William J. Callahan

The Evangelization of Franco's ‘New Spain’

On 20 May 1939 General Francisco Franco attended the solemn Te Deum service held at the royal church of Santa Barbara to celebrate the triumph of nationalist over republican Spain. Surrounded by the symbols of Spains Catholic past, including the standard used by Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto, the general presented his “sword of victory” to Cardinal Goma, archbishop of Toledo and primate of the Spanish church. 1 The ceremony symbolized the close ties between church and state formed by three years of civil war. The new regime had given proof of its commitment to the church even before the conflict had ended, and the clergy now looked forward to the implementation of a full range of measures in education, culture, and the regulation of public morality, measures that had last been seen in Spain over a century before. 2

New Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War: The Gomá Archive

Archivo Goma: Documentos de la Guerra Civil. Edited by Jose Andres Gallego and Anton M. Pazos. Vols. 5-13. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. 2003-10. Vol. 5: Pp. 628; euro47,43; ISBN 978-84-00-08149-2. Vol. 6: Pp. 704; euro49,41; ISBN 978-84-0008222-2. Vol. 7: Pp. 672; euro48,08; ISBN 978-84-00-08302-1. Vol. 8: Pp. 752; euro57,69; ISBN 978-84-00-08335-9. Vol. 9: Pp. 672; euro47,12; ISBN 978-84-00-08429-5. Vol. 10: Pp. 520; euro45,19; ISBN 978-8400-08640-8. Vol. 11: Pp. 584; euro47,12; ISBN 978-84-00-08589-6. Vol. 12: Pp. 784; euro66,35; ISBN 978-84-00-08800-2. Vol. 13: Pp. 488; euro39,42; ISBN 978-84-00-09261-0.)The publication of the final volumes of the archive of Cardinal Isidro Goma y Tomas (1869-1940), archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain dining the Spanish Civil War, concludes one of the most ambitious editorial projects in Spanish ecclesiastical history. Together with the published archive of Cardinal Francisco Vidal y Barraquer, archbishop of Tarragona and effective head of the hierarchy between 1931 and 1935 (Arxiu Vidal i Barraquer: Esglesia i Estât durant la Segonda Repulica Espanyola, 1931-1936, ed. Miquel Batilori and Victor Manuel Arbeloa, 4 vols., Barcelona, 197191), the Goma archive provides a wealth of material for the study of the Spanish Church during the most turbulent period of its modem history.1 Some of the documents have been published previously, particularly those related to the complex and difficult relations between the Holy See and the Francisco Franco regime over the extension of full diplomatic recognition. But the archive covers a broad range of subjects affecting every aspect of ecclesiastical and religious life during the Civil War. There are, to be sure, materials on minor topics such as the cardinals intervention with the Nationalist authorities to expedite the export of olive oil to the Vatican or to secure reduced railway fares for the clergy. Some of the correspondence is formulaic such as the numerous letters of congratulation received by Goma from Spanish and foreign prelates on the occasion of the publication of the Collective Letter (1937) written by the cardinal on behalf of the Spanish hierarchy to the worlds bishops to justify the Nationalist cause as a defense of Christian civilization. But there is abundant documentation on the central issues affecting the Church, including relations with the papacy, the immense task of reconstmction in the former Republican zone where nearly 7000 clergy and religious had perished, the very nature of the Nationalist regime and its ideology, the problem of the Chinchs reaction to the determination of the military to root out the autonomist sympathies of many Basque clergy in one of the countrys most Catholic areas, and the educational role of the Church under Franco.Litde in Gomas background prepared him for the formidable difficulties he would face during the Civil War. Ordained in 1885 for his native Tarragona archdiocese, he served briefly as a parish priest, then received doctorates in theology and canon law. He spent more than two decades as a seminary professor before he assumed diocesan administrative posts and was promoted to the obscure bishopric of Tarazona in 1927. Pope Pius XI, using the power to appoint bishops freely as a result of the separation of church and state by the Republic, surprised ecclesiastical pundits of the day by appointing Goma archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1933. It is not entirely clear why the pope did not follow the customary practice of naming the prelate of a larger diocese to the most important position in the hierarchy.But Goma possessed important strengths. Although he was sixty-six when the war began and suffered from bouts of poor health, he worked tirelessly at the monumental task before him. His correspondence with bishops, clergy, government officials, generals, diverse figures in the Vatican, and even individuals of modest social standing reached impressive proportions. …

Book Review: Sobreviure a Barcelona: Dones, pobresa i assistència al segle XVIII

attested to by employers and other authorities. The freedwoman in this case succeeded in gain ing both a separation and a property settlement from her abusive husband, but in the end she asserted her own honor only through the higher authority of ecclesiastical officials. This superb book complicates the simplistic myth of the Don Juan by showing that common ers valued their honor as much as nobles did, that trials provided a more frequent recourse than duels, and that lost honor could indeed be recovered. In place of the theatrical fictions of the Golden Age, the authors propose a bold research agenda for explaining regional and class varia tions in the honor code and for periodizing changes over time, particularly during the upheavals of the late colonial period. And as that historical drama unfolds, The Faces of Honor is sure of a place at center stage.

