Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and
cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish
Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other
European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain.
José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed
by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy
were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were
burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000
priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few
years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by
Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this
lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary
of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later,
Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’,
or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of
history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have
likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what
Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as
devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.
‘From the Face of My Memory’: How American Women Journalists Covered the Spanish Civil War