ABSTRACT
To many observers during the late 1930s, the expansion of the Axis powers was closely connected to the development of the Spanish Civil War. Despite the passionate interest of so many writers and intellectuals in the Spanish conflict, scholarly inquiry was delayed by two full decades and, when it finally emerged, coincided chronologically with the development of the 'fascism debate' during the 1960s. In general, fascism as a topic has generated relatively little scholarly interest in Spain itself. The new university generation of the 1960s and 1970s, ideologically conditioned primarily by a sort of second-hand, imported Marxism, was little disposed to curiosity about so confusing a phenomenon as fascism or even the serious study of right-wing authoritarianism in general. The literature on political Catholicism has grown more rapidly that of any other area of Spanish conservatism, but it deals mainly with the Franco regime and virtually none of it attempts to focus specifically on the Catholic relationship to categorical fascism.
