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.
On 10 October 1904, Rafael de León y Primo de Rivera, Marquis of Pickman, died from a shot to the heart received during a pistol duel in Seville. Although the Pickmans possessed a family tomb in the Catholic cemetery of San Fernando, the Archbishop of Seville prohibited the burial of the Marquis in holy ground and ordered that he be interred in a civil cemetery, since the Catholic Church had condemned duels and the Council of Trent had ordered that duellists be excommunicated and denied sacred burial. The Archbishop’s decision may also have been influenced by the fact that Pickman was a member of the Liberal Party and a parliamentary deputy, and so may have made anticlerical statements in the Congress of Deputies. 1
Pickman was one of the owners of the La Cartuja ceramics and pottery factory in Seville. On the day of his funeral, workers from the factory took turns to carry the coffin on their shoulders, in a procession with a massive attendance. When it reached the gate of the San Fernando cemetery, the procession had been expected to turn right to enter the civil cemetery, which was next to the main Catholic one. However, the workers decided to bury their employer in the family tomb, against the wishes of the Church and the authorities, and deposited his coffin there amid cries of ‘¡Adentro, adentro!’ (‘Inside, inside’). The Archbishop was not prepared to tolerate this affront and put pressure on the authorities to ensure that ‘the rights of the Church, [which have been] so tumultuously trampled upon, are respected’. 2 That same night, at three o’clock in the morning, a squad of municipal policemen disinterred the Marquis’ body and transferred him to the civil cemetery, while the city subsequently awoke to find a heavy presence of the Civil Guard, deployed to forestall any possibility of a riot.
The funeral of the Marquis of Pickman was just another episode in the culture wars that have characterized the contemporary world. This long-standing conflict was sustained throughout the nineteenth century and for several decades into the following century across Catholic Europe, including Spain. Wolfram Kaiser has gone so far as to describe this culture war as a clash of civilizations. 3 It was a war between two antagonistic ways of seeing the world. On one side were the proponents of the subordination of civil powers to the authority of the Church, convinced that only the Catholic religion should govern public and private morality. This camp consisted of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, headed by the Pope, the rest of the clergy and, as the century went on, a growing number of militant laymen and women prepared to defend ecclesiastical law and Church rights and propagate their faith. On the other side were those who upheld the autonomy of the state, society and the individual with respect to the dictates of the Church. These included liberal governments that defended the supremacy of the civil power, liberal or radical parties and politicians, associations of workers, anticlericals or free-thinkers, Masonic lodges and, where they existed, non-Catholic Christians. Naturally, this was not a case of two monolithic blocs, and between the extremes there were numerous intermediate positions. 4
Death, like other rites of passage through life that had been consecrated by the Catholic Church as part of its sacraments, was one of the battlefields on which this pan-European war was fought. This article analyses the conflicts that arose around burial in Spain, a country in which the Catholic Church exercised exceptional jurisdiction in the field of death between 1874 and 1923, the period known in Spain as the Restoration. 5 During those years the Church was the only institution, standing above any arm of civil administration, with the authority to decide where the dead should be buried. It exercised this power to ensure that social morality remained subject to the ecclesiastical canon, castigating conduct that deviated from Catholic orthodoxy, and to combat those whom it identified as its enemies in the political arena. 6
The Spanish ecclesiastical authorities had the power to refuse to bury a body in a Catholic graveyard – always the principal cemetery and, in many communities, the only one – and to prevent the burial of anyone baptized Catholic in a civil cemetery, even when this was the wish of their family. The clergy based this privilege on the third and fourth articles of the Concordat signed by the Spanish State and the Holy See in 1851, and this view was repeatedly endorsed by the governments of the Restoration. ‘In the same way that the Church has the right to refuse ecclesiastical burial to the individual who dies outside its bosom, it equally has the right to demand that he who dies within its communion is given up to it’, stated a Royal Order of 23 July 1887, echoing other similar declarations made both before and afterwards. 7
Catholic families often simply accepted a decision to deny a body Church burial. However, in other cases this decision was perceived to be an encroachment on the autonomy of the community, and led to clashes between the Church and the family, friends, neighbours or political associates of the deceased, often with the support of anticlerical organizations where these existed. These were conflicts with a powerful emotional charge that could lead to acts of violence. The prohibition of burial in holy ground occurred at the very moment of the family’s loss, separated the deceased from the communities to which they had belonged in life, blackened their memory and, in the eyes of their relatives, disturbed their eternal rest, especially if the person thus excluded had actually been a Catholic.
This article approaches these disputes through a range of sources: episcopal bulletins, legislation, the breviaries issued to priests on funeral practices, correspondence between state and local authorities and above all the national and local press. This enables us to confirm that such clashes were present throughout Spanish territory. Up to the 1890s the daily newspapers associated with the ruling parties – Liberal or Conservative – devoted considerable space to conflicts of this kind. From the latter part of the decade onwards most of these reports are found either in the pro-clerical press, such as El Siglo Futuro or La Unión Católica, or in its anticlerical counterparts like El Motín, El País or Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento, which all employed these conflicts around death to reassert their respective positions.
