European Religion in the Age of Great Cities

1830-1930

Hugh McLeod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134867127
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Modern History

Europe in the nineteenth century saw spectacular growth in the size and number of cities and in the proportion of the population living in urban areas. Many contemporaries thought that this social revolution would bring about an equally dramatic change in religious life. This book, written by an international team of specialists, provides an authoritative account of religious change, both at the institutional and popular level, in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox cities, in seven European countries.

Part I
RESPONSES OF THE CHURCHES TO URBANIZATION

1
AN ORGANIZATIONAL AND PASTORAL FAILURE

Urbanization, industrialization and religion in Spain, 1850–1930

William J.Callahan

On 2 July 1855, the first general strike in Spanish history took place in Barcelona and nearby industrial towns. In the absence of the city’s bishop, the prelate of the neighbouring diocese of Vich, Antonio Palau, urged workers to return to work with a spirit of Christian resignation. By 1858, after becoming bishop of the country’s manufacturing capital, Palau viewed growing social tensions in a more pessimistic light. He warned the rich of his diocese: ‘Your pride will cause the disbelieving masses to rise up; your banquets will irritate the appetite of the naked and hungry crowds, and neither laws, courts, gallows nor armies will be sufficient to contain the outburst of the unbridled multitude.’¹ The bishop’s fear of an imminent explosion of violence proved unfounded, but Palau foresaw in some measure the religious implications of incipient urbanization and industrialization: ‘Who can doubt that people from all parts of the world, of all religions …flow to the great centres of manufacturing and commerce, and communicate…their religious indifference.’ In his own diocese, the prelate believed that ‘faith has grown languid, charity has become cold [and] religious sentiment has grown weak’.²

Palau was not alone in perceiving that capitalist economic change and its social effects posed a new and troubling challenge for the church. Neither the bishop nor other ecclesiastical commentators of the time suggested an institutional response other than to lament the excesses of liberal economic policy and to urge workers to reject the utopian socialism that had already made an appearance in Catalonia. Palau’s predecessor in Barcelona, Bishop Costa y Borràs, was sufficiently alarmed, however, by the progress of what he saw as radical social ideas to promote an ambitious campaign of urban missions directed to workers, although results were disappointing. Costa y Borràs also encouraged the initiatives of a Carmelite friar, Francesc Palau, whose Escola de Virtut, established in 1851, attempted to reach the city’s working class through an innovative programme of pastoral instruction. The success of the Escola aroused the suspicions of the civil authorities who unjustly accused it of fomenting social unrest. Indeed, the Progressive government in power during the labour agitation of 1854–5 ordered Palau’s arrest and the Escola’s dissolution.

More than other ecclesiastical figures of the time, Palau recognized that the church required new methods to communicate its message to industrial workers, many of whom were living in impoverished industrial districts without parish churches. ‘The common and ordinary methods’ employed by the clergy in its pastoral work, he argued, were no longer adequate to halt the spread of religious indifference among a population living in economic and social conditions radically different from those existing in a traditional agrarian society.³ The Escola’s method of 2-hour weekly sessions, open to both sexes and all social classes, was based on the ‘free examination’ of doctrinal and philosophical questions. Although innovative from a pastoral perspective, the discussions were general in character and presented no challenge to the existing political order. The hostile reaction of a government obsessed with the danger of social revolution arose less from the message delivered by Palau than from the suspicion that a conspiracy was in the making when 2,000 workers gathered weekly to hear the Carmelite preacher.

