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PROTESIANI EDUCATION IN SPAIN BEFORE AND AFTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL DECLARATION OF FREEDOM OF RELIGION IN 1869 ——o— VIKTÖRIA SEMSEY In nineteenth century Spain the advance of Protestant education and Protestantism 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 spreading 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 population 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 activities 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 establishment 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 intolerancia [The Bonfire of Intolerance] closes the subject with this: “in 1834 they + 223 +