These conflicts were more common in rural than urban settings, since in small communities parish priests continued to exercise a degree of moral control and vigilance in the maintenance of Catholic orthodoxy that had become almost impossible in larger population centres. 8 Some had a notable impact at national level, thanks to the press. They generated copious amounts of legal regulation, and were debated in the Spanish parliament, the Cortes. They sparked fiery polemics between pro-clericals who maintained the right of the Church to impose ideological control on society, with the aid of a submissive state apparatus, and their opponents who defended the supremacy of civil authority. This latter group included people from freethinking, Freemason and republican circles, or sometimes from within the Liberal and even Conservative parties themselves.
Clashes over denial of Church burial were already frequent in Spain before the Restoration, but reached their peak between the 1870s and 1890s, before declining to the point of practically disappearing by the 1920s. As this article will show, in the early years of the twentieth century the Church realized that this punishment was no longer fulfilling its coercive role. Moreover, civil funerals had gradually ceased to be seen as the final stage in a condemnation by the Church. Instead they had become part of an alternative funerary ritual, an act of affirmation for those who defended secularization. 9 Hence the Church, still disposed actively to combat anticlericalism, and without being prepared to renounce any of its principles or prerogatives, began to see more disadvantages than benefits in exiling Catholics to civil cemeteries.
A New Sensibility Towards Death
During the Middle Ages the custom had become established across most of Europe of burying the dead inside churches or in small cemeteries beside them – ad sanctos et apud ecclesiam – in order that they might rest next to the saints, who would intervene in their favour at the Day of Judgement. This practice began to be questioned in the eighteenth century, when many churches began to overflow with corpses, and advances in medicine and the science of hygiene alerted authorities to the health risks of the living and the dead occupying the same space. 10 In Spain, a Royal Decree of 3 April 1787 was the first measure to prohibit further burials in churches and order the construction of cemeteries outside the walls of towns. However, scarcely any new cemeteries were created over the next 20 years, and a circular of 26 June 1804 had to remind local authorities that their construction was obligatory. These instructions were repeated in a variety of directives issued over the following decades, but real momentum to put them into effect would only come after Spain’s liberal state had been consolidated in the 1840s. Even then, the process was slow. A Royal Order of November 1857 recalled that 2655 municipalities of the 11,000 in Spain still lacked cemeteries. In 1888 there were still some small communities that buried their dead inside the village around the church. 11
The liberal revolution and the generalized creation of cemeteries outside town centres went hand in hand. Both transformations helped give shape to a new vision of death, since the liberal affirmation of the individual was extended to the realm of funerary rites. Since the Middle Ages the dead had been anonymous members of the great Catholic community, exceptions made for some ecclesiastics, aristocrats or bourgeois whose names were individually commemorated. In the nineteenth-century cemetery, however, each citizen, each family, could aspire to immortalize their memory in a personalized tomb. As the Italian historian Dino Mengozzi has noted, the liberal maxim ‘one man, one vote’ had its corollary in the conviction that everyone had the right to perpetuate his or her name on a gravestone. 12 The re-evaluation of the individual brought with it a new culture of bereavement: family ties were reinforced through visits to the departed in the cemetery, funerals became more personalized, the loss of a loved one acquired greater dramatic meaning. 13
This was a change of mentality that was essentially urban, promoted by the enlightened elites of the eighteenth century and the liberal ones of the nineteenth, and which then extended itself little by little into the rural milieu. The cemetery was transformed into a place to honour one’s family members, friends or neighbours, and to show reverence for local or national heroes. It became a corner in which to pause and meditate, a garden-like space that brought together in death families and local communities that had lived together. Nothing better illustrates the desire to preserve family unity in the next life than the concession of plots in perpetuity for the construction of family tombs, which were often sumptuous, the funerary transcription of great bourgeois palaces. 14 The cemeteries of the nineteenth century reproduced in horizontal form the cities of the living, since those who had not been equal in life had no reason to be so in death. Hence, they were given a hierarchical structure relative to income; those with sufficient resources could acquire long-term concessions, but many people could only pay for graves for a limited period, after which their remains were transferred to a common ossuary. Others went into the ossuary immediately, since it was one thing to have the right to perpetuate one’s name and another to have the means to do so.
The Church and the New Cemeteries
The new secular spirit in burial matters caused great consternation in the Catholic Church. The clergy saw the creation of cemeteries outside cities and towns as a kind of amputation. During the nineteenth century the Church argued that the new cemeteries still formed a unity with the local church, as if burials were still carried out physically ad sanctos, and so were just as much sacred ground. They were ‘part of the churches’, Canon Rafael Leante wrote in 1887. 15 These cemeteries also gave rise to serious jurisdictional disputes. Since the Church lacked capital after the desamortización or disentailment – the process through which the state had expropriated most of its property in the 1830s – responsibility for building and maintaining the new graveyards was assigned to municipal councils or ayuntamientos. Despite this the ecclesiastical authorities demanded full control over them from the municipalities, which did not always resign themselves to a marginal role in the management of an asset financed from their own budgets. The resulting tension was often graphically expressed in confrontations between the Church and ayuntamientos over control of the actual keys to the cemeteries, clashes that obliged the government to set down, in a Royal Order of 11 February 1892, that both institutions should have a copy of the keys. 16
This was not the only change that disturbed the Church. In the name of ‘blessed hygiene’ 17 the cemeteries were located some distance from the centres of cities and larger towns, and this made it difficult for a priest to accompany the dead in solemn procession. Commercial undertakers assumed roles that had previously been the preserve of parish priests. Also, in the eyes of the clergy, the proliferation of opulent family tombs disrupted the equality of Christians in eternal rest; one priest wrote that when burials ‘were only a matter for the Church there was not this distinction between rich and poor’. 18 As if this were not enough, the new mentality regarding death also encouraged the families of the dead to begin to assert their rights in the face of ecclesiastical dictates.
