Gendering Catholicism in Late Modern Spanish History (1854–1923): Research Lines and Debates for a European Dialogue

Introduction

Vitality has been a feature of historical analysis about gender and Catholicism in modern Spain since the beginning of the new millennium (and still is). On the one hand, in the last thirty years, the modern history of women and gender has not only expanded significantly but has also become theoretically and methodologically refined in issues such as gender identity formation, women's historical agency and changing power relations. This has allowed for significant changes in approaching the relationship between women and Catholicism from a historical perspective. The initial vision sustained in the 1980s and 1990s depicted Catholic women as manipulated victims or collaborators of an (unchanging) patriarchal institution, with Catholicism as the most salient hindrance to women's emancipation and one of the reasons why historical feminism was assumed to be weaker and came later to Spain than other (European) countries. ¹ In the mid-1990s, the all-encompassing subordination of women within modern Catholicism was questioned by research into women's agency even within hierarchical and unequal gender frames such as those imposed by the Catholic Church and Catholicism. Nevertheless, emphasis on women's agency and visibility has recently been nuanced by approaches whose interest lies in exploring the specific – but changing and contingent, not structural and unmoving – cultural and discourse framework allowing these women to emerge and act as they did. ² Narrative has, then, been partially transformed by studies engaged more in explanation and description than open evaluation or judgement and gender historical analysis paved the way. In addition, historians have emphasized the centrality of gender meanings and models for understanding Spanish anticlericalism (as well as its centrality and long pervasiveness), as well as a contentious secularization process and the specific response of Catholics and the Catholic Church to it through the ‘religious decomposition’ of modernity. ³

On the other hand, history of religion is also undergoing a dramatic, though difficult, transformation. Again, the weight of the past (Spain was a confessional State from 1939 to 1978 and has been asymmetrically non-denominational since then) and its legacy should not be underestimated when exploring classical approaches to the place of the Church and Catholicism in Spanish culture, society and politics. ⁴ Long trapped by historical confrontation (Spain's particular culture war) between secularist and anticlerical versus clerical forces, historians have tended to uncritically reproduce each view in their narratives, reinforcing different memories of past conflict, especially the civil war and Francoism, a central theme in the public and political arena. Recently, historian Javier Ramón has perfectly put words to this idea: ‘for a long time, the history of religion in Spain has navigated between Charybdis and Scylla, between apology and critic, hagiography and diatribe’. ⁵ Though not an easy task and further complicated by the conservative turn in the Spanish Church towards strengthening intra-ecclesiastical viewpoints, some historians have deemed it worthy to develop an academic historiography attentive to this religious factor in modern Spanish history, following the example of other European countries. ⁶ To study the period in question, two directions have been pursued: first, the examination of the uninterrogated reproduction of anticlerical/clerical imaginaries in historical narratives and their analysis (as far as possible) as stories that must be deconstructed and that participated in shaping either political historical subjects or their confrontation; second, the engagement in European and worldwide debates on religion and secularization, and the examination of how they can inform or illuminate the Spanish case. Indeed, the questioning of the secularization narrative (and more recently, the criticism of an all-explaining feminization thesis) as a theoretical framework have been two of the main challenges and drivers of change for another way of looking at Spain's religious past. ⁷ To sum up, these two especially dynamic areas of historical studies have come together to offer interesting contributions to the interpretations of modern Spanish history in a broader European and Western frame (attentive to specificity as much as to shared historical trends and historiographical debates). ⁸

My aim here is to present inner controversies connected to broader (beyond national and European borders) debates around the feminization of Spanish Catholicism throughout the nineteenth century, the changes in the gender discourse of Catholicism and its interactions with liberal modernity, the relationship between Catholicism and liberalism in the construction of nineteenth-century ideals of femininity and masculinity, the potential re-masculinization of Catholicism (or the Catholicization of masculinity), Catholic lay mobilization on the grounds of modern sexual difference and historical interpretation and explanation of so-called Catholic feminism. As I will show throughout the article, this line of research is, in turn, helping us gain new insights into the phenomena and discourses shaping the contemporary history of Spain, such as secularization, liberalism, modernity and nation building.

