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Spain: religions, landmarks
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The real originality of Spain
was to be, for centuries the meeting
point of three cultures and three religions: Christianity, Judaïsm and
Islam,
under different political
hegemonies and over and above the endemic conflict of the Re-conquest
were enriched by and enriched Europe with their mutual differences:
King Alphonse X, the Wise, gathered together a team of Moslem, Jewish
and Christian... for exemple the
Mudejares masons applied their methods of using brick and
sculptured plaster to the construction of the Gothic Churches. |
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Christians:
95.77%
Catholics: 93.51%
Protestants: 0.91%
Moslems: 1.20%
Jews: 0.13%
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The
religious union was
assured by the conversion of the Arian Visigoths to Catholicism in 589. The
Moslems came back as masters in 718 of almost all the peninsula.
A large
proportion of Christians converted to Islam as well as Moslems of
varying nationalities: Arabs, Syrians and Berbers, founded little colonies in
Spain.
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Abd ar-Rahman III
put to an end a troublesome period, united Moorish Spain and proclaimed himself
Calif
929.
His
reign, 912-961, an epoch of economic prosperity and of cultural splendour ,
marks the peak of Moslem Spain.
The Moslem sovereigns generally
tolerated the Christians and the Jews and encouraged cultural diversity.
Science, medicine and philosophy were flourishing, in particular in Cordoue,
the capital. The Spanish Islamic wise men, such as Averroes, studied the works
of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers , who were translated into Latin
before being diffused into the rest of Europe.
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The rare
Christian enclaves, in the mountainous regions of the North, became powerful
kingdoms. Àt the head of
a group of mountain fighting men, Pelagius even defeated, probably in 722, a
Molem army at Covadonga, a victory which was heralded later as the beginning of
the re-conquest of Spain by Alphonse II (791-842) increased the prestige
of the Asturian monarchy, which from then ongave the Re-conquest the tone of
a “crusade”. |
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Sanche III the
Great, reigned for a time over the whole of Christian Spain (1000-1035),
before his empire was shared between his four sons. Sanche III opened Spanish
society to European influences, such as the monastic reform of Cluny and to
feudalism.
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The accession of Isabelle Ist to the throne of Castille,
in 1474, and her husband
Ferdinand of Aragon, in 1479, "the catholic kings", reunited the
two greatest kingdoms of Spain.
Isabelle
undertook the centralization of power into her hands by the intervention of the
Church.
1492: all the Spanish Jews
were hit with expulsion.
1492: taking of Granada, which fixed the end of the Reconquest...
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St Ignatius of Loyola |
St John of the Cross |
St Theresa of Ávila |
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Charles Quint
made his own the ideals of his grand-parents : the unity of the Catholic world
and the conquest of an empire.
He was assisted in his enterprise by the Jesuit Order founded
in 1540 by
Ignatius of Loyola.
The reign of Philippe II
was one of saints and great mystics: to John of
the Cross and Theresa of Ávila- and was deeply marked by the defence of the
Catholic religion.
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Charles III drove out the Jesuits in 1767. |
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The Left won the elections again in June 1931 and
saw to the adoption of a new Constitution; the new government multiplied
initiatives : it abolished the titles of nobility, modified the penal code,
authorised divorce, separated the Church and the State, banned the
Jesuits, undertook the laicisation of education, attributed an
autonomous statute to Catalonia… |
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Then came the
civil war in Spain 1936-1939.
The political currents of Catholic feeling constituted a heterogeneous whole
ranging from Christian Democracy to corporatist authoritarism.
As for the
phalangists, they embodied a fascist current, secularist and anti monarchist
with the general Franco.
The official ideology of the new power exalted a traditionalist and anti
modernist Spain, founded on the Catholic religion, corporatism, the mythical
evocation of a glorious past and rejection of freemasonry, socialism and
democracy.
Franco obtained, although
slowly, the recognition of the nationalist government by the Vatican,
preoccupied by the lot of the Basque Catholics fighting on the side of the
Republicans, while the Spanish Bishops were quickly engaged in the
anti-republican «crusade». a fifth of the Spanish clergy were thus massacred .
A Concordat was signing with the Vatican in 1953.
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Even before Vatican II,
the Church was no longer the unconditional support of Franco-ism.
In September 1971, the majority of the priests and
Bishops in Spain expressed their regret at the anti-democratic attitude
of the Church before and during the Civil war.
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More and
more clearly at variance with the regime of Franco from the beginning of
the sixties, the Church accepted without great difficulty the new
democratic order.
The Catholic hierarchy were held to a strict neutrality the
constituent elections of 1977.
Let us recall
that the catholic Church was explicitly mentioned in the Constitution,
but that the latter rejected all confessional character of the State.
Catholicism remains the religion of a very great majority of the Spanish
people whatever be their effective practice.
The Catholic
Church plays a quite significant role in the educational system by means
of private establishments.
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| Sources: Encyclopedia Wikipedia, history
web
site in French: http://www.memo.fr
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Spanish Bishops'Conference
http://www.conferenciaepiscopal.es/
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Next page:
Spain Europe |
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