Nineteenth-century funerary culture also brought with it another complication. If the science of hygiene prescribed that all burials should be concentrated in enclosed spaces outside towns, it was necessary to find a space for those of the dead that the Church did not want in its consecrated ground, who until then had been buried in any place deemed suitable. Revolutionary France had solved this problem in 1793 by secularizing its cemeteries, depriving the Church of control over them, transferring administration to municipal authorities and opening them to all citizens, irrespective of their creed or actions when alive. However, a subsequent decree of 23 Prairial (12 June) 1804 had amended this position by ordaining that in locations where more than one religion was practised cemeteries should be divided into sections separated by walls or rows of shrubs, each with its own entrance. Consequently Catholics, as the predominant religious community, occupied the main part of cemeteries, blessed as consecrated ground, and relegated other communities to distant corners, which were also the final destination of anyone denied ecclesiastical burial. This situation, which continued throughout much of the nineteenth century, led to repeated disputes. Many otherwise-Catholic families considered that the consignment of any of their relatives to corners considered unworthy, and which were generally uncared for, destroyed family unity and besmirched the memory of the dead. Faced with a plethora of incidents over this issue, the government of Jules Ferry ended the division of cemeteries by faith in 1881. Three years later a further law re-established full secularization and gave complete responsibility for them to municipalities. 19
Portugal and Italy followed similar patterns to the French model of 1804. There too the Church seized the dominant role in cemeteries, which led to a proliferation of similar conflicts between the clergy, families and communities. In Portugal the removal of internal walls within cemeteries and their secularization came in 1910 with the proclamation of a republic. In Italy the same steps were taken shortly before the First World War. 20
Spain took a different path. Instead of burying all the dead in the same space, even if divided into sections, the liberal governments of the mid-nineteenth century undertook to create separate Catholic and civil or disidente, ‘dissident’, cemeteries. A law of 29 April 1855 decreed that in every community ‘where a need so requires’ cemeteries should be built for ‘those who die outside the Catholic communion’, paid for by the municipality. 21 A hierarchical segregation of death was thus established, between a main cemetery, the Catholic one, and another second-class facility, the civil cemetery, often in an atrocious condition; one for ‘the good and pious, the other for the wicked and pestilential’, as the republican intellectual Gumersindo de Azcárate observed in 1876. 22
During the Sexenio Democrático, the six years of turmoil and democratic agitation that followed the overthrow of Queen Isabel II in 1868, a Royal Order from the government of General Francisco Serrano of 16 July 1871 adopted the French model, of a single cemetery compartmented for different beliefs. However, this change infuriated the bishops, who exerted fierce pressure until, on 28 February 1872, a new administration under Práxedes Mateo Sagasta re-established the regulations of 1855. 23 Civil cemeteries could be built alongside Catholic ones, but had to be separated from them by a wall and have their own entirely separate entrances. In its main features this was the situation that existed up to the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931.
Many municipalities, due to lethargy, lack of inclination or lack of resources, resisted building a civil cemetery. A government circular of 3 January 1879 acknowledged this and ordered that where civil cemeteries did not exist the dead who fell outside the community of believers should be buried in a ‘decorous location, in the immediate vicinity, but separated from the Catholic cemetery’. 24 Around the end of the century a further series of government directives reiterated the obligation to construct civil cemeteries, and in 1904 one threatened municipalities that did not have them with fines. However, the correspondence between Interior Ministers and provincial Civil Governors shows that they were still lacking in many towns and villages well into the new century. 25 In these communities, those who professed a different faith or had been excluded from the Catholic community continued to be buried by the roadside, in fields, next to ditches, on mountainsides, under trees or ‘in the middle of the street’. 26 And, where a civil cemetery did exist, it tended to be in a ruinous state. Because of their miserable appearance they were known popularly as corralillos or ‘chicken pens’. 27
The decision to create separate civil cemeteries in place of a single local one open to all citizens represented a victory for the Church, which thus saw consecrated a hierarchy of death in line with its own canons and prevented, as the commentator Father Francisco Ruiz de Velasco put it, ‘the piling up of our dead with those who dissent from our holy religion’. 28 Moreover, for the Church the civil cemetery had only one function, that of serving as a destination for those whom the ecclesiastical authorities considered to have died outside the Catholic communion or to have merited the denial of ecclesiastical burial. At no point did the Church contemplate the possibility that the choice of a civil burial could be a right open to all citizens, for only the Church could decide who should be buried within a Catholic cemetery, and who outside it. 29
The Denial of Church Burial
The Church possessed exclusive authority ‘to declare who dies within its communion and who dies outside it, and consequently to concede to the former and deny to the latter ecclesiastical burial’. Thus proclaimed the government circular of 3 January 1879, ratifying a previous directive of 15 October 1875 that had laid out the central criteria upon which policy on burials would be based during the Restoration; the ecclesiastical authorities had the last word on the destination of the dead. 30 This power formed part ‘of the canon and civil legislation of the Kingdom’, added another Royal Order from 1906 signed by the Count of Romanones, Justice Minister in the Liberal government of José Canalejas. 31 Those who had ‘lived united on earth through the bond of the communion of saints’ could also expect to be ‘united in universal resurrection’ resting together in consecrated ground, explained the Boletín del Clero del Obispado de León, a local church magazine, in 1888. However, the Church denied this mercy to those ‘unworthy’ individuals who had died ‘outside its bosom’, and who by their bad conduct had only ‘scandalized and brought ruin to others’. 32
The denial of ecclesiastical burial was a punishment that was integrated into the penal sanctions of canon law, one of extreme seriousness because it impeded eternal salvation. It was an exemplary punishment that sought to ‘draw the attention of the faithful, strike fear in the indifferent, and perhaps correct the sinners and irreligious and cause them to halt on the road to perdition’. 33 This last point has to be highlighted, that this was a threat directed expressly at believers so that they might continue on the right path. It was not enough for an individual to consider himself a Catholic, if he did not fulfil all the precepts of the Church. This was clearly expressed in a Church report drawn up to prevent the Catholic burial of a resident of Seville in 1875. The parish priest had determined that the ‘deceased was not a non-believer, Jew or heretic, and that he had died in the bosom of religion’, that he had attended Mass, had prints of the Virgin Mary in his room and wore a scapular at his neck. However he had had a civil, not a church, wedding, and since this was an outrage against the sacrament of marriage he was to be denied a Christian burial, not out of any hatred for the deceased, ‘but so that this may serve as an example to others’. 34
Denial of Church burial was more common in the last decades of the nineteenth century than it would be after 1900. It was also more frequent in small towns and villages, where parish priests exerted greater moral and political control over the community, than in major cities. 35 The causes that led to it can be divided into two main groups: those involving individuals who did not belong to the Catholic community, and those of Catholics who had sinned publicly and not repented before their deaths. The first group included both non-believers and the un-baptized, among them young children, even if their parents were Catholics, as well as heretics, schismatics, apostates, the excommunicated and others. The list of public sinners included adulterers and anyone living ‘in concubinage’, including those who had had a civil marriage; prostitutes and pimps; profaners of churches and cemeteries; blasphemers; ‘writers of impious newspapers’; ‘freethinkers, freemasons, spiritualists’; duellists; anyone who ordered a corpse to be burnt; anyone who failed to fulfil the obligation to confess, attend Mass and receive communion during Easter; suicides who had not suffered from a mental infirmity; public moneylenders; and impenitent sinners in general. 36
The parish priest was responsible for allowing, or denying, Church burial, although his decisions needed to be endorsed by his bishop. As the highest religious authority in villages and small towns, the párroco exercised tight moral – and political – control over their inhabitants. 37 He watched over his flock and knew who respected Church precepts and who did not. This was information of crucial importance when it came to dealing with them at the time of their death. When this moment arrived, Father Ruiz de Velasco wrote in 1907, ‘an examination by the priest of the antecedents of the deceased’ was essential. 38 If he was aware that the latter had sinned, he should evaluate whether the sinner had acted scandalously or with discretion; the punishment that fell upon public sinners was for the purpose of giving an example, and lost meaning if the sin had not been public knowledge. Hence the handbooks produced for parish priests insisted that they should only go so far as denying burial when ‘a sinful life is very notorious’. 39 They should also consider whether the deceased had shown signs of repentance, and whether these were genuine or due only to the fear of death, and also whether the sin was a clear act of volition, or not, and if the sinner had persisted in it. Failure to fulfil the requirement to confess and attend Mass during Easter just once, for example, might be due to illness or a mistake, but if it was repeated it could be a sign of heresy. With suicide victims, priests should consider whether they had suffered from a mental disturbance, a fundamental question in deciding whether they could be admitted to a Church cemetery.
