RECIPIENT OF AN HONOURABLE MENTION FOR THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION'S WALLACE K. FERGUSON PRIZE This book provides a comprehensive history of one of Spain's key institutions during a long and conflictive period. Generations of secular critics saw the modern Spanish Church as a monolithic, efficiently organized institution intent on imposing a highly traditional Catholicism on a society undergoing rapid social, economic, and political change. However, the rise of liberalism, republicanism, socialism, anarchism, and intellectual pluralism challenged the clergy's view that Spain had always been and would always be Catholic. The Church attempted to modernize its strategy by creating trade unions, an expanded school system, agrarian associations, and a modern confessional press, while maintaining its privileges as the established Church of the State until the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. This study examines the reasons behind the Church's failure to recreate the Catholic Spain of a vanished golden age and the consequences of that failure, particularly during the Second Republic, the Civil War of the 1930s and the regime of Francisco Franco. The alliance of Church and State under Franco, although far from being as untroubled as apologists maintained in public, began to break down during the 1960s. The causes of deteriorating relations between the Church and the regime form an important part of the book because they formed the background for an astonishing transformation that saw the Church accept democracy following Franco's death in 1975. Although the Church's adaptation to a pluralistic society was far from smooth, that it happened at all is remarkable, given the historic opposition of a majority of clergy and laity to liberalism, democracy, and intellectual freedom. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William J. Callahan is professor of history at the University of Toronto and fellow at Victoria College. He is the author of numerous works, including Church, Politics and Society in Spain, 1750-1874, winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: ""Callahan has a great deal of experience writing about the intersection of Church and society in the history of Europe. He has a very fair way of treating the Church that is neither pandering nor hostile. He writes with a clear understanding of ecclesiastical culture and seeks to explain the actions of the hierarchy with clarity and insight. This is a very scholarly work with fine apparatus, extensive bibliography and a detailed index. It is unlikely to be outdone for many years to come. This is certainly the most definitive work on the subject available in English. This book is recommended for all academic libraries supporting graduate programs or undergraduate majors in church history.""--Herman A. Peterson, Catholic Library World ""This is a magnificent book. It maintains a commanding view of the Spanish church in its relations with the res publica, with the Vatican, and with society, while at the same time evaluating the different currents within the ranks of clergy and laity. The impressive depth of scholarly analysis is matched by the elegance of William J. Callahan's writing. . . . [A] superb achievement. . . . Callahan has given us a magnificent survey of the church in contemporary Spain.""--Audrey Brassloff, American Historical Review ""Callahan's conclusions are careful and cautious. The clear and very readable prose includes marvelous quotations. The Catholic Church in Spain is absolutely indispensable for anyone interested in the history of Spain or the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Callahan deserves the thanks of all Spanish historians providing a fundamental study that is unquestionably the major work on the topic.""--University of Toronto

This contribution to European historical literature--based on extensive research in Madrid--provides a clear and dispassionate account of successive ecclesiastical-secular conflicts and controversies, and deftly summarizes the diverse ideological and intellectual currents of the times. Nowhere in Europe has the Roman Catholic Church exerted a more mystical hold on the life of a nation than it has in Spain. Yet this hold has not been unchanging or unchallenged. By the mid-eighteenth century the Church was no longer the only legitimate source of authority, the all-pervasive presence that it had been, most forcefully in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Still, its power remained formidable. The Spanish Church imposed standards of conduct over the entire range of society, from the aristocracy to the peasant masses, and it possessed the material resources necessary to maintain an elaborate ecclesiastical network that influenced every aspect of Spanish life. The heart of the book deals with the reactions of the Church to the dramatic, sometimes violent, changes that occurred during the critical nineteenth-century period of national transition from royal absolutism to popular liberalism. The study examines the responses of the Church to the new social and political forces that could no longer be excluded or contained, among them an emergent secular--even anticlerical--culture and a developing capitalism. Callahan demonstrates that these changes engendered resentments and frustrations deep within the ecclesiastical order that persisted well into the twentieth century, notably with the Spanish Church's embrace of Franco.

Of the great European institutions of the Old Regime, the Catholic Church alone survived into the modern world. The Church that emerged from the period of revolutionary upheaval, which began in 1789, and from the long process of economic and social transformation characteristic of the nineteenth century, was very different from the great baroque Church that developed following the Counter-Reformation. These studies of the Church in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germane, Austria, Hungary and Poland on the eve of an era of revolutionary change assess the still intimate relationship between religion and society within the traditional European social order of the eighteenth century. The essays emphasize social function rather than theological controversy, and examine issues such as the recruitment and role of the clergy, the place of the Church in education and poor relief', the importance of popular religion, and the evangelization of a largely illiterate population by the religious orders.