With the exception of the Escola and the foundation in 1865 of a Workers’ Circle at Manresa by a young Jesuit, Antonio Vicent, the church’s response to the pastoral problems created by industrialization and urbanization scarcely existed prior to the revolution of 1868. The reasons for this neglect were several. The episodic capitalist revolution of mid-nineteenth-century Spain remained highly localized. Barcelona and its environs had emerged as the centre of cotton manufacturing by the 1840s, while banking and speculation in property and railway shares expanded Madrid’s bureaucratic and artisan economy in new directions. Valencia continued to maintain, although with difficulty, a traditional silk industry based on small enterprises. The capitalist surge that later would convert Bilbao into the centre of a regional economy based on mining and metallurgy had only just begun. Beyond these and a few other industrial pockets, Spain remained an agricultural country. Indeed, as late as 1900, two-thirds of the active labour force continued to work the land. As a result, few bishops and priests came into direct contact with the pastoral problems created by economic change. A late nineteenth-century bishop of Segovia thus felt no scruples about delaying publication of Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), on the grounds that ‘neither workers nor factories, nor, by the mercy of God, the errors combatted by the encyclical, abound in the city’.⁴

Between the final triumph of liberalism over absolute monarchy in 1834 and the establishment of the First Republic in 1873, the church’s energies were consumed by the necessity of coming to terms with a political system which virtually destroyed a centuries-old ecclesiastical superstructure. In 1836, the ministry of Juan Alvarez Mendizábal suppressed the male religious orders, while successive liberal governments between 1835 and 1860 sold off the vast properties of the secular and regular clergy. During the regency of General Espartero (1840–3), there loomed the possibility that the government would succeed in implementing a revolutionary scheme for a national church tied to the papacy only by loose ceremonial ties. This radical plan, identified with the Progressive Party, was partially implemented until it was set aside by the other great party of mid-nineteenth-century Spain, the Moderates, who seized power after the revolution of 1843.

The Moderate triumph began a decade of rule by the most conservative sectors of liberalism. As a result, the church was able to escape in some measure from the crucible of institutional change imposed by earlier liberal governments. Determined to create a highly centralized state designed to exclude the vaguely populist Progressives from power, the Moderates began to see the church as a possible source of support. Their attempt to solidify a narrow, oligarchic liberalism opposed to political radicalism and to undo the most extreme ecclesiastical reforms of the Espartero regency was welcomed by the church with a sigh of relief, although years passed before agreement was reached between the papacy and the Moderate government. The concordat of 1851 finally sealed a new, if uneasy, accommodation between the church and the conservative version of liberalism, although the agreement did not by any means resolve the chronic and divisive issue of the church’s place within liberal Spain. Following the revolution of 1854, which brought the Progressives to power, the sale of ecclesiastical property was resumed.

Even during periods of Moderate rule, relations between church and state were rarely smooth, while the clergy always viewed the Progressives with suspicion. In these circumstances, the church saw liberalism as its principal enemy, although at a practical level, the hierarchy and the papacy reluctantly recognized the necessity of coming to terms with the new order as best they could. Some Catholic thinkers, notably Donoso Cortes, began to perceive socialism as more dangerous than liberalism around mid-century, but, in general, the church saw the fragmented diffusion of communitarian ideas and the tentative beginnings of trades unionism, especially in Barcelona during the 1850s, as less an immediate threat to ecclesiastical interests than as one of the many dangerous currents loosed on the country as a result of liberalism’s triumph. Still moved by a traditional organic view of mutual rights and responsibilities on the part of all social classes, the church regarded the free-wheeling economic development of liberal Spain as an example of egoistical excess. Denunciations of the rich and exhortations to the obligation of charity became the stock-in-trade of clerical commentaries on the social question.

Despite the ambiguity of clerical attitudes towards liberalism and the capitalism associated with it, a church that had been victimized by outbursts of violent anticlericalism in 1834 and 1835 feared popular revolution as an ever present danger capable of exploding at any time to sweep away religion, order and property.⁵ This general fear of revolution provided the bridge to a stronger accommodation with liberalism that developed between 1866 and 1868 when the hierarchy supported a semi-dictatorial Moderate government led by General Ramón Narvaéz. The regime’s determination to crush social unrest and its willingness to grant financial and educational concessions to the church did not give the clergy all it wanted, but the government’s social and ecclesiastical policies offered more than any previous liberal ministry had provided.