There were so many nuances to be considered that, as they were filtered through the character of each priest, contradictory decisions on otherwise similar situations became a constant occurrence. This level of arbitrariness fuelled the arguments of anticlericals and their press. Repeated criticism was made, for example, of the treatment of suicides; while one priest excluded a suicide victim from consecrated ground, in another corner of Spain the opposite might happen. ‘The Church grants ecclesiastical burial to suicides when it suits it’, charged the liberal daily La Iberia in 1877. 40 This denunciation was accompanied by accusations of venality and of being swayed by improper influences. ‘Every day Catholic burial is given to suicides whose families possess sufficient wealth or influence’, claimed the anticlerical paper El Globo in 1880. 41 On some occasions the degree of discretion exercised resulted in the paradoxical situation that the prohibition of a burial in one cemetery was resolved by burying the individual concerned in the next village, with the consent of its priest. It seems probable that many priests, acknowledging the feelings of their community, acted benevolently towards the deceased and their families. However many others, due to their very meagre level of education, were simply not sufficiently well-prepared or well-informed to take decisions that could be the cause of serious conflicts. 42
Hence the breviaries issued to priests called for prudence. A parish priest should act ‘without prejudice, and with great charity’, advised the Church commentator Doctor Guzmán y Muria. 43 Hence, too, the priest should also consult his bishop, although this could be difficult if the ‘peremptory nature of the case’ demanded an urgent decision. This peremptoriness could be forced upon clergymen for biological reasons, for at a time when communications were poor in many areas the speed of putrefaction of corpses did not permit extended deliberations. 44 For this reason bishops often found themselves faced with a fait accompli, which they commonly endorsed in order not to undermine the authority of the local priest. However, this was not always the case. In 1877 the priest of Cabral in Galicia ordered the roadside burial of a child of nine who had died unconfessed, but the Bishop of Tuy ordered his exhumation and reburial in consecrated ground. 45 In 1887 the Diocese of Vitoria reprimanded a priest who had refused to bury a man who had died without absolution. 46
However, it must be stressed that this was not the normal response. Despite their differences in levels of education and the degree of responsibility they exercised, many parish priests and bishops shared a common attitude of resistance to the modern world, one that had been legitimized by the Papacy in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors with which it denounced the failings of the century. They felt themselves hounded ‘by the spirit of secularization that little by little is infiltrating itself into the heart of even the most Christian societies’, as the Bishop of Málaga asserted in 1901. 47 They reacted angrily to anything they interpreted as a challenge to the Church, saw the debate between Catholicism and the various secularizing forces as a war without quarter, and called for a religious re-conquest of society. In this struggle the parish priests formed the Church’s front-line troops, above all when anticlericalism began to gain ground in rural communities. Hence they frequently made the denial of Church burial a weapon of war, one that needs to be understood in the context of the cultural conflict across Europe in which supporters of ecclesiastical law confronted the forces of secularization. 48
In this regard the list of those potentially excluded from Catholic cemeteries as enemies of the Church was extensive. It could include local republicans, democrats, liberals and Masons; those who had held political responsibilities in the years between the overthrow of Isabel II and the Bourbon Restoration in 1874; those who had bought land that had previously been Church property after the state disentailed it in the 1830s; anyone who had had a civil marriage ceremony, labelled by the Church as amancebados, essentially unmarried and ‘living in sin’, and accused of casting a stain upon the sacrament of marriage; members of liberal professions, whose guilt was not made clear in the press, although one could assume some sort of heterodoxy from their other activities: journalists, municipal secretaries, schoolteachers, surgeons… 49
Conflicts over Burials between the Church and the Catholic Laity
In small towns and villages in Spain, the social weight of the Catholic Church was so powerful that it was very difficult for anyone to feel fully integrated in the community without taking part in the religious rituals that brought feelings of belonging to the fore: pilgrimage processions, fiestas in honour of patron saints and, especially, the rituals that recognized births, reproduction and death. 50 As Els Witte has observed in relation to her studies of Catholic Belgium, tradition and religion carried great weight among the inhabitants of the rural world. 51 The authority of the parish priest remained immense, so that in most instances where someone was denied Catholic burial their families and neighbours accepted these decisions with resignation. In some, however, this denial prompted legal complaints or conflicts of greater impact. Although anticlericals sought to gain political profit from these situations, these clashes – as Thomas Kselman pointed out in relation to France – occurred within the Catholic community, between the Church authorities and believers, who pleaded for religious services for their dead. 52
Parish priests and bishops exercised their coercive powers ‘against the Catholics closest to the deceased’, La Discusión observed in 1883, since many families desired religious funerals against the will of the Church or even contrary to the wishes of their dead relative, if the latter was a freethinker. 53 This was ‘the cruellest of all forms of coercion, in these moments of supreme pain and tremendous anguish’, the Liberal Marquis de la Vega de Armijo observed in 1904. 54 Some anticlericals, for their part, accepted a Catholic funeral for themselves in order not to offend friends and relatives. There were also relatives who tried to maintain family unity into death, even when this clashed completely with the ideas of the dead, as in the case of the father of an anarchist shot in 1897 for allegedly committing a terrorist attack, who sought – unsuccessfully – to bury his son next to his mother in the local Catholic cemetery. 55
Those close to anyone thus excluded could be subject to distress from several sources at the same time: fear of eternal damnation, the pain of seeing their family split up, the label of indigno or ‘unworthy’ 56 that the Church applied to those barred from consecrated ground, ‘the infamy of lying in a rubbish-heap’, as Jiménez Lozano has described the repulsion inspired by the decrepit civil cemeteries. 57 It was, moreover, entirely logical for Catholics to reject the ‘dissenters’ cemeteries’, since the Church considered that anyone interred there was ‘buried like a dog’. 58 Jacqueline Lalouette is probably not exaggerating when she suggests that the idea of being excluded from consecrated ground instilled a bitter combination of fear and grievance in many Catholic families, as ‘the most terrible of threats and the most blatant of outrages’. 59
Shame, fear, humiliation … Given the powerful emotions at the moment of loss it is easy to understand why some families rebelled against their priests’ dictates, with sporadic backing from municipal authorities and the self-interested support of local anticlerical organizations in places where any were available. And it was not just families that did so, but also broader communities to which the dead person belonged – friends, neighbours, fellow members of political groups or other associations, work colleagues. In some instances these ‘revolts’ went no further than a demonstration of intent, as in the ‘disturbance’ that occurred in San Juan de Beleño in Asturias in 1883, when the local priest denied burial to a suicide victim. 60 In other cases, however, friends and relatives took the coffin on their own shoulders and buried it in the Catholic cemetery themselves by forcing entry, as happened in Santa Pola, Alicante, in 1890, where they also harassed the priest, or in the case of the Marquis of Pickman in Seville described at the beginning of this article. 61
One should stress that this kind of violence was not a habitual occurrence. There were no doubt many other cases, which went unreported in the press, in which families and local communities accepted the decrees of their priest and buried their friend or relative in unconsecrated ground in silence. On other occasions, however, the desire to honour the dead in public prevailed without resort to violence, and with a visible disregard for the Church’s refusal to offer its services, since the frustrated Catholic ceremonial was replaced by civil funerals with their own ritual – ceremonies in which one can reasonably imagine that local anticlerical groups gave families the support denied them by the clergy. In 1880, for example, when the parish priest of Barberà in Catalonia refused to allow funeral rites for one old man, ‘a considerable number of residents met together spontaneously and without prior preparation, and set out to honour the deceased in a dignified manner in the absence of a Church burial’, preparing ‘a full-scale civil burial, with music and numerous people in attendance’. 62 In this way, and without this ever having been its intention, the Church itself was contributing to the development of an alternative funeral ritual. And whenever such conflicts did occur, whether they led to publicly assertive civil ceremonies amid families and neighbours, or a burial in the consecrated cemetery by force, these disputes inevitably undermined the authority of the Church, and encouraged the secularization of death.
Civil Authorities and the Denial of Church Burial
In these disputes the local civil authorities had to choose between supporting the Church or the residents of a community, and the former appears to have been the most usual response. However, on many occasions they also took the side of families. This can be seen not only from reports in the press, but also from the repeated complaints in the handbooks for parish priests and the voluminous regulations issued by successive governments. 63 ‘Far from the Church being able to count upon the support of the secular arm, it has to struggle against it to apply its punishments’, Canon Leante y García lamented in 1887. 64 In some incidents one can see behind the support given to families by municipal councillors the latter’s own anticlerical affiliations, as when the Mayor of Cabrejas del Pinar in Soria imprisoned the local priest in 1889 because he refused to bury a resident. 65 However, in other situations this support was due simply to the deceased’s roots in the community, sympathy for their fellow-citizens or the wish to avoid greater conflicts. Frequently, it was the local mayor who confronted the religious authorities; at other times, however, it was the municipal judge, whose responsibilities included the issuing of burial licences, who decided to allow a funeral in a Catholic cemetery in contradiction of a priest’s veto, as in San Juan de Tirán in Galicia in 1880. 66 This was despite the fact that when issuing a licence a judge was expected to ‘respect the criteria of the parish priest’, as Guzmán y Muria reiterated in 1918, in the face of repeated incidents of this kind. 67
After a burial had taken place contrary to the judgement of the parish priest, a bishop could place the cemetery under an interdict. Catholics could not be buried there until it was reconciled with the Church by the expulsion of the unworthy cadaver, after which the ground would have to be blessed again. The cemetery in Santa Pola, for example, was placed under such an interdict in 1890 after the incident mentioned above, until the body of the suicide victim was disinterred. 68 The decomposition of bodies while it was decided what to do with them added a macabre note to these disputes. In Tarazona in Aragon locals buried a man in the fields seven days after he had died because ‘they could not stand the stench’. 69 In Camuñas in Toledo province in 1911 the Interior Minister ordered the burial of a body ‘in a complete state of decomposition’, ‘without prejudice to any complaints that may be presented by the parish priest’. 70
The ecclesiastical authorities nearly always received the support of central government in their struggles with municipal officials. ‘It does not correspond to Mayors, nor does it correspond to municipal judges, nor to Civil Governors to concede or deny ecclesiastical burial’, the Conservative Party minister Eduardo Dato proclaimed in the Cortes in 1900. 71 ‘The acts of violence that we have had to deplore on the part of some lower authorities’, Guzmán y Muria acknowledged in 1918, had served to encourage governments to ‘reprimand them, and dictate new resolutions that have strengthened more and more the rights that we defend, in exclusivity, for the Church’. 72 The majority of the Royal Orders issued on burials referred to conflicts with municipal judges and mayors – directives such as that of 30 September 1877, which at the request of the Bishop of León rebuked a municipal judge for ordering the burial of a body in consecrated ground, or that of 26 May 1897, which reprimanded the Mayor of Calonge on the Catalan coast. 73 In these circumstances the government could order the removal of the offending cadaver, in accordance with canon law, but had to do so while also observing its own sanitary legislation, which prohibited exhumations until five years after burial. In the interim, the grave had to be surrounded by a ‘wall or wooden fence of sufficient height to establish a possible separation between it and other graves’, and which would have upon it the date for the final removal. Once the grave had thus been walled off, the bishop would have to re-bless the rest of the cemetery, which until then, in canonical terms, would remain polluted. 74
