantees that the bastion of the Basque provinces will never fail to support the Catholic cause.63 This powerful image would continue to evolve over the

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

next two decades to become part of popular Basque Catholic culture in the Second
Republic. In fact, the well-known priest Jose Miguel de Barandiaran noted in his
diaries that one of the visionaries of Ezquioga, a village in the Basque province of
Guipuzcoa where the Virgin Mary was said to have made several appearances
during 1931, had predicted a future war in which the Basque Catholics would
triumph in order to bring about the liberation of Spain, within the conventions
of the discourse of national salvation which had developed over the decades.64
Ultimately the Catholic argument was that the Basques would be willing to
struggle for their faith to the bitter end, in what was presented as a new
Reconquest by a Catholicism which saw itself as besieged in a new context of
conict. Thus, it only needed a violent confrontation to complete the forging of
such an identity, with its obvious tinge of martyrdom, among the Vizcayan
Catholics. And it was not slow to arrive, as such an opportunity unfolded three
years after the canonical coronation of Begona, when the Virgin of Begona was
proclaimed as patron saint of Vizcaya. On 11 October 1903, the most important
day of the Begona pilgrimage, Catholics and anti-clericals confronted each other in
the streets of Bilbao, and a death resulted which was regarded as a martyrdom,
alongside around a hundred arrests and injuries.65 The tone of the speeches associated with the pilgrimage became more exalted, announcing that the Reconquest
was approaching, and converting Begona into a new Covadonga.66 Local Catholics
were breathing the atmosphere of martyrdom. According to the local press, before
the celebration of the anniversary of the pilgrimage two daughters of a well-known
Bilbao family had memorial photographs taken, in case they ended up giving their
lives for their faith during the pilgrimage. As the Catholic daily La Gaceta del Norte
indicated, piety is nothing if it is not complete and clear. All or nothing.67 In the
following year the commemoration of the Gloriosa Jornada [Glorious Day], as it
was beginning to be called, claimed that its celebration would serve as a gust of air
into all the corners of Spain, [which] will awaken the sleeping and debilitated spirit
of so many soldiers of the faith.68
This conict of values was presented as an authentic political and cultural struggle to reinstate the kingdom of Christ in Spain. This ecclesiastical necessity was
beginning to create a belligerent confessional militancy which provided an apprenticeship in participatory political citizenship, while at the same time contributing to
the rise of national sentiments among the Catholic masses.69 As true Catholic
soldiers, as well as patriots, they were defending not only religion, but also the
Catholic identity of the nation. As the pilgrimage homilies armed, the nonbeliever, he who did not love the Virgin of Begona, was not a true Vizca no, and
never could be; and in a situation of emergent dualism Vizcaya became identied
with either Spain or Euzkadi, the nationalist version of the Basque Country,
depending on the recipient of the message. Within the civil war between
Catholicism and anti-clericalism, the devotion to the Virgin of Begona united
rather than divided. In Portugal, as Antonio Teixeira Fernandes has shown, in
the heat of the discussions of the visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, there was
also a confrontation between two ideological positions in the search for a model of

Louzao Villar

669

national regeneration.70 In this case, too, positions were adopted proposing the
exclusion of unbelievers from the right to citizenship, as expressed in an eloquent
and popular Manual do Peregrino de Fatima: nao se chame portugues/quem cristao de fe nao ser (no one may call themselves Portuguese without faith in
Christ),71 which is strikingly reminiscent of the Catholic discourse marked out
in the Vizcayan pilgrimages, but also to Article 10 of the Ecuadorian Catholic
constitution of 1869, the work of the dictator Gabriel Garc a Moreno, which
denied Ecuadorian citizenship to anyone who was not a Catholic.72
Such references to the cult of the Virgin Mary remained inescapable throughout
the rst third of the twentieth century, as demonstrated by the Civil War manifesto
the mobilization of the Virgins for the restoration of the national religion, issued
in the name of the Jesuit scholar Alfonso Alvarez Bolado.73 This mobilization was
more than simply an instrumental political recourse to religious symbols, but rather
an identication of the Catholic masses with the desire to achieve victory in what
was now dened as a Crusade, and we cannot ignore the important providentialist
element in Spanish Catholicism. This fed into the important conservative capacity
for mobilization, based on the depiction of a constant threat from revolutionary
violence, which was founded in personal experience and historical memory, and
which sparked o a strong emotional response through fear of the dangers which
were now identied as a result of attacks on certain images and symbols which
represented regional traditions and the local universe.74
On the other hand, on the opposite bank of the conict, we have already shown
that anti-clericalism had also been erected into a component of the secular denition of the nation.75 Since the military defeat in Cuba, a narrative had been constructed, disseminated in pamphlets, newspapers and novels, which blamed the
Church for the nations ills and pointed out the dangers of clerical domination.
An example could be read in an editorial in the Castellon republican newspaper El
Clamor just before the Tragic Week: Gambetta called clericalism the enemy. In
Spain it is something more: it is the element of national dissolution, the cancer
which eats it away and will kill it.76 This was a discourse which did not disappear
with the end of the anti-clerical cycle of the rst decade of the twentieth century, for
it came back in strength during the Second Republic. An example was the characterization of the Confederacion Espanola de Derechas Autonomas (CEDA) as
the anti-Spanish Spain, prostrate at the feet of Rome; the Spain that is governed
from the pulpits.77 In this way, and during the rst third of the twentieth century,
the anti-clerical discourse was permeating through broad sectors of the urban
middle classes and among the working class. This was a shared world of experience
and sociability, which fortied a specic anti-clerical and patriotic selfidentication.
In this way, in the Cataluna of the rst decade of the twentieth century, anticlericalism became a keystone of opposition to Catalanism, in a process similar to
what happened in Vizcaya, where socialists and republicans conated anticlericalism with furious opposition to Basque nationalism.78 In the case of
Vizcaya, some of the anti-clerical protests of this period were transformed into a

