ABSTRACT
Few countries have been more closely identified with Catholicism than Spain. For some, Spaniards and outsiders alike, the Church has been an integral part of the nation’s identity, if not the very basis of that identity. Yet, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Church has been the most controversial institution in the country, struggling to determine how to relate to an emerging liberal society while that society, and the governments to which it gave rise, sought to delimit an acceptable sphere for the Church and religion.