Betrayal of the Innocents: Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain by Timothy Mitchell (review)

Betrayal of the Innocents- Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain. By Timothy Mitchell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1998. Pp. vii, 178.

Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned by Stephen Haliczer (review)

39,95 clothbound;

Church, politics, and society in Spain, 1750-1874

16,50 paperback.) Interpretations of the past sweeping over the centuries often make fascinating reading. But for historians moved by the traditional evidentiary canons of their craft, such grand sallies are the cause of some discomfort. This provocative study by a highly regarded social anthropologist combines the insights of his field with psychological theory and a dose of history to argue that Spanish Catholicism developed over the centuries a powerful set of values identified as authoritarian sexual repression. The imposition of these values on society, he maintains, was damaging to individuals and encouraged patterns of sexual abuse by the clergy ranging from the use of the confessional in the sixteenth century to seduce penitents to cases of clerical sexual abuse brought to light in contemporary Spain. That such cases occurred in the distant and recent past is beyond dispute. Nor is there any doubt that the Spanish Churchs traditional dark and pessimistic view of human nature in its sexual dimension verged on the obsessional, perhaps more so in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier times. To what extent this obsession was a uniquely Spanish phenomenon, as the author argues, is less certain. Similar concerns with upholding rigorous morality in sexual matters were scarcely absent from Protestant Europe until it was submerged by the powerful secularizing currents of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The thesis that the five centuries considered in some detail in this study are connected through an unchanging pattern of authoritarian sexual repression and the clerical abuse that accompanied it rests primarily on psychological arguments that may well have merit, although difficult to prove from an historical perspective. It is more difficult to see a direct historical connection between the abuse of the confessional brought to light by the Inquisition in tile sixteenth century and recent cases of sexual abuse by priests. The author appears to assume that the clergy formed an undifferentiated mass over the centuries when, in fact, it underwent as dramatic a transformation as civil society during the nineteenth century. 711-ie chaotic recruitment of priests, the vastly uneven levels of clerical education, the extraordinarily diverse social backgrounds of the clergy and the attraction of the priesthood for those inspired less by religious motives than the prospect of having a roof over ones head and food on the table in early modern Spain stand in sharp contrast to the more tightly controlled clerical caste formed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would have been useful for the legitimate indictment of abuses to have been placed in the context of the socio-economic back-grounds of priests and the particular social conditions of each period discussed. The fact is that historians know little of the state of the lower clergy for both the early modern and modern periods. …

Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard.

Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned. By Stephen Haliczer. [Studies in the History of Sexuality.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. vii, 267.

Espana en la crisis de 1898: De la gran depresion a la modernizacion economica del siglo XX

49.95.) The use of the confessional as an instrument of seduction, largely of female penitents, fell under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition between 1530 and 1819. It investigated such cases with its customary efficiency down to the most intimate sexual details. This fascinating study of the Inquisitions determined campaign against priests who violated the sanctity of the confessional is at one level an institutional study of the organization and procedures of the tribunal in solicitation cases. But it is also concerned with the sexual mores of clergy and laity following the efforts of the Council of Trent to tighten Church control over morality.The author maintains that from the mid-sixteenth century increased attention was given to the abuse of the confessional as the relative tolerance of irregular sexual conduct among the clergy found in the medieval period gave way after Trent to stricter controls over clerical conduct.The postconciliar Church also gave priority to defending the sanctity of the confessional at a time when the sacrament of penance was subject to withering criticism by Protestant reformers.The Council also exalted the sacraments spiritual importance by stressing the need for more frequent confession and communion in contrast to the once-a-year obligation common in medieval Europe.The author argues that the disciplinary controls imposed on the clergy after Trent and the increased frequency of confession aggravated the solicitation problem among priests no longer able to take advantage of the more lax arrangements of the past as far as sexual conduct was concerned. The study is based on 223 detailed case histories drawn from several regional tribunals, although the author recognizes that these formed only a small part of the total number of accusations because of the loss of inquisitorial records. These micro-histories provide abundant examples of a wide range of sexual practices among accused confessors. The individual cases studied say a good deal about sexual attitudes within the increasingly puritanical moral world of post-Tridentine Catholicism.The sexual pathology of priests functioning within these more restrictive moral confines receives considerable attention. But for the ecclesiastical historian, the authors discussion of the organizational and sociological causes of the phenomenon of solicitation is of greater interest. The poor state of clerical education, at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, the practical appeal of a priestly career for many lacking a religious vocation, and inadequate means of supervision within a clerical establishment of over one hundred thousand are properly considered as contributing factors. It is interesting that the largest number of accused came from the ranks of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans, in which admission standards were notoriously loose well into the eighteenth century. …