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

defence of the Spanish nation, even nishing up with choruses in support of liberty
in front of the meeting places of the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) which, as
we have seen, had adopted many of the political and cultural values of nineteenthcentury Basque traditionalism.79 In practice, the rhetoric of the anti-clerical critique confused and mingled the goals of traditionalism and nationalism, which
shared a similar political culture based on the politics of religion and the defence
of the traditional practices of the fueros. Even so, the Carlists themselves subscribed to a vision of Basque nationalism which embraced the Spanish state,
although marked by their strong identication with their region, while Basque
nationalism as such focused its ideology on political secession from Spain.
Hence, for example, meetings in defence of secularism were even decorated with
colours of the Spanish ag, as happened at the anti-clerical protest in Bilbao which
reacted to the pilgrimage of 1903.80 Felipe Carretero, a leading socialist in the
region, wrote that he thought of himself as more Spanish than Basque and [this
is] why I believe that in response to the cry of Up the Basques! [Gora Euzkadi!],
those who believe in democracy should shout out: Long live Biscay!, Long live
Spain! [ Viva Vizcaya!, Viva Espana!].81 The democratic defence of the republican ideal was being clearly linked with Spanish national identity.
It was this transformation of the nature of debate, in transit between the moral
and the political, which provided the basis for a Monist gaze which invited the
demonization of the other side, which gave fuel to the violent impulses of the confrontation. Moreover, the political power attained by the Spanish anti-clericals was
signicantly less than that of their French equivalents, whose achievements they
sought to emulate.82 Their successes were few and not at all prominent, and the
public prole of anti-clericalism was extinguished until the Second Republic.
In reality this period of relative harmony arose from the displacement of the question
from the top of the political agenda by other themes, such as social problems, the
outbreak of the First World War and disputes over Catalan and Basque nationalism.
Moreover, the installation of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship seemed to demonstrate the victory of the Catholics confessional model of government.83 Even so, the
potential power of anti-clericalism was sustained in various social settings and in
growing collective self-identication, as during these years the Left was actively
developing its anti-clerical dimension. In fact, Spain was one of the few European
countries which had not resolved this religious conict by the beginning of the 1930s.
At the same time contemporary observations showed continuing high levels of religious participation in northern Spain, where Catholicism maintained an essential
role in communities, and a progressive decline in the agricultural regions of the south
and among the urban working and lower middle classes.
Thus the city became one of the main battleelds. Urban space had to be
occupied, and found itself at the epicentre of social, cultural and political conicts.84 It is therefore not surprising that many anti-clerical meetings demanded
that members of the government should support the suppression of all public religious demonstrations,85 Many anti-clericals favoured the elimination of the physical presence of everything religious, as in the case of some French mayors during

