National Catholicism

History

The invention of the term is attributed to the Jesuit and historian Alfonso Álvarez Bolado, who gave the term a scientific nuance and whose articles were compiled by the publishing house Cuadernos para el Diálogo in 1976, before, the term was used more informally. In France, a similar model of National Catholicism was advanced by the Fédération Nationale Catholique formed by General Édouard Castelnau. Although it reached one million members in 1925, it was of short-lived significance, subsiding into obscurity by 1930.

In Spain, the Spanish State explicitly fused National Catholicism with elements of Fascism and National Syndicalism to create a personalist dictatorship under Franco's rule. In 1943, he initiated a project in 1943 to reform the university. It was called the University Regulatory Law (U.R.L.), which remained active until 1970.

The U.R.L. represented the clearest politicization of the university in the service of the new regime's National-Catholic precepts. While there was no explicit exclusion of women from higher learning, their presence at the university level was discouraged and not recognized during the two first decades of the regime.

In the later years of Franco's regime, National Catholicism would be emphasized more with Fascism and National Syndicalism downplayed after the defeat of the Axis powers and the start of the Cold War.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ante Pavelić's Croatian Ustaše movement espoused a similar ideology, although it has been called other names, including "political Catholicism" and "Catholic Croatism". Other countries in central and eastern Europe where similar movements of Francoist inspiration combined Catholicism with nationalism include Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia.