ABSTRACT
Historians who base their account of the Catholic Church’s relations with the Second Republic firmly but narrowly on the legislative record experience little difficulty in presenting the Church as the victim of gratuitous attack between the summer of 1931 and the end of 1933. 1 While the separation of Church and state, the introduction of civil marriage and divorce and even the gradual ending of state subvention of the clergy might be regarded as the profoundly distasteful but inevitable, and therefore ultimately acceptable, concomitants of the new regime, other measures belonged to a quite different category. In particular the disbanding of the Society of Jesus, the proposed introduction of a uniform state system of secular education and the prohibition of all members of religious congregations from teaching, constituted a direct assault on the ordinary rights of the Church and its members—an assault made all the more radical and indefensible for being mounted in and through the constitution itself. 2 Juxtaposing the legislation of the Constituent Cortes with executive decisions from the very early days of the Republic, most dramatically the irresponsibly slow and evidently unwilling reaction to the burning of churches and convents in May 1931, 3 gives added sharpness to this version of events. The Church, itself willing to negotiate and to accommodate—as demonstrated by the Vatican, the nuncio Tedeschini, and the acting head of the Spanish hierarchy Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer—was provoked into a defensive hostility to the sectarian governments and dominant parties of the first bienio which led naturally to its later general opposition (with conspicuous but limited exceptions) to the whole Republican side in the Civil War. 4