Louzao Villar

671

the Third Republic who had tried to prohibit the passage of funerals through the
streets, religious processions, the ringing of church bells and even the wearing of
the cassock.86 Nor should we forget that the Catholics had a multitude of religious
observances with special signicance and symbolism directed to the sanctication
of urban space. Recognizing this, the Republicans tried to reconstruct their own
civic ceremonial, which had previously been lled with a strong anti-Carlist component.87 At times such demonstrations were envisaged in direct opposition to
Catholic events, but following a similar pattern. Juan Buisan, a Bilbao republican
politician and well-known local freemason, even proposed: Let us imitate our
enemies, naming Our Lady of Liberty, and crowning her in Somorrostro! Let us
raise a monument to demonstrate our liberal faith!88 Above all this was an attempt
to counteract, in the public sphere, the religious demonstrations which were loaded
with politico-cultural signicance.
The changes of the last third of the nineteenth century had transformed Catholic
attitudes to the city, as they focused their eorts on urban conquest even as they
remained ambiguous in their messages about it. As the Mallorcan priest and folklorist Antoni Maria Alcover indicated in a political speech, Spanish Catholicism
had to forget the armed struggle through mountains and besieged peninsulas to
concentrate on the political struggle in towns and cities, organizing ourselves politically.89 And in this respect the worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which had
been revived by the French counter-revolution and popularized at the end of the
nineteenth century, occupied a central place.90 The Jesuits gave this cult a Spanish
identity, as in 1733, according to a recovered tradition, the Castilian Jesuit
Francisco Bernardo de Hoyos received a divine revelation in which the Sacred
Heart of Jesus had explained that it would reign in Spain, receiving more veneration than anywhere else. Its spread was marked by plaques on the facades of
buildings, pictures in domestic interiors, the development of enthroning rituals in
schools and confessional associations, and, nally, by the inauguration of monuments in its honour in Spanish towns and cities, which reached its zenith with the
dedication of Spain to the Sacred Heart by Alfonso XIII and the construction in
1919 of a large statue in Cerro de los Angeles, where the soul of the Nation was to
be found.91
The Sacred Heart thus represented much more than simple piety, as it embodied
an ideal of society and the nation. It constructed a pyramidal structure based on the
personal and familial, which reproduced itself through domestic consecrations and
enthronements. It also moved beyond the private sphere to show itself in every
aspect of public life, from teaching to legislation, culminating in institutional ceremonies in Town Halls and provincial governments. At the apex of the pyramid, or
more precisely at the geographical centre of Spain, was placed the monument of the
Sacred Heart of Cerro de los Angeles,92 which sealed this devotional building and the
Catholic ideal of the People of God with special symbolism. On the pedestal,
together with the legend Reign in Spain, the Immaculate Conception held beneath
its feet the national heraldic shield, displayed by a group of angels. On either side of
the monolith were two allegories, representing Humanidad santicada: on the right,

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

with egies of several saints associated with dedication to religious practice, such as
St Margarita Mar a Alacoque, St Francis of Assisi, St Augustine and Father Hoyos,
among others; and on the left with depictions of Humanidad que tiende a santicarse,
aiming to achieve sanctity through good works, expressed through charity, love,
humility and repentance, which marked out the path which led to heaven.93
Since the establishment of the Second Republic with an explosion of popular
jubilation in April 1931, the cultural war between Catholicism and Laicism was
igniting through mass mobilization and the struggle for the public sphere.94 The
supportive attitude of the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship towards Catholicism
fanned the ames of anti-clerical activity. For the Left, the Church continued to
be the principal enemy of the Spanish nation, which ensured that the coming of the
Second Republic revived the religious confrontation in the public sphere.95 For
the rst time, anti-clericalism had the capacity to impose its secular denition of the
nation, which was, of course, strongly opposed. Although it is clear that at the
beginning both the Government and the ecclesiastical hierarchy tried to maintain
conciliatory positions of negotiation, on both sides a considerable majority was
more inclined to confrontation than dialogue. As noted above, for the Spanish
Republican forces and socialists the religious question was the main national problem.96 Despite the intense secularization of society, the hegemony of the Church
had been undisputed, and the institution was associated with the ancien regime.
These contradictions led the Republican-Socialist government to undertake a
reform programme contrary to existing assumptions of Catholic supremacy, without reaching the necessary constitutional consensus. The Republicans even thought
they could maintain power over an extended period of time. However, during the
193335 biennium the political pre-eminence of the centre-right changed the situation. However, the tension was rising. For many Catholics the Republic had
become an unjust regime which attacked their established religious rights; for the
Republican-Socialist organizations, however, reforms were not producing the
desired transformation. Ultimately, frustration took over both groups and fed
the widespread political violence which broke out in 1936, when over fty churches
were burned.97
It is not surprising, then, that during the Second Republic eorts were made to
eliminate the Sacred Heart monoliths in several places, or that the monument of
Cerro de los Angeles was destroyed, which Spanish Catholicism judged to be an
enactment of the passion and crucixion of Christ.98 At that point the rival mobilizations and discourses played a fundamental role in the transformation of the two
national denitions, generating the confrontation between the people of God and
the popular community, which we should understand as a struggle between collective identities for their exclusive denitions of the condition of citizenship.99

Conclusions
In conclusion we must make clear that, as Pamela B. Radcli has indicated, the
symbolic religious universe was converted into one of the most spectacular

