From National Catholicism to Romantic Love: The Politics of Love and Divorce in Franco's Spain

In the early 1970s, when the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) was coming to an end, some Catholic intellectuals began to defend people's right to end their failed marriages and seek happiness with a new partner. In so doing, they recognised that love was the primary purpose of marriage; if it was absent the union ceased to be valid. These intellectuals thus broke with a discourse that had until then been deep-seated in both Catholic theology and Francoist morals and laws. According to these, love was only a secondary end of marriage and the conjugal union was indissoluble, leaving people no choice but to tolerate it if it was an unhappy one.

Man of the Theatre: Stage Performances of T. S. Eliot’s Work in Spain (1949–2016)

T. S. Eliot’s presence in Spanish theatres has taken various forms. His verse drama enjoyed a relative popularity in the late 1940s and in the 1950s: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party were staged by student and amateur groups, “chamber” companies and even a national theatre. Reviews were ambivalent, most of them finding fault with the plays’ poetic density as an impediment for performance. Although, as a conservative Anglo-Catholic, Eliot was a priori an unproblematic author for the Francoist establishment and its censorship, critics loyal to Spanish National Catholicism were uncomfortable with the tragic fatalism of The Family Reunion, or with the non-judgemental treatment of adultery in The Cocktail Party. When Eliot’s plays were losing their appeal from the late 1950s onwards, only Murder in the Cathedral was occasionally performed in Spain. More recently, intermedial transpositions and dramatizations of Eliot’s poetry have consolidated his image as a great influential poet whose drama is a rarity.

Racism, Hispanidad and social hierarchy in medicalpsychiatric thought during early Francoism. The work by Misael Bañuelos (1936-1941)

A range of discourse and racial proposals are analyzed and confronted in the article that were pursued from within Medicine and Psychiatry during early Francoism. In particular, Misael Bañuelo’s openly biologistic vision that was influenced by the racial theories put forward by Nazism are discussed. His confrontation with the racial conception sustained by followers of Hispanidad (Spanishness) and National Catholicism are analyzed, especially that with Vallejo Nágera.

Between modernity and tradition: the formation of a psychoanalytical culture during the Franco dictatorship

The aim of this work is to analyze the process by which psychoanalysis categories joined scientific and popular culture in Francoism. To do so, we will start with the criticism and reinterpretations that different experts did on Freud’s theory to adapt it to the new political-social context. This analysis will allow us to show how reappropriation and signification of a progressive and modern theory was achieved based on the doctrinal principles of national-Catholicism. From here on, we will analyze the incorporation of psychoanalytic language and ideas into several mass media, confirming the consolidation of psychoanalysis as a cultural framework in Spain.

The cultural significance of physics and evolution in Francoist Spain: continuity and development in the autarchic period

Science took on several distinct uses and meanings under Francoism. It was exhibited as a token of intellectual prowess, deployed as a mighty diplomatic tool, applied as a resource for industry, and invoked in support of National Catholicism. However, in order to successfully fulfill all these roles, science had first to be cleansed and purified, for it was historically bound to materialism, atheism, and positivism. Physics had developed a mechanical worldview that precluded spiritual agency, and the theory of evolution had deprived man of his privileged place in nature. Could these developments be reversed? Classical physics would not easily serve the needs of the new National Catholic state, but modern physics might do, acting as a model and a tool for biological reasoning. In this paper we describe the various attempts by Spanish scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals to enlist modern physics and a revised version of evolution in the construction of the new regime. They strove to show their spiritual value, to sever them from a soul-less modernity, and to reinstate them within a grand universal Catholic tradition. We discuss the import of their arguments for the simultaneous debates about time, space, matter, life, and evolution, exploring the affinities and tensions between the inert and the living world.

W obliczu (post)prawdy, czyli inna historia frankistowskiego Patronato de Protección a la Mujer w esejach Consuelo Garcíi del Cid Guerry

Facing the (Post)Truth or Alternative History of Francoist Board for the Protection of Women in Essays by Consuelo García del Cid Guerra The paper is an attempt at shedding light on the unknown actions of Spanish Board for the Protection of Women. In Francoist Spain, this organization was originally founded to control and to dignify morality of “fallen women” in order to reeducate them in accordance with the National Catholicism ideology propagated by the Francoists. Although the aim of this powerful institution was to reeducate young women, many of them were hidden away in interments and suffered from different kinds of abuse. The violence applied against them was covered up and their voices silenced by authorities. The history of young women, completely unknown among Spanish society, was revealed and denounced by García del Cid Guerra. A former victim, she is the author of three political essays: Ruega por nosotras (2015), Las desterradas hijas de Eva (2012), and La niña del rincón (2018), books on which this article is based to present a different history of the Board for the Protection of Women, remembered by its young victims.

Polish Catholic Bishops, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy

The alliance of the Polish Catholic Church with the Law and Justice (PiS) government has been widely reported and resulted in significant benefits for the Church. However, beginning in mid-2016, the top church leadership, including the Episcopal Conference, has distanced itself from the government and condemned its use of National Catholicism as legitimation rhetoric for the government’s malpractices in the fields of human rights and democracy. How to account for this behavior? The article proposes two explanations. The first is that the alliance of the PiS with the nationalist wing of the Church, while legitimating its illiberal refugee policy and attacks on democratic institutions of the government, further radicalized the National Catholic faction of the Polish Church and motivated a reaction of the liberal and mainstream conservative prelates. The leaders of the Episcopate, facing an empowered and radical National Catholic faction, pushed back with a doctrinal clarification of Catholic orthodoxy. The second explanatory path considers the transnational influence of Catholicism, in particular of Pope Francis’ intervention in favor of refugee rights as prompting the mainstream bishops to reestablish the Catholic orthodoxy. The article starts by tracing the opposition of the Bishops Conference and liberal prelates to the government’s refugee and autocratizing policies. Second, it describes the dynamics of the Church’s internal polarization during the PiS government. Third, it traces and contextualizes the intervention of Pope Francis during the asylum political crisis (2015–2016). Fourth, it portrays their respective impact: while the Pope’s intervention triggered the bishops’ response, the deepening rifts between liberal and nationalist factions of Polish Catholicism are the ground cause for the reaction.

’Oh, of course, one accepts the Gospels, naturally’: Subversive Use of the Bible in Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote

When Graham Greene wrote Monsignor Quixote (published in 1982), one of his aims was to reflect critically on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spain of the late 1970s, as well as on the support this institution offered to the former dictatorship of Franco within the so called ‘National Catholicism.’ In this novel, the reader witnesses the evolution of the protagonist, Father Quixote, from a religious living a complacent life in a small village in La Mancha to a priest in rebellion against the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Spain. Drawing upon Gerard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, I will examine Greene’s use of different religious texts to fight a model of conservative Catholic Church that he rejects. I will focus my analysis especially on the intertextual and metatextual references to the Gospels that the Bishop of La Mancha/Father Herrera and Father Quixote make in their dialogic interactions, references that portray their different vision of the role that the Church should have in society.