‘The Cruellest of all Forms of Coercion’: The Catholic Church and Conflicts around Death and Burial in Spain during the Restoration (1874–1923)

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century and up to the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 the Catholic Church played an essential role with regard to death in Spain: it had the power to decide where the dead were buried. It could refuse to bury a body in a Catholic cemetery, or prevent one from being interred in a civil cemetery. The prohibition of burials in consecrated ground frequently gave rise to serious conflicts with the relatives of the deceased, as in other countries such as France, Italy or Portugal where Catholicism had been the hegemonic religion at the beginning of the late modern period. However, in the early 1900s the Church changed its strategy. Without renouncing any of its principles, but aware that the prohibition of burials in holy ground was encouraging the growth of civil funerary rituals, it gradually set aside the denial of ecclesiastical burial. Nevertheless, in order to combat the spread of secular funerals, it still demanded that all those who had been baptized and had not formally renounced their religion should be consigned to Catholic cemeteries, even when their families wished for a burial in a civil cemetery, so that this new policy continued to provoke conflicts around the issues of death and burial.

This article analyses this type of clashes in Spain between 1874 and 1923: in particular, the Church’s criteria for denying ecclesiastical burial or claiming the dead for Catholic cemeteries; the ways families, friends, neighbours or political associates of the dead reacted; and the attitude taken by the civil authorities.