Louzao Villar

673

battleelds perhaps the crucial one in the broader cultural struggle for Spanish
identity.100 In fact, religion was the principal element which divided Right and
Left. It is clear that, as this brief and perhaps (necessarily) over-simplied approach
to the subject has tried to demonstrate, it would be necessary to reassess the confrontation between the confessional and the secular in modern Spain not only to
shed further light on explanations for the religious origins of the Spanish Civil War,
a cultural fracture which had been deepening over several decades, but also to
question some established (if controversial) assumptions about the diverse processes of Spanish nation-building.
As in other European nations with a Catholic tradition, the construction of
Spanish national identity developed through antagonism and conict. Despite
the variety of dierent political cultures which developed during the period, the
main confrontation was between two great and mutually incompatible visions of
the nation. In this dispute the conict between Catholicism and secularism or laicism took centre stage. It is undeniable that attempts were made to transcend this
sealed-o narrative of the Two Spains, which has its equivalents in other narratives of national construction, but they were unable to overcome this dominant
narrative. It is therefore evident that in countries with a Catholic tradition two
contradictory and incompatible symbolic and cultural traditions came into conict
during the late nineteenth century and the rst third of the twentieth. Each
attempted to dene the nation exclusively in its own image, in what Sudhir
Hazareesingh sought to dene in the French case as adversarial nationalisms.101
The denition of the Civil War by the architects of the coup, and by the Church, as
a Crusade in defence of the Catholic religion, had important implications for the
subsequent brutal repression of their opponents, while the crude and uncontrolled
anti-clerical violence which erupted within the collapsed Republican state, provided
no less powerful evidence of the potential for conict that was enshrined in the rival
denitions of the nation that confronted each other during the rst third of the
twentieth century.
Acknowledgements
This article forms part of a research project on nation-building processes in Spain and the
Basque Country within the Research Group IT-286-07 of the Basque University System,
directed by Professor Luis Castells Arteche (UPV/ EHU). I am particularly grateful to
Professor John Walton (Ikerbasque-UPV/EHU) for his translation.

Notes
1. Alardo Prats, Tres das con los endemoniados. La Espana desconocida y tenebrosa (Madrid
1929), page unnumbered.
2. For further details, see Enrique A. Sanabria, Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism
in Spain (New York 2009).
3. For a suggestive discussion of the struggle in France, see Herman Lebovics, True France:
The Wars over Cultural Identity, 19001945 (Ithaca, NY 1992).

674

European History Quarterly 43(4)

4. An analysis with case studies of Europe in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds,
Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-century Europe (Cambridge 2003).
5. The state of the investigation in Beno t Pellistrandi, ed., LHistoire religieuse en France et
en Espagne (Madrid 2004); Feliciano Montero, La historia de la Iglesia y del catolicismo espanol en el siglo XX. Apunte historiografico, Ayer, Vol. 51 (2003), 265-82.
6. Cited in Lorenzo Fernandez Prieto, De olvidos, memorias e identidades colectivas.
Cronica del VII Congreso de la AHC, Ayer, Vol. 56 (2004), 296. The polemic by
Philip Jenkins in The New Anti-Catholicism. The Last Acceptable Prejudice (New
York 2003), may also be of interest.
7. Caroline Ford, Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe, Journal of Modern
History, Vol. 65 (1993), 175.
8. This point is discussed at length in Rene Remond, Religion and Society in Modern
Europe (Oxford 1999); Hugh McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 18481914
(Basingstoke 2000); Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds, The Decline of
Christendom in Western Europe, 17502000 (Cambridge 2003); Margaret L. Anderson,
The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in NineteenthCentury Germany, The Historical Journal, Vol. 38(3) (1995), 64770.
9. For different perspectives on religion and nationalism see Peter van der Veer and
Hartmut Lehmann, eds, Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia
(Princeton, NJ 1999); Michael Geyer and Harmut Lehmann, eds, Religion und
Nation, Nation und Religion: Beitrage zu einer unbewaltigten Geschichte (Gottingen
2004); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, eds, Nation und Religion in
der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main 2004).
10. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism
(Cambridge 1997), 2.
11. Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley 1994),
ixx.
12. See e.g. Willfried Spohn, Multiple Modernity, Nationalism and Religion: A Global
Perspective, Current Sociology, Vol. 51(34) (2003), 26586. See also C. A. Bayly,
The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914: Global Connections and Comparisons
(Oxford 2004), 362.
13. For more helpful discussions, see Timothy Mitchell, Violence and Piety in Spanish
Folklore (Philadelphia, PA 1988); Richard Maddox, Revolutionary Anticlericalism
and Hegemonic Processes in an Andalusian town, August 1936, American
Ethnologist, Vol. 22(1) (1995), 12543; Julio de la Cueva, Religious Persecution,
Anticlerical Tradition and Revolution: On Atrocities Against the Clergy during the
Spanish Civil War, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33(3) (1998), 35569;
Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense: The Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil
War (Abingdon 2007), 12658; Mary Vincent, The Keys of the Kingdom: Religious
Violence in the Spanish Civil War, JulyAugust 1936, in Chris Ealham and Michael
Richards, eds, The Splintering of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War,
19361939 (Cambridge 2005), 6889.
14. See e.g. Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial
Germany, and National Memory, 18711918 (Chapel Hill, NC 1997), and Germany as
a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC
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16.
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18.
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20.

