AHC: A Spanish Catholic revolution

The problem with "Iran-esque" Catholic revolutions in ANY place, is that Catholicism is a centralized global religion and has been for quite a while.
You just can't have a "Catholic Revolution" in one country without affecting the rest of the world, as emerged pretty clearly in the discussion of the parallel thread about such a thing in Italy.
I tried damn hard to get such a thing half-plausible in post-1900 Italy; with Italy being quite the centre of Catholicism, it can arguably be said to have some degree of sense, although there are quite large holes in the scenario I sketched.
Having such a thing possible in Spain is another matter altogether. In a sense, it depends on how much Iran-esque you want it; if the requirements are lax enough, a more religiously oriented version of the *Francoist regime could do. However, actual similarities between Falangist Spain and Revolutionary Iran are really few, at least for what I understand of Franco's regime.
Probably the way to go would be a Republican victory that turns nasty a has a Catholic backlash some decades later. Still almost impossible without some quite massive change to the Church itself that no amount of political change in Spain alone (as opposed to Italy) is likely to trigger.
 
The problem with "Iran-esque" Catholic revolutions in ANY place, is that Catholicism is a centralized global religion and has been for quite a while.
You just can't have a "Catholic Revolution" in one country without affecting the rest of the world, as emerged pretty clearly in the discussion of the parallel thread about such a thing in Italy.
I tried damn hard to get such a thing half-plausible in post-1900 Italy; with Italy being quite the centre of Catholicism, it can arguably be said to have some degree of sense, although there are quite large holes in the scenario I sketched.
Having such a thing possible in Spain is another matter altogether. In a sense, it depends on how much Iran-esque you want it; if the requirements are lax enough, a more religiously oriented version of the *Francoist regime could do. However, actual similarities between Falangist Spain and Revolutionary Iran are really few, at least for what I understand of Franco's regime.
Probably the way to go would be a Republican victory that turns nasty a has a Catholic backlash some decades later. Still almost impossible without some quite massive change to the Church itself that no amount of political change in Spain alone (as opposed to Italy) is likely to trigger.

Not to mention the Church having formal political power is something the 20th Century Church rarely sought. I mean, you had Tiso in Slovakia, a few MPs here and there, but actual control? ASB.
 
Not to mention the Church having formal political power is something the 20th Century Church rarely sought. I mean, you had Tiso in Slovakia, a few MPs here and there, but actual control? ASB.

Maybe not ASB, but requiring a different evolution in doctrine.
This might emerge of a different global political context, but not from events in Spain alone.
By the way, there's actually a country were a "Catholic" revolution was attempted (and defeated) in the twentieth century, although the Papacy was not especially pleased about it: Mexico.
 

E.Ransom

Banned
It actually happened from 1939 onwards.

No it didn't.
As with Hitler (and Stalin too, who momentarily paused persecuting the EO-church when it became a convenient propaganda tool), Franco had need of the RC-church for political purposes, and so, made some concessions.
There's quite a bit of way from that, to a full-blown Iran-style theocracy. THAT hasn't been seen in Europe for centuries, outside of the Vatican State, anyway.
 
Probably the way to go would be a Republican victory that turns nasty a has a Catholic backlash some decades later. Still almost impossible without some quite massive change to the Church itself that no amount of political change in Spain alone (as opposed to Italy) is likely to trigger.

It could happen within the Francoism if things had developed differently. IOTL, the Fascist element was promptly pruned during the WWII. This, together with the social reforms and the nominal power given to the church by the Concordate, pacified both the catholic extremists and the traditionalists. With this the regime's ideology was left in a nebulous religious nationalism whose only ideological requirement was being Francoist (is that what Putin is attempting? :D). This allowed for a depolitization of the army and, after the economic disaster of the "real falangism", a relatively painless transition to a technocratic govt., which offered no Resistance to the change to democracy.

On the other hand, a more ideologically-driven Franco (or maybe someone else who had risen to power rather than him) could have aspired to a more clearly fascist falangism. Due to its revolutionary nature, a split between the falangists and the catholics and traditionalists would be unavoidable. If the later manage to keep and even increase their influence over large sectors of the army, they might attempt a coup upon the dictator's death, who would have supposedly left power in the hands of the falangist sector.

Arguably such a regime might have done a better job at suppressing the underground left movements, so this Catholic-Traditionalist uprising could channel people's dissatisfaction with the dictatorship.

A succesful coup with popular support would be a revolution: it would certainly chain the nature of the regime from fascist to religious-conservative. The result would be a restored monarchy with limited constitutional powers, and as the Church would have acted as ideological vehicle during the upraising, it could well become the mechanism for popular representation.
An example of how it could work: each parish sends a representative to the provincial parliaments through universal suffrage, and the provincial parliaments chose 1-3 representatives to send to the national parliament. The candidates to parochial representative would be censored or shortlisted by the parish's priest, and the provincial representatives, by the bishops of the bishoprics that have territory in that province. (Would they feel tempted to remove the provinces altogether and turn the bishopric borders into political boundaries too?)

This way, while the Catholic Church would hold no temporal power, it would have an unbridgeable role as censor of the power. Which is, iirc, the same type of power that the muslim clerics hold in Iran, right?
 
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