Finally, we might consider what Spain's historical past, after years of being nurtured and enriched by different national historiographies, might offer other European approaches to their respective pasts in order to understand processes such as the deployment of secularist discourse, the transformation of Catholic rhetoric on women and men (and on sexuality and sexual ‘deviance’) and the mobilization (and, in the process, the construction of gendered Catholic identities) of lay women and men who resisted secularization.

Liberalism, Catholicism and Modern Spanish Women

In 1856, during the drafting of a liberal constitution, Spanish members of parliament debated an article on religious tolerance for the first time (the previous constitutions of 1812, 1837 and 1845 having asserted the religious unity of the country, that is, the catholicity of the State). ⁹ Against the possibility of approving this article, different anti-liberal advocates of Catholicism as the only truth guiding human life expressed their rejection via petitions to the Government and through the Catholic press. It was also the first time that ‘Catholic ladies’, given their elitist social position (whether pedigree nobles or nouveau riches), took a stand in the public sphere in defence of the Catholic faith and Church. ¹⁰ A few years later, in 1859–1860, they supported Pope Pius IX, opposed the recognition of Italy as a kingdom by the Spanish Government under Isabel II, and fought for children's religious education. ¹¹ The next occasion for progressive liberals to object to secularist politics was after the liberal revolution of 1868, when the 1869 Constitution included an article on religious freedom and other legal measures such as civil marriage in 1870 and the secularization of cemeteries. And in the First Republic (1873–1874) republican political sectors proposed separating Church and State for the first time. ¹² Legitimation of their petitions and involvement in this public discussion was not only the right to give an opinion on Catholicism's place in the nation and State, which concerned the Catholic women especially as mothers, the moral axis of Christian families, and instillers of values and customs. Equality and freedom also had a place in their rhetoric: as equal souls, rational beings, free mothers and ‘compañeras’ considered emancipated by Catholicism from slavery, compared with other religions. ¹³ The supposedly strong and long-lasting link between women and Catholicism made it a haven for female dignity (women had been saved by Christianity through ecclesiastical marriage from sexual slavery), for which women should be deeply grateful.

Through the work of M. Cruz Romeo, Raúl Mínguez and Diego Palacios, we know the origins and evolution of modern Catholic women as a collective subject and agent for mobilization in defence of the place of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in politics and society against the secularization process. In Romeo’s view, since 1851 women’s involvement in the re-Christianization drive (exploiting and reinforcing their assumed nature of greater religiosity and loyalty to the Church) was part of a broader, European project against materialism and secularism led by the Church seeking to retrieve the spaces and power lost after the liberal revolution. Through novels, the press and newspaper serials or serialized novels (folletines), the Catholic clergy and lay men outlined the strong woman: a new (modern) Catholic woman called to play a leading role in the counter-secularist battle as a redeemer of indifferent men. ¹⁴

Until recently scholars had analyzed the gender discourse of Spanish Catholicism as being overtly informed by unchanging, misogynist rhetoric, rooted in the principles and spirit of the Council of Trent. But the Church was not mobilizing a premodern female subject. As historian Raúl Mínguez has shown, a transformation from misogyny (though it still pervaded Catholic Church rhetoric) to a discourse on femininity deeply influenced by liberal modern gender ideals, such as maternity and female moral superiority, took place from 1851 onwards. ¹⁵ The grounding of this modern liberal, gender imaginary was the formulation of a specific conceptualization of sexual difference (human beings were divided into two sexes whose differences were completely irreducible). From 1844 onwards, this conceptualization became embedded, once liberal political and institutional life had settled after the liberal defeat of the Carlists in the first civil war (1834–1840). ¹⁶ By 1851, when a Concordat was signed between the Vatican and the Liberal State under Isabel II, Spanish Catholicism entered into a tense dialogue with this liberal gender discourse. The result was the reformulation of Catholic gender discourse so that it shared traits with liberal discourse, such as the central place of maternity and domesticity in defining true femininity, and the acceptance of bourgeois culture. ¹⁷ The writings of Antonio Claret (who kept the centrality of Counter-Reformation values, such as the prevalence of celibacy and virginity over marriage, as well as his pessimistic notion of female nature) also revealed something new: the centrality of the mother as educator and diffuser of moral values in society. ¹⁸ In that context, modern sexual difference was gradually accepted (and adapted) by Spanish Catholics in the late nineteenth century. Although Catholicism offered other options, such as the convent and celibacy, motherhood was women's primary destiny (deriving from God's design and their essential nature), and the strong link between women and religiosity was shared by both liberalism and Catholicism.

Besides this new Catholic gender rhetoric based on women’s identity as mothers, pillars of the family and advocates of Catholic values and morals, scholars have called attention to another constituent element of Catholic discourse, which facilitated women’s public agency, and was in turn criticized by progressive liberals. A more fluid understanding of the separation of spheres than that assumed by liberals and republicans, as well as the all-pervasive nature of religion not restricted to the private realm, framed an action conceived and shown as religious beyond politics: a question of belief and not of political opinion. ¹⁹ Catholics overtly rejected the liberal–secularist mandate of cloistering religion in the private sphere and saw no reason not to mobilize women out of it. This promising and innovative interpretation of changing Catholic discourse on women and gender in the nineteenth century has participated in, as well as taken advantage of, a new way of looking at the relation between Catholicism and liberalism/modernity. Beyond the confrontation (explicitly declared by actors’ perceptions and motivation) is the suggestion of a focus allowing for mutual influence and entanglement – a focus which has provided nuance to the master narrative structured around the invariability and homogeneity of Catholic thought on women in nineteenth-century Spain, as well as its constant resistance to modern and liberal principles. In the debate around the historical relations between modernity and Catholicism, positions reproducing confrontation and dichotomy (as understood by secularists and anticlericals) have been nuanced by analysis that pinpoints the entanglement and transformation throughout the historical process. Rather than being used for explanatory purposes, this dichotomous image should be analyzed as part of the liberal and republican imagination, which was not completely shared by Catholics. Moreover, this picture does not fit well with recent Spanish historical literature engaged in moving away from the paradigm of failure and backwardness (also applied to the liberal revolution) adopted by the classical vision of Spanish history, though it shows caution about a pendulum swing towards declaring historical processes as successful.

Following the critical stance of the secularization thesis, Catholicism, like other confessions, did not become marginal with the advance of liberal principles and institutions. On the contrary, Catholics (clergy and laity) responded to them by launching a project of re-Catholicization through an adjustment and reformulation to modernity. Catholicism walked its own way to modernity, adopting and adapting not only resources and patterns of mobilization but also ideas and categories of liberal modernity such as the modern nation and modern sexual difference. ²⁰ Three especially successful terms have been coined to refer to this Catholic reshuffling in the modern world and to the situation deriving from the confrontation with secularist drives in Spain: ‘religious recomposition of modernity’, ‘defensive modernity’ and ‘contentious secularization’. ²¹

Finally, discussions on gender, Catholicism and liberalism have been linked to debates on Spanish nationalism and modern nation-building processes. Until very recently this process had been evaluated as weak because, among other reasons, Church and Catholic milieus were forces that curbed modern nationalization efforts and national identity construction, given their premodern character and the loyalties in conflict emerging from combining nation-State/Vatican authorities. ²² Recent studies have demonstrated that from 1851 onwards, at least, Catholics have contributed to forging a specific version (Catholic) of the modern Spanish nation. ²³ A vision which also contained a gender dimension, perfectly represented and cultivated in the novels of Fernán Caballero (the pseudonym adopted by Cecilia Böhl de Faber, the daughter of Nicolas Böhl de Faber, who introduced Romanticism to Spain, and the realist Frasquita Larrea). The model of Catholic women presented by Caballero was not (or not only) the product of old Catholic discourse, but a result of the articulation, after the liberal revolutions, of a nationalist discourse in which women appeared as regenerative forces of the Spanish nation. ²⁴ This became clear at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Catholic lay movements were boosted by national re-Christianization as a way of regenerating the nation in crisis after the loss of the last colonies in 1891.