21.

22.
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24.

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Appropriations of Local and Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 19301945,

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For an intelligent discussion see Jose Mar a Faraldo, Modernas e imaginadas. El
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Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca,
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On this issue, see Jeffrey K. Hadden, Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory,
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World: A Global Overview, in Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World:
Resurgent Religion and World Politics, (Washington, DC 1999), 118; Jose Casanova,
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Social and Behavioral Sciences (Oxford 2001), 1378691; Karel Dobbelaere,
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Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York 1960); Josep R. Llobera, The God of
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For a complete review, see Fernando Molina, Modernidad e identidad nacional.
El nacionalismo espanol del siglo XIX y su historiograf a, Historia Social, Vol. 52
(2005), 14771.
Mar a Cruz Romeo, Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on
Nineteenth-century Spanish Liberalism, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70 (1998),
892912; Jesus Millan and Mar a Cruz Romeo, Was the Liberal Revolution
Important to Modern Spain? Political Cultures and Citizenship in Spanish history,
Social History, Vol. 29(3) (2004), 284300.
For further details, see David Ringrose, Spain, Europe, and the Spanish Miracle,
17001900 (Cambridge 1996); Monica Burguera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara,
Backwardness and its Discontents, Social History, Vol. 29(3) (2004) 27983; and the
texts collected in Nigel Townson, ed., Es Espana diferente? Una mirada comparativa
(siglos XIX y XX) (Madrid 2010).
Indicative of this position is Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD
9901992 (Oxford 1990).
See some recent bibliographically exhaustive overviews in Sebastian Balfour and
Alejandro Quiroga, The Reinvention of Spain: Nation and Identity since Democracy
(Oxford 2007); Stephen Jacobson, Spain: the Iberian Mosaic, in Timothy Baycroft
and Mark Hewitson, eds, What is a Nation? Europe 17891914 (Oxford 2006), 210
27; Diego Muro and Alejandro Quiroga, Spanish Nationalism: Ethnic or Civil?,
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State (Oxford 2007).
For this surge, see Xose-Manoel Nunez Seixas, The Region as Essence of the
Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism (18401936), European
History Quarterly, Vol. 31(4) (2001), 483518, Xose-Manoel Nunez Seixas, ed., La
construccion de la identidad regional en Europa y Espana (siglos XIX y XX), Ayer,
Vol. 64 (2006); Fernando Molina, The Historical Dynamics of Ethnic Conflicts:
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25.
26.

27.

28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.

36.
37.
38.

39.
40.
41.
42.
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European History Quarterly 43(4)

