ABSTRACT
Of all the problems that confronted the Spanish Republic, that of religion
was the most thorny. In a memoir written after the Civil War, Jime´nez de
Asu´a enumerated four major tasks that the Republic could not evade:
military reform (which he characterized as a ‘technical reform’), the Religious
Question (a ‘liberal reform’), the Agrarian Problem (a ‘delayed/late reform’)
and the Regional Problem (a ‘patriotic reform’)1 and, of these, it was the
Religious Question that aggravated tension the most and led to the crisis of
the regime and the Civil War. Indeed, amongst historians and politicians it is a matter over which schools of thought are still bitterly divided.
