Spain, Christianity in. Tradition ascribes the evangelization of Spain to St
Paul and St
James, but the earliest record of Spanish ecclesiastical organization is a letter of St
Cyprian of 254. The spread of Christianity by the end of the 3rd cent. is attested by Spanish martyrdoms in the
persecution under
Diocletian and the disciplinary measures of the Council of
Elvira (
c.306). In the 5th cent. most of Spain fell under the rule of Arian Visigoths. The conversion of the people to Catholicism, officially proclaimed by King
Recared in 589, inaugurated a period of brilliance in religious and cultural life. In the 8th cent. the Visigothic kingdom was conquered by the forces of
Islam. Though officially tolerated, Christians suffered occasional persecution. Christian principalities emerged in N. Spain in the 8th and 9th cents. as nuclei of opposition to Islamic rule. They slowly expanded south, and by
c.1250 most of the Iberian peninsula had come under Christian rule. From
c. 1050 Franco-Papal influences were strong; they may be seen in the foundation of Cluniac and
Cistercian monasteries and the disappearance of some distinctively Spanish usages such as the
Mozarabic rite, proscribed in 1080. Both the
Dominican and
Franciscan Orders, which were popular in Spain, experienced a movement for reform which resulted in branches of
Observants. Thus the Franciscans, under the Observant Abp. of Toledo, F.
Ximénez de Cisneros, were in a good position to take advantage of the opportunities offered in the mission field by the discovery of America. The Spanish
Inquisition, which, in answer to popular hostility to Jews and converted Muslims, was established by Ferdinand and
Isabella in Andalusia in 1480, spread to the rest of Castile, though not to Aragon until the 16th cent.
The adhesion of Spain to the Papacy in the 16th cent. was of prime importance. The influence of Spanish bishops at the Council of
Trent did much to shape the
Counter-Reformation. In Spain groups of
Alumbrados and Protestants were suppressed, and the great mystics and spiritual writers, St
Teresa of Ávila, St
John of the Cross, Luis de
Leon, and
Luis of Granada, faced ecclesiastical hostility.
In the early 18th cent. the position of the Spanish Church, as the one serious threat to royal absolutism, was uneasy, and relations between the Spanish Court and the Papacy, broken off during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–15), were not restored until 1753. The
Jesuits were expelled in 1767. Hostility between the Church and liberalism continued in the 19th cent., a period of unrest, conflict, and alternating extremes. In the 1830s Church assets were expropriated, convents and monasteries dissolved, and churches destroyed, but the constitution of 1876 recognized Catholicism as the State religion, subsidized clergy stipends and the upkeep of RC Churches, and limited the activities of other religious bodies. When the monarchy fell in 1931, the Second Republic separated Church and State. In 1936
anticlerical violence resulted in the killing of almost 7,000 priests and religious and the destruction of churches and other ecclesiastical buildings. After General Franco's victory in 1939 the Republic's laicizing changes were swept away and the old closeness of Church and State re-established. Until the 1960s the alliance was unchallenged. Then criticism among the clergy mounted and by the time of Franco's death in 1975 the Church had distanced itself far enough from the dictatorship to find a secure place in the new order enshrined in the 1978 constitution. Spain now has no State religion, and Protestantism no longer involves any legal disabilities.