Ethnicity, Region, and Nation: Valencian Identity and the Spanish Nation-state,
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See the collection edited by Javier Moreno Luzon, Construir Espana. Nacionalismo
espanol y procesos de nacionalizacion (Madrid 2007).
For further analysis, see Carolyn P. Boyd, ed., Religion y poltica en la Espana contemporanea (Madrid 2007); Pere Fullana and Maitane Ostolaza, Escuela catolica y modernizacion. Las nuevas congregaciones religiosas en Espana (19001930), in Julio de la
Cueva Merino y Feliciano Montero, eds, La secularizacion conflictiva. Espana (1898
1931) (Madrid 2007), 187213; Maitane Ostolaza, La Nacion espanola en el Pa s
Vasco, 18571931: el papel de la escuela, in Luis Castells, Arturo Cajal and
Fernando Molina eds, El Pas Vasco y Espana: Identidades, Nacionalismos y Estado
(siglos XIX y XX) (Bilbao 2007), 163-84.
See Joseba Louzao, La recomposicion religiosa en la modernidad: un marco conceptual
para comprender el enfrentamiento entre laicidad y confesionalidad en la Espana contemporanea, Hispania Sacra, Vol. 121 (2008), 33154.
Robert J. Wuthnow, Sociology of Religion, in Neil J. Smelser, ed., Handbook of
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Luca Diotallevi, Il rompicapo della secolarizzazione italiana. Caso italiano, teorie americane e revisione del paradiga della secolarizzazione (Soveria Mannelli 2001), 17.
William J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 18751998 (Washington, DC 2000),
107.
Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain,
18751975 (Oxford 1987), also discusses this kind of initiative.
Peter L. Berger, ed., The Limits of Social Cohesion: Conflict and Mediation in Pluralist
Societies (Boulder, CO 1998).
To go deeply into this aspect, Clark and Kaiser, op. cit.; James Davidson Hunter,
Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York 1991).
More details in Gregorio de la Fuente Monge, El enfrentamiento entre clericales y
revolucionarios en torno a 1869, Ayer, Vol. 44 (2001), 12750.
See among many examples Alfonso Botti, Cielo y dinero. El nacionalcatolicismo en
Espana (18711975) (Madrid 1992); Jose Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa (Madrid
2001); William J. Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 17501874
(Cambridge, MA 1984); Lannon, op. cit.
Alfonso Botti, op. cit., 15174.
Pedro Carlos Gonzalez Cuevas, Historia de las derechas espanolas. De la Ilustracion a
nuestros das (Madrid 2000), 18.
Cited in Alfonso Botti, Algo mas sobre el nacionalcatolicismo, en Julio de la Cueva
Merino y Angel Lopez Villaverde, eds, Clericalismo y asociacionismo catolico en Espana:
de la restauracion a la transicion (Cuenca 2005), 197; also Daniele Menozzi, La Chiesa
Cattolica e la secolarizzazione (Torino 1993).
Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 18301914 (Oxford 1998), 40683.
Sapientiae Christianae. Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII on the obligations of
Christians, promulgated 10 January 1890.
Cited in George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of
Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 18701925 (New York 2006), 142.
Leopoldo Eijo y Garay, Religion y Patria (Vitoria 1919), 201.
Andres Manjon, Los padres de familia y el problema de la ensenanza (Madrid 1902), 33.

Louzao Villar

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44. See Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London 1995).

45. See Danie`le Hervieu-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, NJ 2000),
92100 and 12362.
46. On Spain, see Pamela B. Radcliff, La representacion de la nacion. El conflicto en torno
a la identidad nacional y las practicas simbolicas en la Segunda Republica, in Rafael
Cruz and Manuel Perez Ledesma, eds, Cultura y movilizacion en la Espana contemporanea (Madrid 1997), 30525 and Pamela B. Radcliff, From Mobilisation to Civil War:
The Politics of Polarisation in the Spanish City of Gijon, 19001937 (Cambridge 1996).
47. See particularly Julio de la Cueva Merino: Clericalismo y movilizacion catolica durante
la Restauracion, in Julio de la Cueva Merino and Angel Lopez Villaverde, eds,
Clericalismo y asociacionismo catolico en Espana: de la restauracion a la transicion
(Cuenca 2005), 378 and Julio de la Cueva Merino, The Stick and the Candle:
Clericals and Anticlericals in Northern Spain, 18981913, European History
Quarterly, Vol. 26(2) (1996), 24165.
48. See e.g. Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain,
18751975 (Princeton, NJ 1997) and Tim Kossler, Towards a New Understanding of
the Child: Catholic Mobilisation and Modern Pedagogy in Spain, 19001936,
Contemporary European History, Vol. 18(1) (2009), 124.
49. See the classic Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week: A Study of Anti-clericalism in
Spain, 18751912 (Cambridge, MA 1968).
50. See the letter of Menendez Pelayo in January that year in opposition to secular schools:
What generations educated with the bile of blasphemy on their lips, with no idea of God
or of patriotic sentiments, may make of themselves, has already been demonstrated in
exemplary fashion by recent events towards which silence would suggest complicity, or
at least cowardice (cited in the pastoral letter of Victoriano Guisasola, El problema de la
ensenanza (Valencia 1910), 347, in which the Archbishop of Valencia himself
denounced secular schooling as intending to form new brains with no idea of God or
the Nation, 29).
51. Wilhem Kriege, La escuela neutra a la luz de la verdad (Madrid 1911), 14.
52. Ramon Ruiz Amado, La escuela laica, peste social, La Educacion Hispanoamericana,
Vol. 170 (1925), 5 and 16.
53. In the Basque city of Bilbao it was calculated that 9000 children had taken the sacrament
(El Pueblo Vasco (Bilbao), 2 May 1913).
54. Domingo Cirici Ventallo, La peregrinacion de la lealtad (Madrid 1913), 967.
55. For further details, see Frances Lannon, 1898 and the Politics of Catholic Identity in
Spain, in Austen Ivereigh, ed., The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival (London
2000), 5673.
56. See Julio de la Cueva Merino, Movilizacion pol tica e identidad anticlerical, 1898
1910, Ayer, Vol. 27 (1997), 10126 and Julio de la Cueva Merino, The Assault on
the City of Levites: Spain, in Clark and Kaiser, op. cit., 181201.
57. See e.g. Claude Langlois, Le Catholicisme au feminin. Les congregations francaises a`
superieure generale au XIXe sie`cle (Paris 1984); Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit
in the Secular Age (London 1999); David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the
Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (New York 1994); and Thomas
Kselman, Miracles in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, NJ 1983).
58. Javier Moreno Luzon, Entre el progreso y la virgen del Pilar. La pugna por la memoria
en el centenario de la Guerra de Independencia, Historia y Poltica, Vol.12 (2004),

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59.