This satisfactory state of affairs from a clerical perspective came to an abrupt end with the revolution of 1868. Dominated by Progressives and some disgruntled Moderates, the new government quickly alienated the church. Enactment of a broad programme of civil liberties, including freedom of the press, and proclamation of religious toleration in 1869 angered the clergy. The church also feared that sporadic disorders in town and country threatened the social upheaval it had long feared. The appearance of the First International in the country intensified clerical apprehensions. The International, declared Bishop Lluch y Garriga of Salamanca in 1872, represented nothing less than ‘a frightening despotism’ intent on placing Spain ‘beneath the yoke of communism’.⁶ Although there was no prospect that the country would be engulfed by social revolution, clerical fears of impending disaster deepened when the unstable constitutional monarchy established in the wake of the 1868 revolution gave way to the equally shaky First Republic.

The church welcomed, therefore, the social and political stability promised by a former Moderate, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who became prime minister in 1874 after a military rising against the transitional regime that had succeeded the failed republic. The new minister’s grand design envisaged the creation of a political system based on a constitutional monarchy and a political accommodation between the two great liberal factions, eventually realigned into the Liberal-Conservative Party dominated by Cánovas and the Liberal Party of Práxedes Sagasta. The nature of the Restoration state designed by Cánovas during the 1870s has generated considerable controversy. On the one hand, it rested on liberal parliamentary institutions and allowed, to a greater or lesser degree depending on circumstances, freedom of the press and a measure of cultural pluralism. On the other, it depended for its survival on electoral manipulation in the interests of the social élites controlling the governing parties.

Clerical attitudes towards the Restoration system were ambiguous in many respects. The church recovered its religious monopoly through the 1876 constitution, received increased official funding and won a valuable concession when the government authorized the reestablishment of the male religious orders during the late 1870s. At a practical level, the hierarchy appreciated the advantages secured from the church’s constitutional position as the country’s established church. But many bishops and priests held serious reservations about the liberal political philosophy on which, however imperfectly, the regime was based. They were also disgruntled by the refusal of successive governments to accept without question wide-ranging ecclesiastical demands for further changes in official policy. But on the other side of the coin, the church looked with favour upon the Restorations commitment to defend society against the danger of political and social revolution. This shared concern provided the ideological glue cementing relations between church and state. Although there was never a formal agreement between the civil and ecclesiastical powers in this respect, there is little doubt that an informal ‘pact’ existed between the church and the bourgeois, conservative élites of the Restoration.⁷ For all practical purposes, the hierarchy accepted a tacit alliance with the Restoration system that converted the church into one of the regime’s most influential interest groups. The historic ambiguity with which the clergy viewed liberalism and capitalism did not by any means disappear. But by 1900 it was considerably diminished in the name of what Catholic commentators euphemistically called ‘social defence’.

After the turn of the century, the growing strength of anarchism in the southern countryside, Marxist socialism in Madrid and Bilbao and a fiercely anticlerical populist republicanism in Barcelona and Valencia moved the hierarchy to identify even more closely with the Restorations governing élites, especially those gathered in the Conservative party which moved in a pro-clerical direction following the assassination of Cánovas in 1897. The masses, declared Cardinal C.M.Sancha y Hervas of Valencia, had become ‘ungovernable’ because they had been taught that ‘there is no God, no supernatural order,…nor punishments to be feared’ as they moved to destroy the foundations of society.⁸ Increasing awareness of growing radicalism among workers, as well as renewed interest in the social question produced by Rerum Novarum, led to intense discussion, beginning in the 1890s, about the urgency of devising a more effective strategy to meet these dangerous challenges to religion and the social order. The debate among Catholics concerned with social unrest was conducted by university professors, aristocrats and politicians. Workers contributed nothing to the discussion which focused on the need to defend society against ‘the eruption of the ideas of utopian socialism and fierce anarchism’.⁹

The church’s identification with the bourgeois society created by nineteenth-century liberalism in the common cause of defending society against radical assault did not occur overnight. It ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Responses of the Churches to Urbanization
• Part II Urban Religious Cultures
• Part III The Religious Consequences of Urbanization
• Guide to Further Reading