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PROTESIANI EDUCATION IN SPAIN BEFORE AND
AFTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL DECLARATION OF
FREEDOM OF RELIGION IN 1869
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VIKTÖRIA SEMSEY
In nineteenth century Spain the advance of Protestant education and Protes¬
tantism in general was a slow process because ofthe dominance ofthe Catholic
Church. The process livened up after the constitutional declaration of freedom
ofreligion in 1869, and was given free rein along when educational freedom was
introduced in the conservative constitution from 1876, but it stopped spread¬
ing after that. Thus Spanish Protestantism faces several factors that make its
particular situation different from anywhere else in Europe.
The Catholic Church in Spain, which has organized the life of the popula¬
tion for sixteen hundred years, still dominated the nineteenth century. It was
interwoven with the national sentiment: the purity ofthe Catholic Church was
intended to provide the unity of the country.
The admission of the freedom of religion and the expansion of Protestants
within Spain was made possible by the weakening position of the Catholic
Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The legislative granting of
liberties energized the Liberal authorities, who supported the Protestant activi¬
ties in elementary education, the press and book publishing from the second
half of the thirties of the nineteenth century.
Between 1833 and 1840 Queen Regent Maria Cristina ruled the country
for the child Queen Isabella II. She was supported by moderate Liberals and
promulgated a constitution. One of the constitutional monarchy’s reforms was
the abolition of the Spanish Inquisition in 1834, a decrepit ecclesiastic estab¬
lishment that had outlived its era, and had been suspended three times since
Napoleonic invasion. The termination of the Inquisition strengthened the civil
transformation in the nineteenth century, but not long before this, in 1826,
it managed to condemn and execute Cayetano Ripoll (1778-1826), a Catalan
Deist teacher. Angel de Prado Moura, in his book Las hogueras de la intoler¬
ancia [The Bonfire of Intolerance] closes the subject with this: “in 1834 they
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