Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

This is a magnificent book. It maintains a commanding view of the Spanish church in its relations with the res publica, with the Vatican, and with society, while at the same time evaluating the different currents within the ranks of clergy and laity. The impressive depth of scholarly analysis is matched by the elegance of William J. Callahan's writing. It is also a long book (643 closely argued pages and a cornucopia of footnotes). With sufficient stamina, readers can accompany Callahan's broad-visioned sweep right through, or they could pause for reflection at the end of chapter eleven, before resuming at the Second Republic (1931–1936). All the seeds of modern church-state-society relations are already there or foretold, starting with the hierarchy's uneasy involvement in the tangled nineteenth-century politics of liberalism, "Glorious Revolution," First Republic, and Restoration.

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The church would, as ever, seek alliances with the powerful to protect its interests and privileges. New forms of anticlericalism arose, while various attempts to unite Catholics as a single effective force in defense of church interests foundered on the rocks of dynastic and ideological divisions. The last pre-1931 chapters turn to various aspects of the organization and condition of the "established church," including the status of the hierarchy, the numbers (with maps and tables) of the secular clergy and religious orders, and, finally and insight fully, the overall state of health of Spanish Catholicism up to 1930. A similar technique is used later for the post-Civil War period ("The Church Restored" and "Religious Reconquest," chapters seventeen and eighteen) and for the church after the Second Vatican Council (chapter twenty-three).

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