Why have overwhelmingly Catholic countries such as France, Spain, Mexico, Portugal etc. have seen extreme bouts of anti-clericalism. Not just seizure of church property or strict separation of church and state but killing clergymen or banning religious practice? Weren’t most people in the respective revolutions or civil wars still nominally Catholic?
This may be more of a debate, but I’d wager it’s at least partly because the Catholic Church, with its emphasis on the authority of the Pope (a foreigner, unelected by the people) interfered with the nationalist discourse. It was seen as undue foreign influence in the affairs of the nation.
ETA: The Catholic Church and its hierarchy (even its home-grown hierarchy) is also a notoriously illiberal institution, which obviously made it a target of liberal reformers in Catholic countries, with a goal of eliminating its influence on the people.
The Spanish Church sided with Franco, for a start.
In those countries, the Catholic Church got involved directly in politics, usually right wing monarchism and anti-liberalism. So, for certain reformist and revolutionary groups the Church got seen as the enemy, and part of the status quo keeping the people down.
Other way around. The persecution of the Spanish Church started before the Civil War, and one of the reasons Franco and the other generals gave for starting the war was the defense of the Church.
Henry VIII did pretty much what you’re suggesting. Basically, The Church was getting in the way of what Henry felt were necessary actions to secure the welfare of his kingdom. Besides, when it comes down to it, the wealth and land owned by The Church gives it considerable power–essentially a second layer of government which can clash with the will of the current secular leader. At some point the leadership decides it no longer wants to tithe to a foreign power.
Is that kinda what you were looking for?
The more powerful the church is, the more the occasion for anticlericalism.
I’d disagree that the RC Church is entirely “illiberal.” I’m thinking specifically about the Jesuits (they done edumacated me, after all) in Honduras. Essentially (in whole or in part), the rebels viewed them as a threat because they provided charity to the poor; the rebels decided that they wanted to be Robin Hood. Jesuit (and related “civilian”) heads swung.
The Jesuits are, admittedly, not entirely representative of the Church as a whole however.
Wrong for Spain, where “the Church” has always been so involved that it has people on every single side of a discussion; many of the liberal parlamentaries of the 19th century were priests. “Rome” and “the Church” are perceived as different entities here.
Yes, but as Captain Amazing says, it’s because they saw him as being willing to protect them from the barbarians who were burning churches down. You’re putting the cart before the horse.
And many of those people were against all authority.
My churchburning grandfather’s main reason to hate the Church? It told him he should only have sex with his wife. Many times, once you start excavating it’s not about big concepts, it’s about what to do with your dick.
Many people feel that a religious organization should confine itself to religious issues. When a religious organization starts making proclamations on political issues like who people should vote for or what laws should be enacted, it becomes a political organization. And when that happens it opens itself to political opposition.
I’ll grant that killing your political opponents should not be part of the political process. But the historical reality is that murder has been an instrument of political opposition in many places - and one which the Roman Catholic Church and other religious organizations have supported.
Before we go indicting (or defending) “the Roman Catholic Church”, it’s probably important to distinguish between the institution as a whole, from Mother Teresa to the Catholic Worker Movement to Friar Tuck to Pope Innocent III, and its particular hierarchical leadership in a particular country at a particular time and place. (And note that while a lot of relevant case histories involve Catholicism, the Church of England and its Irish and Welsh affiliates and the Russian and Greek Orthodox Churches were equally at fault. And on the occasions when conservative evangelical Christians get political power, they can justify condemning anything they oppose by attributing it to the work of Satan. They rest their behavior on the Bible, which of course (in their view) says nothing to condemn what they do but has a lot to say about the sins of their opponents.
Very often, the hierarchy of an established church (not necessarily big E) allies itself with the rest of the entrenched establishment, excusing away a lot of social injustice. It’s the pesants’ lot to slave in the fields so that the nobles can live large and endow the arts with the wealth they gain at the peasants’ expense. And if you choose your prooftexts carefully enough, you can prove this from Holy Writ and Canon Law.
Man is not a rational animal. He’s a rationalizing animal. From Fred Phelps to Der Trihs, he can explain to you, with examples, why it’s only logical to hate what he hates.
Maybe it is a bit pointless to get into a chicken-and-egg argument, but it seems to me that, even in Spain, anti-clericalism is, by its very nature, a reaction to something. Even if Church in Spain, or elsewhere, wasn’t completely monolithic, on the whole it was a deeply authoritarian force in Spain of the thirties (and pretty much every decade before that). Not that the anti-clerical reactions were necessarily models of liberal behaviour.
A couple of quotes from Anthony Beevor’s recently updated history of the Spanish Civil War:
“The fanatical mysticism of the church provoked much of the anti-clericalism in Spain, especially the ‘miracles’, which in the 1930’s often involved a ‘red’ supposedly committing a sacrilegious act and dropping dead on the spot. The novelist Ramon Sender attributed the left’s vandalism against churches, such as the desecration of mummies, to the Church’s obsession with the kissing of saints’ bones and limbs. Anything, however ridiculous, was believed by the beatas, the black-clothed women who obeyed their priests every word like the devotees of a cult leader. In Spain, there were more psychological disorders arising from religious delusions than all other kinds. This atmosphere influenced even unbelievers in a strange way. Workers formed gruesome ideas of torture in convents, and many natural disasters were attributed to the Jesuits in the same way as the Church blamed Freemasons, Jews, and communists.”
And this:
“The attacks on the attacks on the clergy were bound to cause the greatest stir abroad, where there was little understanding of the Church’s powerful political role. The Catholic Church was the bulwark of the country’s conservative forces…*t was surprising how few foreign newspapers made the connection between the religious repression dating back to the Middle Ages and the violent anti-clericalism that developed in the nineteenth century. The rage that led to such excesses in some areas was fired by one great conviction: the promise of heaven for the meek was the age-old trick by the rich and powerful to make the poor accept their lot on earth.”
Atrocities were real enough, but, Beevor writes, the worst of the violence was mainly “a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past.” (In contrast, “*n Nationalist territory the relentless purging of ‘reds and atheists’ was to continue for years.”)
A little context: in spite of the influence of the Church over education and its support from the state, less than 20 percent of Spaniards attended mass in the early 30s, and, according to Beevor, probably less than 5% south of the Guadaramma mountains.
In the Basque area, where the vast majority of priests opposed the military rebellion, churches were untouched.
A complex issue, I know, and it is easy enough to find evidence to support one’s biases, whatever they are. I agree with posters above who note that there are also in Catholicism strands which support the downtrodden. But if you want to understand anti-clericalism, that is not where you look.