60.
61.
62.
63.
64.

65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.

75.

76.

European History Quarterly 43(4)

4178; Carlos Serrano, El nacimiento de Carmen. Smbolos, mitos y nacion (Madrid

1999), 5574; Carolyn Boyd, Covadonga y el regionalismo asturiano, Ayer, Vol. 64
(2006), 14978; and Julio de la Cueva Merino, Inventing Catholic Identities in
Twentieth Century Spain: The Virgin Bien-Aparecida, Catholic Historical Review,
Vol. 87(4) (2001), 62442.
See the local studies by Andres E. de Manaricua, Santa Mara de Begona en la historia
espiritual de Vizcaya (Bilbao 1950) and Silverio de Echevarr a, Historia del Santuario e
Imagen de Nuestra Senora de Begona (Tolosa 1892).
Miguel de Unamuno, Paz en la guerra (Madrid 1897).
The following quotations are all taken from Ecos Religiosos (Bilbao), 48 (1900).
Francisco Navarro Villoslada, Amaya o los vascos en el siglo VIII (Madrid 1879).
El Debate (Madrid), 18 July 1917.
Reference in Jose Miguel de Barandiaran, Diario personal. Volumen I (19171936)
(Ataun 2005), 6734; see also William Christian, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic
and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley, CA 1996) and Joseba Louzao, La Virgen y la salvacion de Espana. Un ensayo de historia cultural durante la II Republica, Ayer, Vol. 82
(2011), 187210.
See Joseba Louzao, Soldados de la fe o amantes del progreso. Catolicismo y modernidad
en Vizcaya (18901923) (Logrono 2011).
Luis Ortiz y Saralegui, Bodas de Plata de la Jornada sangrienta, pero gloriosa para el
Catolicismo en Bilbao (El 11 de Octubre de 1903) (Pamplona 1928), 89.
La Gaceta del Norte (Bilbao), 11 October 1904.
La Gaceta del Norte (Bilbao), 6 October 1904.
Julio de la Cueva Merino, Catolicos en la calle: la movilizacion de los catolicos espanolas, 18991923, Historia y Poltica, Vol. 3 (2000), 5580.
On Portugal, see Antonio Teixeira Fernandes, O Confronto de Ideologas na Segunda
Decada do Seculo XX. A` volta de Fatima (Porto 1999), 57.
Rui Ramos, Historia de Portugal. Sexto volume: A Segunda Fundacao (edited by Jose
Mattoso) (Lisboa 1994), 611.
On Gabriel Garc a Moreno, see Peter V. N. Henderson, Gabriel Garca Moreno and
Conservative State Formation in the Andes (Austin, TX 2008).
Alfonso Alvarez Bolado, Para ganar la guerra, para ganar la paz. Iglesia y Guerra Civil:
19361939 (Madrid 1995), 401.
Many examples in Javier Ugarte, La nueva Covadonga insurgente. Orgenes sociales y
culturales de la sublevacion de 1936 en Navarra y el Pas Vasco (Madrid 1998) and
Francisco Javier Caspistegui, Spains Vendee: Carlist Identity in Navarre as a
Mobilising Model, in Chris Ealham and Michael Richards, eds, The Splintering
of Spain: Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 19361939 (Cambridge 2005),
17795.
In this respect, see Enrique A. Sanabria, Nineteenth-century Spanish Anticlericalism,
in Brian D. Bunk, Sasha D. Pack and Carl-Gustaf Scott, eds, Nation and Conflict in
Modern Spain: Essays in Honor of Stanley Payne (Madison, WI 2008), 5164; Jacob S.
Schapiro, Anticlericalism: Conflict between Church and State in France, Italy, and Spain
(Princeton, NJ 1967); Manuel Perez Ledesma, Studies on Anticlericalism in
Contemporary Spain, International Review of Social History, Vol. 46 (2001), 22755.
Cited in Ferran Archiles, Parlar en nom del poble. Cultura poltica, discurs i mobilitzacio
social al republicanismo castellonenc (18911909) (Castello 2001), 203.