Feminization and Re-Masculinization of Spanish Catholicism? From Discourse to Mobilization in the Age of Contentious Secularization

One of the pervasive elements of the gender discourse of Spanish Catholicism from the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War was the imaginary of religiosity as a natural attribute of women (particularly of Spanish women, who were supposedly the epitome of Catholic faith). ²⁵ Yet the belief that women were by nature more religious than men also pervaded liberal, republican, anticlerical and clerical discourse and was a good example of an imaginary shared by different political cultures, and of the still meaningful explanatory usefulness of this discursive conception of feminization. ²⁶ In fact, the feminization of Catholicism by assigning more religiosity to women (by practically the entire spectrum of nineteenth-century political cultures) and moral superiority emanating from faith and respect for dogma, has been central to exploring Spanish anticlericalism, but also to explaining Catholicism's political and religious mobilizations of women until the interwar years, as much as anticlerical and republican resistance to granting the franchise to women. ²⁷ Opposition to women's enfranchisement was heavily influenced in the early decades of the twentieth century by this imaginary of women being more Catholic in essence. It was thought that they would give their vote to clericals or right-wing parties that defended the Church and its dogma, thereby threatening the implementation of a secular project or political regime (as happened during the parliamentary debates for drafting the Constitution of the Second Republic in 1931). ²⁸ For anticlericalism, Pilar Salomón has shown (through her analysis of anticlerical and republican press and fin-de-siècle writings) how modern gender notions informed by this religious divide pervaded anticlerical rhetoric about women as a supposedly less autonomous group that was easily influenced and subject to manipulation by the clergy. Anticlericals created the prototype of the ‘beata’ (pious or devout woman), a derogatory term, represented as a repulsive, threatening and disruptive figure (sometimes animalized as a raven). The ‘beata’ was criticized for unnaturally devoting her time and energy to the Church and its rituals, neglecting her duties at home and was suspected of a sexual morality unfitted to marital and reproductive rules because of her dangerous proximity to the clergy. Though priests could sometimes be represented as effeminate, they were seen as other men threatening household harmony by provoking women's desires and affections. ²⁹

Last but not least, one of the central features of Catholic discourse mobilizing laywomen in defence of the Church from the period 1854–1856 to the First World War was this objectification of women as essentially more religious, more pious and more devout than men. This imaginary became especially powerful at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Catholic lay movement experienced a particular drive, articulating its identity around the idea of a besieged Church, which had to be protected from what were perceived as increasing onslaughts of secularization, responding to anticlerical protests and secular reforms by the Liberal Party (aimed at limiting the proliferation of religious orders and the hegemony of Catholic principles and dogma in schools). ³⁰ This mobilization also contained an answer to the national identity crisis triggered by the loss of the last overseas colonies in 1898 (Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba) and by a deeply corrupted representative political system. Women, long represented as naturally faithful, more intensely religious and therefore more fitted to defending the Church, were reserved an important place not only in this battle for re-Christianization but also in a particular (Catholic) project of Spanish national regeneration, to counter the growth of secularism in the counter-secularist battle, guiding men (and society in general) back to the Church and faith. ³¹

Important changes have been pointed out in relation to nineteenth-century mobilization. Collective action was represented by associations of a different kind (new ones connected to local Catholic Leagues and ‘Social Defence’ Centres or politicized old pious, devotional and charitable associations such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul, tertiary religious orders and congregations). While in 1868 only one association sent signed petitions and statements to the Spanish parliament, in 1906 it was mainly associations that did so. Devotional associations became, as Javier Ramón put it, ‘politicization spaces for women’. ³² In addition, at the very beginning of the era of mass politics (universal male suffrage was granted in 1890), as a group, women became subjects to be claimed by different and competing political causes, and also the Catholic cause. In fact, one of the central elements of anticlerical/clerical confrontation was women's attraction to each of their causes – the fight for the ‘female soul’, according to Max Turman. ³³ Anticlericals tried to construct a female subject emancipated from clergy and dogma (delinking female nature from religiosity), while clericals insisted on the benefits Catholicism had brought women since their supposed liberation from ‘slavery’ by Jesus Christ.

Though women had no right to vote (and did not fight for it because a fraudulent and corrupt functioning of the liberal electoral system had contributed considerably to the discredit of suffrage), mass politics pushed them to become involved, not without tension and hesitation, in electoral battles and in new modalities of public action and protest such as meetings and demonstrations. ³⁴ As arguments deployed in fin-de-siècle feminist debate, women, still not corrupted by the public sphere, were to leave the home in order to provide political and social (national) regeneration. ³⁵ In this sense, Rerum Novarum not only allowed Catholic participation in politics but also encouraged fighting against the human impact of economic liberalism (and socialism as its solution) through social action and social reform. A new feature of these laywomen associations, one that became particularly significant in Catholic women's associations in the early part of the century, was to be their social engagement on behalf of women workers through women's Catholic Unions and other ‘social’ initiatives. This space for social intervention, for which women had to develop special skills and awareness, was consciously understood as a broadening of their field of action through the projection of female and domestic virtues on to the social and public sphere. ³⁶

