Secularization and the Impact on Spanish Social Policy

Abstract

The 1978 Spanish constitution was a signal event. It sealed the disestablishment of the church and codified a democratic regulation of its relations with the state. The effect was to assist ongoing secularization through dismantling Franco’s ‘National Catholicism’. Instead, besides retaining its role as a moral agent occupying a special cultural position, the church was transformed politically into an influential pressure group, albeit one among several. These processes matured towards the end of the 1980s, when the socialists reached a broad accommodation with the church over its role in welfare services, future funding and, less conclusively, in education.