Mary Vincent

Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic : religion and politics in Salamanca, 1930-1936

The research for this thesis has been confined in space and time in order to facilitate an investigation of the Church at several levels: the study is as concerned with the faith and the faithful as with the official presence of the hierarchy. It examines questions of religious identity in an area of high Catholic practice, conservative politics and, eventually, genuine popular support for the Nationalist rising. The province of Salamanca, in the north west of Spain, is a particularly appropriate focus for such a study. Part of the Castilian heartland of traditional Spain, it was the home province of Jose Maria Gil Robles and a major area of strength for the parliamentary Catholic right, which mobilised here before anywhere else in Spain. This has led to Salamanca receiving some attention from historians. Scholars such as Paul Preston and Juan Jose Castillo use it to provide examples of the Catholic rights techniques and rhetoric, arguing that the innate conservatism of the Castilian smallholders was manipulated by the great landlords. However, perhaps the most interesting feature of the history of the province in the 1930s is how its story differed from that laid out in Madrid. The historiography of the Second Republic has concentrated - perhaps inevitably - on political and parliamentary struggles. While issues such as disestablishment and the fate of the religious orders were of crucial importance at institutional and governmental level, the impact they had outside the professional circles of church and state is far less certain. This study has moved outside the administrative world of the capital to investigate the impact of the Republic on ordinary Catholic citizens. The minutiae of church/ state relations and the undoubted injustice of the treatment of the religious orders may have outraged the Catholic deputies representing Salamanca in the Cortes, but their Catholic constituents had different concerns. By examining these concerns, this thesis throws new light on the process of breakdown of the Second Republic.

La reafirmación de la masculinidad en la cruzada franquista

After the First World War, the soldier became the masculine archetype. Aggression was intrinsic to contemporary understandings of masculinity: the ‘new Fascist man’ would be the agent of political and social change. The military coup of July 1936 was a call to men to renew Spain. Falangist ideas of male beauty, brotherhood and comradeship in arms created a new understanding of masculinity in Spain. This cult of virility was instrumental to Franco’s mobilisation during the civil war and seemed to be reinforced by victory. However, the horizontal communities of fascist brotherhood were soon jettisoned, replaced by the vertical connections of history and family hierarchy, so important in the Carlist tradition. Paternalism, not fascism, was the key to the understanding of masculinity fostered by the New State during the postwar.

Ungodly Subjects: Protestants in National-Catholic Spain, 1939–53:

This article examines the little-known history of the Protestant minority in Spain in the years after Franco’s victory in 1939, looking at the reality of Catholic ‘unity’ and the position of the internal ‘other’ under National-Catholicism – the hegemonic ideological expression of Franco’s Spain. Arguing that, rather than substituting for fascism, National-Catholicism in fact served as a transitional rhetoric, the article examines the anti-Protestant campaigns of the late 1940s, illuminating the position of religious minorities and their paradoxical position in post-Civil War Spain. Excoriated as a ‘foreign’ enemy, Protestantism was discriminated against but its adherents were never treated with the savagery meted out to the political opposition and, in some cases, they received legal and police support. The ecclesiastical authorities promulgated the language of anti-Protestantism but there is little evidence that they convinced the public that Protestants were a real and immediate danger, even before the move towards toleration and religious freedom in the 1960s.

Made Flesh? Gender and Doctrine in Religious Violence in Twentieth-Century Spain: Gender and Doctrine in Religious Violence in Twentieth-Century Spain

The incarnation is the central doctrine of Christianity yet has received little attention from historians. The idea of God made flesh, and the embodiment of the divine in the person of Jesus Christ, distinguishes the Christian religion from other monotheistic faiths and makes gender fundamental to Christianity. From the Reformation, Protestant creeds brought a new emphasis on God as word while Catholicism continued to stress the bodily reality of the incarnation and the physical—and gendered—presence of Jesus, Mary and the saints. In artistic terms, this emphasis on physicality reached its apogee in the Baroque Catholicism of southern Europe, particularly Spain. Holy Week processions, maintained this tradition of acute physical representation into the modern period, even as iconographic traditions changed. This article examines the religious conflicts of twentieth-century Spain in relation to competing beliefs around the incarnation. Catholic violence against protestants (which erupted at certain points in the 1940s and 50s) was often directed against books and bibles while anti-Catholic violence (widespread in the 1930s) was targeted against bodies, both real and unreal. Much of this violence had a sexual theme yet women featured far less commonly than men, particularly priests, in the lists of victims. This article argues that this differential treatment reflects the gendered structures of both Spanish society and Catholic doctrine. Significantly, doctrinal understandings of Mary from the 1850s, made her into not only the most popular icon in the Catholic world but also an increasingly inhuman presence.

Made Flesh? Gender and Doctrine in Religious Violence in Twentieth-Century Spain

The incarnation is the central doctrine of Christianity yet has received little attention from historians. The idea of God made flesh, and the embodiment of the divine in the person of Jesus Christ, distinguishes the Christian religion from other monotheistic faiths and makes gender fundamental to Christianity. From the Reformation, Protestant creeds brought a new emphasis on God as word while Catholicism continued to stress the bodily reality of the incarnation and the physical—and gendered—presence of Jesus, Mary and the saints. In artistic terms, this emphasis on physicality reached its apogee in the Baroque Catholicism of southern Europe, particularly Spain. Holy Week processions, maintained this tradition of acute physical representation into the modern period, even as iconographic traditions changed. This article examines the religious conflicts of twentieth-century Spain in relation to competing beliefs around the incarnation. Catholic violence against protestants (which erupted at certain points in the 1940s and 50s) was often directed against books and bibles while anti-Catholic violence (widespread in the 1930s) was targeted against bodies, both real and unreal. Much of this violence had a sexual theme yet women featured far less commonly than men, particularly priests, in the lists of victims. This article argues that this differential treatment reflects the gendered structures of both Spanish society and Catholic doctrine. Significantly, doctrinal understandings of Mary from the 1850s, made her into not only the most popular icon in the Catholic world but also an increasingly inhuman presence.