The path from an almost exclusively pious and devotional agency to a social and political one not only entailed new activities but also a new subject: the militant and the ‘social mother’. ³⁷ These were the subjects who were to come to terms with the feminist debate and the discussion on women’s civil and political rights intensified by the social and cultural impact of the First World War (though Spain did not take part in the war, society became polarized around Germanophile/Alliedophile positions). ³⁸ As several studies have shown, under the direction of the open-minded Cardinal Guisasola, these women created and sustained a national association (Acción Católica de la Mujer, 1919) whose main aims were more social than religious, including ‘solving women's problems’, improving women's culture and education, defending women workers against employer abuse, and ‘representing Spanish women in the face of public opinion and government’. Moreover, these women became involved in the debate on women's suffrage and the discussion on women's participation in formal politics. ³⁹ Catholic feminism was the term used by some of the members of the Acción Católica de la Mujer in an attempt to reconcile Catholicism and certain feminist demands as an alternative to socialist, liberal and neutral (non-denominational) feminist associations at a national level. ⁴⁰

Debate has arisen around the causes behind this mobilization and around the true feminist nature of Catholic feminism. Discussion has allowed a productive move towards theoretical (and epistemological) reflections on discourse workings, subject formation and historical agency. ⁴¹ Whereas some historians have explained Catholic women's involvement exclusively as a result of the clergy and the bishops’ manipulation strategies for women's submission and support (in a complementary role of victims and instruments of a patriarchal plan connected to right-wing political interests), ⁴² others have emphasized their agency and the different possibilities, such as their entering the public sphere and reclaiming political citizenship, provided by religious commitment in a very restrictive context. ⁴³ Neither explanation is completely satisfactory. The first offers an all-encompassing instrumentalist (leaving out contingency and variability) understanding of discourse, action and identity, in a sort of reproduction of the anticlerical and socialist views on women's consciousness through manipulation or brainwashing by the clergy. The second, with its emphasis on agency, could have celebrated women's visibility and actions (as in other historical situations) and superseded the analysis of power relations (both with regard to men and to other women). Furthermore, that this agency was being enacted by a female subject whose motivations and desires are the same or similar to ours might have implied a misunderstanding of the specific conditions that make agency possible. A way out of this impasse might be to approach those women and their agency as a result of a complex, unforeseen, changing and intertwined discourse on gender, religious and nationalist differences. ⁴⁴ Rather than asking whether Catholic rhetoric facilitated women's emancipation or to what extent, we should explore why historically specific actions, identities, mobilizations and subjects took shape without overlooking the changing configurations of discipline, authority and regulation as mechanisms of power.

Similarly, Catholic feminism has been exclusively interpreted as an orchestrated response by the ecclesiastical hierarchy to neutralize feminist and women's emancipation movements. Thus, it has been generally understood in a reactive manner. A dissenting interpretative path has emerged since the publication in 1994 of the pathbreaking article on Spanish feminism by Mary Nash. Considering the particular national socio-political context in which feminism evolved, Nash redefined it as ‘social feminism’, demanding women's social welfare rather than political citizenship. Thanks to this term, feminist debate and experiences much richer than ever before imagined emerged from the past, so that early twentieth-century Spanish feminism is no longer conceived as extremely weak or virtually non-existent – one current of social feminism developed in social-Catholic and Catalanist milieus. ⁴⁵ The challenge in this case, given that a group of Catholic women used the term feminism instead of refuting or avoiding it, is to scrutinize what they meant by it and what their pursuits were, and to explain how it emerged and changed.

