American Catholics and Religious Intolerance in Franco’s Spain

Abstract

Roman Catholics in Francoist Spain and in the United States share a common faith, but the history of Catholicism in these two countries followed very different paths. Before key transformations that the Second Vatican Council ushered in, Catholic attitudes towards religious freedom in these two countries were sharply divergent. Each nation’s political system, with its own historical circumstances, was also very different. The United States, for its part, was a democracy in which religious freedom had become a substantial part of its own political tradition. Francisco Franco’s Spain was instead a military dictatorship that some critics mocked as a “National-Catholic” state, if not a “clerical-fascist” regime, as the famous American anti-Catholic author Paul Blanshard once put it. As a result, Catholics in Spain and the United States approached the matter of religious freedom, as well as the closely related issue of the separation between church and state, very differently. However, Vatican II crucial changes radically transformed Spanish Catholics’ attitudes, which eventually resembled American ones.