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77. Cited in Pilar Salomon, El discurso anticlerical en la construccion de una

identidad nacional espanola republicana (18981936), Hispania Sacra, Vol. 54
(2002), 496.
78. See the classic Jose Alvarez Junco, El emperador del paralelo. Lerroux y la demagogia
populista (Barcelona 2011), 24680.
79. El Liberal (Bilbao), 10 October 1904 and 12 October 1904.
80. El Noticiero Bilbano (Bilbao), 5 October 1903.
81. El Liberal (Bilbao), 13 August 1918.
82. For further details, see Jose Andres-Gallego, Linfluence francaise sur le catholicisme
espagnol des XIXe et XXe sie`cles, Revue dhistoire de leglise de France, Vol. 224 (2004),
23946.
83. A more developed account in Alejandro Quiroga, Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera
and the Nationalization of the Masses, 192330 (Basingstoke 2007).
84. See a classic Ramiro Reig, Blasquistas y clericales: la lucha por la ciudad en la Valencia de
1900 (Valencia 1986).
85. This can be seen, for example, in the message from the liberal people of Vizcaya to
the President of the Government, transcribed in Las Dominicales (Madrid), 19 April
1901.
86. Jacqueline Laloutte, Dimensions anticlericales de la culture republicaine (18701914),
Historie, Economie et Societe, Vol. 10(1) (1991), 12742.
87. For this interrelation, among other examples, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, Religion and
Politics in the Saint-Napoleon Festivity 185270: Anti- Clericalism, Local Patriotism
and Modernity, English Historical Review, Vol. 482 (2004), 61449 and Ferran Archiles,
Una nacionalizacion no tan debil: patriotismo local y republicanismo en Castellon
(18911910), Ayer, Vol. 48 (2002), 283312.
88. The reference to Somorrostro is because it was in this valley that three important battles
took place during the Second Carlist War, between Liberal and Carlist forces. The
Liberal victory in the third battle enabled the lifting of the blockade of Bilbao, which
had been besieged by the counter-revolutionaries. El Liberal (Bilbao), 7 January 1905.
89. Antoni Maria Alcover, Conducta poltica que simposa avuy a n-els cato`lichs (Barcelona
1907), 11.
90. The main works in this direction are Daniele Menozzi, Sacro Cuore. Un culto tra
devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della societa` (Rome 2001) and Raymond
Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times
(Berkeley, CA 2000).
91. Quotation in El Pueblo Vasco (Bilbao), 30 May 1919. Viva el Rey de Mar a de Echarri
in El Debate (Madrid), 31 May 1919.
92. See Joseba Louzao, El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus como instrumento de nacionalizacion
(c. 18981939). Breves notas para un estudio pendiente, in Mariano Esteban de Vega
and Mar a Dolores Calle Velasco, eds, Procesos de nacionalizacion en la Espana contemporanea (Salamanca 2010), 17388 and Antonio M. Moral Roncal, La cuestion
religiosa en la Segunda Republica Espanola: Iglesia y carlismo (Madrid 2009).
93. See La Construccion Moderna, 15 June 1919: 578.
94. See Maria Thomas, Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence, Conflict and the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, April 1931July 1936, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporanea,
Vol. 33 (2011), 4969.

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European History Quarterly 43(4)

95. This point is discussed in Manuel Alvarez Tard o, Anticlericalismo y libertad de conciencia. Poltica y religion en la Segunda Republica espanola (19311936) (Madrid
2002) and Julio de la Cueva and Feliciano Montero, eds, Laicismo y catolicismo. El
conflicto poltico-religioso en la Segunda Republica (Alcala de Henares 2009).
96. See most recently Julio de la Cueva and Feliciano Montero, eds, Izquierda obrera y
religion en Espana (19001939) (Alcala de Henares 2012).
97. See for this argument Nigel Townson, Anticlericalismo y secularizacion en Espana:
una excepcion europea?, in Townson, op. cit., 14655.
98. See Reinare en Espana, 2932 (1936).
99. Rafael Cruz, En el nombre del pueblo. Republica, rebelion y guerra en la Espana de 1936
(Madrid 2006), 342.
100. Pamela B. Radcliff, La representacion de la nacion. El conflicto en torno a la identidad nacional y las practicas simbolicas en la Segunda Republica, in Cruz and Perez
Ledesma, op. cit., 320.
101. For a useful definition in the French context, see Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political
Traditions in Modern France (Oxford 1994), 12450.

Author Biography
Joseba Louzao Villar is Professor at Cardenal Cisneros University College
(University of Alcala). He is the author of Soldados de la fe o amantes del progreso:
catolicismo y modernidad en Vizcaya (18901923) (2011) and is currently working
on Spanish National Catholicism in the twentieth century.