Returning to the concept of religious feminization, though I agree that the alleged feminization theory should be nuanced and reassessed, the discursive approach evolved here has facilitated exploration of the grounds for the changing and increasingly religious/political nature of women's mobilization and of modern political engagement. Moreover, it has opened questions and called attention to objects of enquiry which are still pending more detailed and in-depth research in Spanish historical writing. Compared with other historiographies, the study of the growth of female congregations devoted to an active life (education, charity, the poor and health care) has not developed a strong line of research partly because gaining access to congregational and Church archives continues to be difficult. ⁴⁶ Raúl Mínguez contends that, although there were many more nuns than members of the clergy because they were less affected by liberal exclaustrations resulting from confiscation, foundational fever after the Concordat and the religious revival under the Bourbon Restoration in 1876 was weaker in Spain than in France or Italy. ⁴⁷ Beyond quantitative conclusions, Maitane Ostolaza recently observed that, for congregations devoted to education, subjectivity, religiosity, devotions and relations between individuals and the Church are under-analyzed aspects worthy of further exploration. The challenge here rests on how to interpret these subjects, actions and the project in which they were engaged, and how to link them to broader theoretical debates on subject formation, historical agency and contingent power relations. For Ostolaza, Catholic schools provided possibilities for autonomy, responsibility and social influence for the women involved in them. At the same time, they contributed to shaping modern women through education, by establishing the domesticity model and simultaneously contributing to fracturing it. ⁴⁸ Another line of research meriting investigation is a gendered transnational focus for the study of a religion which has reinforced its supranational character in modern times. The circulation of press, books (interestingly the cultural politics of translation), people and, with them, gender models, and the impact on Spanish Catholicism of an international (gendered) associative life is only now being explored. In a declining but not dead colonial context, civilizing experiences by Spanish Catholics (predominantly nuns) are completely unknown. Once again, theoretical discussion should not be neglected, but welcomed, in order to interpret women's agency in a context both of strict gender norms and of colonial rule and imposition. ⁴⁹

From what has been outlined above, the feminization of Spanish Catholicism still seems useful and relevant as an explanation of central historical developments in Spain concerning the diverse workings of the religious factor in moulding subjects and socio-political practices. Moreover, a rigorous approach to the feminization of Catholicism does not preclude research on men attracted by and involved in Catholicism or on masculinity models, as some scholars have suggested. ⁵⁰ In fact, one of the central terms emerging from the studies on Christian masculinities, re-masculinization, rests on the assumption that a previous religious feminization had taken place (or had been perceived) in the framework of different confessions, to which Churches, clergy and laity responded from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Neither should it prevent the exploration of the historical specificity of power relations in the Church and the changing definitions of sexual difference (and its legitimizing foundations) and religion/morality as a mechanism of exclusion and subordination, as ways of creating historically specific subjects and agencies (not necessarily understood as moved by the will to resist patriarchal structures). For this second objection, it has been correctly stated that feminization did not evolve in all the spheres of religious practice: male dominance was constantly reflected and reassessed through the hierarchical power of the clergy at different levels (from the Vatican to the parochial milieus) but also through a majority of laymen populating areas of social and political action in defence of Catholic interests, values and beliefs. ⁵¹

Spanish historians have just begun to explore modern Catholic masculinities attentive to these and other debates on the history of masculinities in other Christian confessions in Europe. ⁵² Two outstanding conclusions have been drawn by this incipient research on Catholic discourse on men in modern Spain, which could hopefully contribute to filling the void of studies in ‘other countries’, ‘not least from the Latin parts of the Western world’, noted by Yvonne Maria Werner. ⁵³ The first is that women received a great deal of attention from Catholic writers from the mid-nineteenth century on, whereas men were not the focus of interest (except for priests). Romeo considers ‘Catholic agreement introduced by Spanish liberalism’ as the reason for this lack of interest. Unlike France (where a Catholic masculinity had emerged in the 1830s before the revolutionary one), only in 1868, when this agreement between Church and State broke off, did a new interest in mobilizing men emerge. ⁵⁴ In any case, the prevalent image of men shaped by Catholic rhetoric 1850–1906 (see neo-Catholic authors such as Gabino Tejado) was that of spiritual weakness, uncontrolled passions, neglect of family life and indifference to or distance from religion as a result of the impact of secularization and atheist ideologies on men's already natural propensity to them. ⁵⁵ Embedded in a modern understanding of sexual difference, which supposed that (Catholic/all Spanish) women would essentially become strong religious women, the call for women to bring men to faith and to the Church continued in the first decade of the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the 1903 elections, the Jesuit Luis María Ortiz invited ‘señoras’ to ‘drag them from their apathy and throw them on to the streets against the enemies of God’. ⁵⁶