The Conservative and Liberal parties, which alternated peacefully in power until 1917, both supported the Church’s dominion over cemeteries and its authority to decide on the destiny of the dead, albeit that from time to time they questioned the way this was exercised. In general, the Conservatives were most comfortable with the role of the Church’s protector. ‘It being impossible to deny the Church the characteristics that constitute it as a perfect society…’, began a Royal Order on funerals issued by the Conservative Raimundo Fernández Villaverde in 1890, with language that is hard to imagine in a text from a Liberal government. 75 The Liberal Party, in the period before it consolidated its position as one of the governmental parties, had used the denial of Church burial as a weapon for denouncing Conservative clericalism. The Liberal leader Sagasta cited various examples in the debate on Article 11 of the 1876 Constitution, which confirmed Catholicism as the state religion, 76 and up until 1885 the Liberal press attacked the Church’s intransigence on these matters. However, once the Liberal Party had moderated its language to reinforce its status as a party of government, news of this sort became scarce in mainstream liberal newspapers. Not even during the Liberal Party’s outburst of anticlericalism in the early 1900s did conflicts with the Church over death regain much prominence in the press closest to the party, except for a few specially prominent cases. 77
Nevertheless, the response of the pro-dynastic government parties was not a monolithic one. In liberal political culture independence of outlook was a virtue, and parties that were made up of local notables, the sum total of an amalgam of factions, lacked the centralized structures and disciplinary committees that could have imposed unanimity. Hence the most serious reverse inflicted on the Church did not come from the Liberals but from the Conservative Interior Minister Francisco Romero Robledo, a politician who had received his primary political education during the Sexenio Democrático that followed the Revolution of 1868. On 30 May 1878 he issued a Royal Order that challenged a decision by the Bishop of Mahón in Menorca and arranged for the body of a woman buried in a civil cemetery by Church decree to be transferred to a Catholic one, as her family desired. This decree was then reversed in turn by a subsequent order from the same government in January 1879, in response to ecclesiastical pressure. 78 This disparity of opinions, at the same time and in the same party, was not unique to the Conservatives. During the Liberal government of José Canalejas, in February 1910, the Civil Governor of Logroño supported a family against the Church, inspired, he said, by ‘the criteria always maintained by the Liberals, in favour of the pre-eminence of the civil power and the secularization of cemeteries’, but a few months later his counterpart in Badajoz resolved a similar conflict by ‘supporting the rights of the Church in accordance with the prevailing legislation’. 79
A Change of Strategy: The Church Moves from Expelling Corpses to Civil Cemeteries to Combatting the Funerals Held in Them
Disputes over the denial of Church burial became scarcer after 1900. They were ‘falling out of fashion’, the republican newspaper El País observed in 1901. 80 As a penalty this denial no longer inspired the ‘salutary horror of other times’, Doctor Guzmán y Muria lamented in 1918. 81 In addition, since the last decades of the previous century civil funerals had gradually ceased to be seen as the final stage in a condemnation by the Church, to become an act of affirmation. The cemetery was one more of many fields in which the battle of secularization was fought, and the most belligerent anticlericals and freethinkers were gaining ground as they asserted their presence as a social group who had chosen to culminate their passage through life with a civil ritual. 82 Hence the Church, ever more inclined to combat anticlericalism actively, and still unwilling to renounce any of its principles, began to see more disadvantages than benefits in exiling Catholics to civil cemeteries, since without wishing to do so it was thereby encouraging the growth of an alternative funeral ritual. 83
‘Civil funerals should be avoided as much as possible’, Guzmán y Muria counselled parish priests in 1918. 84 The ecclesiastical authorities had changed their strategy since the 1890s. Open denial of religious burial became less frequent and, in a period that also saw the forceful emergence of a more militant, more combative Catholicism, the Church began actively to obstruct civil funerals that were not the result of its own decisions. This was not a novelty. Ever since cemeteries for disidentes had been first established, the Church had demanded the bodies of anyone who had been baptized, and so in its judgement still belonged to the Catholic community, for its own cemeteries. However it now began to do so methodically, in virtually every case. ‘One enters the Church through baptism and leaves it through apostasy or excommunication’, asserted the Conservative Minister Eduardo Dato when defending the rights of the Church in this area. 85 Apostasy had to be declared before a notary, something not always within the possibilities of those living in small villages and without education or resources. Neither the civil nor the religious authorities accepted a ‘certificate of last wishes concerning burial’ presented in 1916 by the husband of a Protestant woman. ‘It is signed by two witnesses and the [Protestant] Pastor’, a canonical judge recorded, ‘it was not signed by the woman because they say she did not know how to write’. The document was declared invalid and she was buried in the Catholic cemetery. 86
The Church began to demand that bodies be sent to its cemeteries systematically, even when the family, friends and associates of the person concerned wanted a civil burial. This entailed a new kind of local conflict, in which the opposing camps tended to be more clear-cut: on the one side, the parish priest, and on the other, the anticlerical organizations – of republicans, freethinkers or workers – and the Protestant communities, since, even though the latter were very small in Spain, if there was one place in which they unavoidably clashed with the Catholic Church, it was the cemetery. In this type of conflict priests confronted the more anticlerical local authorities, although it was more common for the clergy to receive their respective mayors’ support. Ultimately, those who fought the Church in such cases tended to be those who also questioned the political system. And, when it was a matter of preventing the burials of Protestant women or children in the civil cemetery the parish priest could also sometimes count on the support of local Catholics, as Kent Eaton has shown, and as happened, for example, in Olazagutía in Navarre in 1884. 87 Governments, with only a few exceptions, continued to maintain that only the Church had the power to decide what to do with dead bodies.