A significant change took place at the end of the nineteenth century when press and publicists showed a new and explicit interest in mobilizing men for the re-Christianization drive launched by Pope Leo XIII (1880). This became especially visible during the fin-de-siècle crisis when Spain lost its last overseas colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines), an event experienced as a national identity crisis, which was understood and metaphorically expressed as a national masculinity crisis. ⁵⁷ Anticlerical mobilizations and secular legislation at the beginning of the century completed the setting for a reformulation of Catholic masculinity in national terms against previous images of Catholic men as religiously unenthusiastic. Through her research on the Eucharistic Congress of 1911, Natalia Núñez first showed how a new subject of re-Catholicization was shaped: an externally pious man, publicly proud of his faith and an overt advocate of the Church. As Pilar Salomón has analyzed through a careful reading of the Catholic popular press, two models were presented: the Christ Soldier, a defender of Catholic faith and doctrine and the Catholic nation, a fighter against heresy and a collaborator in gaining individual (men's) souls for the Church, the embodiment of obedience and subordination combined with perseverance and resistance (even martyrdom); and the family father (a sort of continuity with the previous model of a virtuous man at home), protector of the household as the last stronghold of faith from the attacks of secularization. Unlike in previous years, emphasis was placed on strengthening authority in the family as a response to the masculinity crisis and to anticlerical stereotypes of Catholic men as weak and controlled by women (‘calzonazos’, hen-pecked husbands). ⁵⁸ A third model, particularly (but not only) aimed at young men, emphasized controlling passions through faith, respecting religious precepts, piety, willpower and chastity. This reflected a Catholic anthropology by which men (young men overall) tended to succumb to passions which served as a ground for visions of spiritual decadence, sensualism, materialism and pleasures of the flesh seen as nourished by leftist ideologies and the modern world. ‘Re-conquering lost manliness’ implied mainly controlling passions and cultivating mettle. These tenets that define militant Catholic masculinity seem to have found continuity in lay (boys) movements during the interwar period. ⁵⁹

Is it possible to talk about a re-masculinization strategy in Spain? Did the need to compensate for a feminized Church push for a re-masculinization project? As recently encapsulated by Werner, the ‘concept of masculinization focuses on the strategies developed within various confessional and national contexts to make religious life more attractive to men … to counteract the perception of Christian religion as feminized’. ⁶⁰ This strategy would have consisted in combining Catholic and male values in order to make religious life and experience more attractive to men. And the desire of recouping men for religion would have resulted in a Catholic revival featuring men. ⁶¹ Though research done on the grounds of re-masculinization has been (and is) enormously rich and stimulating, in my opinion, it raises similar conceptual problems to feminization: the polysemy of the term (what we mean by it), the conflation of the explanation (what caused it) and its broad application in different contexts and chronologies complicate analysis and dialogue. As other historians have noted, some caution should be shown, following previous reflections and research in other European countries. First, the risk of transporting present meanings to the past, terms such as feminize and masculinize, contribute to fixing their content and applying them to realities that did not function according to these parameters. Gender meanings should be unpacked in the contexts and cultural frames in which they are produced. Patrick Pasture's statement that ‘concepts such as feminization should not be used in an absolute sense but conceptualized and historicized’ should also be applied to re-masculinization. ⁶² Essentialized opposition (devotion pervaded with presumed gender values not necessarily shared by historical actors) and a linear development underlie a vision of a feminized (weak and unmasculine) Catholic century which is countered by a re-masculinization (strong and manly) effort. ⁶³

Tine Van Osselaer's analysis of the Belgian case, including her proposal to think about Catholicizing masculinity as well as masculinizing Catholic men, is especially useful for the Spanish context and sources. The call to men by the Church at the turn of the century was a response by Church, clergy and laity to the previous diagnosis of men having left the Church, their faith either lost or diminished. It did not forcefully entail a (negative) perception of a feminized church which had to be countered, although the targets of this call were enjoined by anticlerical images representing Catholic men as weak and unmanly. In fact, appealing to men did not arrest the mobilization of women to restore men/society to faith (women were still considered naturally appropriate for keeping piety, patriotism and Catholic virtues).