Embarked upon this new strategy, parish priests initially demanded the remains of those who had been baptized and whom the Church deemed to be defenceless: children, women and the disabled. Through their baptism they formed part of the Catholic community, and due to their weakness they could not confront those who were dragging them towards heresy and perdition. From around 1900 onwards, the Church proudly conceded Catholic burial to those to whom a few years earlier it would probably have denied it, since the conversion of an anticlerical in extremis and his burial in consecrated ground began to be perceived as a victory over the enemy. The clerical press presented as a triumph – and their anticlerical counterparts as a defeat – the Catholic funerals of notorious republicans and anticlericals such as Doctor José María Esquerdo, Luis Morote or Juan Sol y Ortega. These funerals, at the same time, demonstrated the deep-rooted nature of Catholic culture among even the most hardened anticlericals and – above all – their families. 88
There were also frequent instances in which parish priests and other clergy, sometimes with the help of family members, redoubled the pressure they placed on anticlericals in their last moments to achieve death-bed recantations that might thus avoid a civil funeral that could be converted into an affirmative act. It was even common for such last-minute converts to be patients in hospitals or institutions controlled by religious orders, with their mental faculties blurred or undermined. This was the case with the leading anarchist Fernández Carrión, who died in a hospital in Oviedo in January 1917. The Church claimed that he had converted shortly before his death and tried to bury him in a Catholic cemetery, against the wishes of his family and associates. After a great deal of deliberation, the Liberal Civil Governor supported the family. 89 These kinds of conversion under pressure were also abundant in France, until a law of 1887 permitted anyone, when living, to set out their wishes for their funeral, so that neither the Church, the civil authorities nor their families could contradict their desires. 90 In Spain nothing like this was seen during the Restoration, and legally the Church continued to enjoy complete authority over the disposal of bodies up to 1931.
That the Church had changed its strategy was evident to contemporaries. ‘One has to note the most recent change in the Church,’ observed Gumersindo de Azcárate in 1916, following a case in which a parish priest had tried to prevent the burial of a Protestant woman in a civil cemetery. Before they went so far as to deny Church burial to anyone who hadn’t confessed or gone to Mass at Easter the year before. And now we have to deal with demands like this one, thanks to the Church’s zeal to ensure that no one is to be buried in the civil cemetery.
91
Conclusions
During the whole of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, one of the culture wars that characterized the contemporary world was conducted throughout Catholic Europe, including, of course, Spain. Those who considered that the Catholic religion ought to be the sole guide ruling public and private morality and wished to submit civil powers to the authority of the Church confronted those who defended the autonomy of the state, civil society and the individual against ecclesiastical dictates. These two sides were not of course monolithic, uniform blocs, and between the extremes there was a variety of intermediate positions. Part of this war was fought in the field of death. For decades the Church denied the privilege of ecclesiastical burial to those whom it considered to have committed particular sins in a public and notorious manner, and those who had publicly dissented from its dogma or criticized or questioned ecclesiastical decisions.
The denial of ecclesiastical burial was a sanction that had already been well established in canon law under the Ancien Régime. However, in the course of the liberal revolution a change in mentality towards death developed, a new sensibility that transferred the cult of the individual to funerary customs and gave priority to reuniting the deceased with the other members of their community: their family, their neighbours, their friends. In this new context, the denial of ecclesiastical interment became a terrible punishment – ‘the cruellest of all forms of coercion’ – that tore the dead from their roots by separating them from those closest to them. In Spain, moreover, this punishment was aggravated by the fact that those who suffered this sanction, excluded from Catholic cemeteries, were buried in scattered locations or, where a locality had one, a civil cemetery. The state of these civil cemeteries was generally atrocious until well into the twentieth century.
As the century went on, the refusal of ecclesiastical burial generated an ever-greater number of conflicts. The risk of riots meant that it was rarely applied in major cities – though there were exceptions, such as the incident in Seville described in the first pages of this article – and such disputes customarily occurred in small communities, where the resistance of families, friends and neighbours was less. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth conflicts over the denial of burial were seen in every part of the Spanish state.
As Christopher Clark observed several years ago, during this period the Catholic Church, far from remaining shackled to immobility, showed itself capable of adapting its strategies to a changing environment in the culture war that it undertook against the forces favouring secularization. 92 This could be seen very clearly in the Spain of the first years of the new century. The penalty of denying Church burial was gradually abandoned, since it fostered the alternative funeral rituals that were being demanded ever more vehemently by the members of anticlerical parties and associations, who actively proclaimed their right to be buried in a civil cemetery. In contrast the Church, determined to combat these rituals, set out much more actively to claim the bodies of all those whom it considered to have been baptized Catholic or Catholic converts, even when their families wished to bury them in a civil cemetery.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Professor Julio de la Cueva for his comments, which contributed to improving this article. Research for this study has been financed by project HAR2012-31520 of the Dirección General de Investigación Científica y Técnica of the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish government.