As in studies on Catholic notions of authentic womanhood, a comparison with the Protestant world emerges. Spanish Catholicism did not shape a male ideal strongly connected to sports and the body as historians in the Protestant world have shown through the concept of ‘muscular Christianity’. ⁶⁴ In anticipation of new research around this question, we can say that although sports and other modern activities were introduced in Catholic sociability, they were not central to defining true Catholic masculinity. As in other countries in which Catholicism was prominent, like France, faith, piety and morality seem to have been central traits as much as restraint and mastery of the self. ⁶⁵ What is the relevance of a Catholic anthropology (that conceives the body as a place of sin that must be controlled) underlying and framing the possibilities of imagining and shaping modern masculinity in Catholic countries? If so, how should it be related to other secular (liberal, republican, socialist) models? How long has it been in place? Did it change under new circumstances such as political right-wing fears of (socialist) revolution and its dreaded impact on social order? ⁶⁶

These final interrogations on how Catholic theology understood the body lead to a field of enquiry awaiting empirical research within a more dynamic, interwoven and yet contentious epistemological framework for considering the relation between modernity and Catholicism, and between the secular and the religious. Catholicism and sexuality merit further and more refined historical scrutiny, attentive to changes and continuities. General accounts of the medicalization and secularization of modern sexuality assuming a sort of schematic transition from a sinful to a pathological category might be nuanced in a context where Catholicism had a strong cultural influence. As in other places, religious discourses, intertwined with medical theory, shaped Spanish modern sexual cultures and became involved in the construction of discourse on gendered (proper) sexuality and (appropriate) sexual identities. At the same time, hygienic, medical, psychological and sociological discourses on sex, sexuality and the body became a challenge to the Catholic laity and the hierarchy to which they responded by re-enacting the imperatives of canonical matrimony and of sexual morality. Were they exclusively reactive, reinforcing old views on the body, and defensive against sexology, sexual reform, divorce and contraception, or was there a transformation in the course of the process by which new arguments and understandings of human nature were introduced in Catholic rhetoric? ⁶⁷ Connecting research on the history of sexuality, gender and Catholicism would offer new and productive insights.

Conclusions

Mónica Moreno has recently contended that gender history has been a particularly productive field of enquiry in pursuing new approaches for the historical study of Catholicism in modern Spain. ⁶⁸ Indeed, as I have attempted to show in this paper through the rich scholarship published in the last twenty years, gender history in Spanish Catholicism has participated in a vibrant debate on mutations and continuities in Catholicism in modern times. Through constant engagement in inner debates (the nature of Spanish liberalism and its relation to Catholicism, Spanish nationalization and the contentious secularization processes), this historiography has contributed to a better understanding of a changing Catholicism whose adaptation to modern times has marked its revival and explains its active involvement in shaping and nurturing mass politics at the turn of the twentieth century.

At the same time, this corpus of research has also dialogued with general debates on women's and gender history. Initially stimulated by a focus on the feminization of Catholicism (mainly, but not only, approached from its discursive dimension), the study of Catholic women's mobilization (Catholic feminism included) has taken centre stage. Continuities and mutations through time have been explored in this gendered reaction to secularization which became central for the Church, while arousing significant fears of women's political involvement. Catholic women's activism has entailed a challenge and a chance to explore identity formation and the discursive frames that made this activism possible. Although insights in this matter have been very productive, topics addressed by other historiographies such as the emergence of female congregations devoted to an active life through diverse archival materials and perspectives (the history of emotions, the history of subjectivity or transnational and postcolonial history) await exploration.

Recently, following the development of Spanish historiography on masculinities in the last decade as well as international historical studies on gender and religion, Catholic masculinities have aroused interest. Special attention has been paid to the possibilities and limitations of the concept of re-masculinization applied to Spanish Catholicism but also to changing models of Catholic manliness, their involvement in renewed men's confessional movements and their interaction with other masculinities (republican, secular, socialist). However, given its incipient stage, scholarship on this issue still raises more questions than answers. The same can be said about studies on sexuality and the body from a perspective interested in the changes and continuities experienced by Catholic discourses and identities in responding to medical and scientific challenges. ⁶⁹

To conclude, I hope to have reflected the complexity and depth of historical studies on gender and Catholicism in modern Spain, engaged in reconstructing a historical narrative that is less teleological and less evaluative. The scholarship analyzed here has also been attentive to international discussion and has reshaped Spain's historical particularity, which is significantly embedded in European (or Western) trends. By way of return, a contribution to those debates is offered here from a specific, yet simultaneous, shared history.