The Unidad católica de España () refers to a historical legal and political principle according to which the Catholic Church was recognized as the sole official religion of Spain, to the exclusion of other forms of public worship. Supporters of the principle trace its origins to the Third Council of Toledo in 589. There, the Visigothic king Reccared I renounced Arianism and converted to Catholicism, leading to the establishment of Catholicism as the official religion of the Visigothic Kingdom. The principle of Catholic unity was reflected in Spanish legislation from the time of the Catholic Monarchs until the promulgation of the Spanish Constitution of 1869. It was subsequently reinstated, except during the periods of the Democratic Sexennium and the Second Republic), and remained in force until the adoption of the Law on Religious Freedom of 1967, which recognized a limited right to religious choice.
Opponents of Catholic unity maintained that governments should promote and safeguard what they described as the right to freedom of conscience and the common good. Its defenders, by contrast, argued that Catholic unity was essential to the welfare of Spain and its people, and that it did not prevent the acceptance of non-Catholics provided they respected the Catholic majority.
Catholic unity in the doctrine of the Church
In 1962, during the first session of the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani presented a draft schema affirming the continuity of Catholic teaching on the relationship between the Church and political authority. The text upheld the model of confessional unity as the most appropriate form of cooperation between religion and the state, describing such unity as a primary good and the source of multiple benefits, including temporal ones.
According to this position, Catholic unity implied that civil authority, and not only individuals, should recognize and accept the teachings of the Church. In legislative matters, this entailed adherence not only to natural law but also to divine and ecclesiastical norms intended to guide human beings toward their spiritual fulfillment. Such an arrangement was presented as facilitating a social order inspired by Christian principles and oriented toward the ultimate ends of humanity as understood in Catholic doctrine. A related consequence of this conception was the restriction of public manifestations of other religions, with the justification that the state had a duty to protect citizens from the dissemination of doctrines considered erroneous and potentially harmful to their eternal salvation.
In the 19th century, Pius IX articulated a critique of modern liberal principles in the encyclical Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors, in which certain conceptions of religious freedom were condemned. Earlier, Pope Gregory XVI had expressed similar views in the 1832 encyclical Mirari vos. These teachings were reaffirmed in authoritative form by the First Vatican Council, whose doctrinal definitions were binding on Catholics. In Spain, the Archbishop of Toledo, Juan Ignacio Moreno y Maisanove, emphasized the obligation of Catholics to adhere to these papal and conciliar teachings, maintaining that their authority was not diminished by dissent but rather underscored by it.
In his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), Pope Leo XIII would justify the obligation of States to profess and exclusively favor the Catholic religion in this way:
Even so, the Church admitted that in countries with significant religious minorities, for reasons of public utility, the authority might tolerate some "false worship" as a lesser evil, with a view to ensuring peace, or avoiding greater evils. The concept of religious tolerance differed from that of freedom of worship in that such tolerance could sometimes be a necessary evil, but never a good in itself. On this matter Leo XIII would say in his encyclical Libertas (1888):
However, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, there was no shortage of people, even within the Church, who insisted on introducing liberalizing ideas, including that of freedom of worship and that all religions are true by reason of the doctrine of experience, linked to that of symbolism. In his encyclical Pascendi (1907), Pope Pius X condemned these tendencies, which he would label as Modernism, which, according to the pope, constituted "the synthesis of all heresies".
Regarding the specific situation in Spain, in 1911 Pope Pius X communicated, through his secretary, Cardinal Merry del Val, some norms for Spanish Catholics, the first point of which established that:
For decades, Pius X's successors would maintain this policy in Spain. Even Pope John XXIII, in his radio message to the V National Eucharistic Congress in Zaragoza in 1961, said to the Spanish:
And Paul VI, in his Message to the VI National Eucharistic Congress in León on 12 July 1964, stated:
Despite this, the promulgation in December 1965 of the declaration Dignitatis humanae, one of the most controversial documents of the Second Vatican Council, would end up introducing the doctrine of freedom of worship within the Church, although its preamble, added by the pope himself, pointed out that it left "intact the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ". But in post-conciliar preaching, certain Catholic groups considered that the doctrine of the "social reign of Jesus Christ" had been weakened and obscured, or even denied, to the point that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre affirmed that Christ had been dethroned.
History Middle Ages
Before the Third Council of Toledo, the Iberian Peninsula was socially divided between Visigoths and Hispano-Romans. The latter, who were Catholics, were subject to the former, among whom Arianism initially predominated. Two different legislations applicable to each group also prevailed. From 589 until the Saracen invasion of 711, in Visigothic Hispania only one legislation would exist, and both peoples would merge into one.
According to François Guizot, the Third Council of Toledo marked the beginning of a new phase in Spanish civilization led by the Church. Visigothic law, which he characterized as previously personal and “barbaric” in nature, acquired a more systematic and social character, with members of the clergy exerting influence on the governance of the kingdom. For this reason, some currents of Spanish Catholic thought identified the conversion of Reccared I with the birth of the Spanish nation.
The Suebi, formerly pagan, had already converted to Catholicism with their king Chararic, being incorporated shortly after into the Visigothic kingdom by Reccared's father, Liuvigild. Reccared’s successors, particularly from the reign of Sisebut onward, also promoted the conversion of the Jewish population, seeking religious unity within the kingdom of Hispania under Catholicism.
The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 altered this situation. During the period of the Reconquista, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism coexisted both in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus and in the northern Christian kingdoms. Although mixed marriages and apostasy—whether from Islam in al-Andalus or from Catholicism in Christian territories—were prohibited, Christians (Mozarabs) generally retained the right to practice their religion under Islamic rule, Muslims (Mudéjars) under Christian rule, and Jews in both spheres.
Despite the relative tolerance practiced during the early centuries of Muslim rule, relations among religious and social groups in the Emirate and Caliphate of Córdoba were not always peaceful. Episodes of violence occurred, such as the movement of the Martyrs of Córdoba Umar ibn Hafsun. As the Reconquista advanced, the population of the northern Christian kingdoms increased significantly through the migration of Mozarabs from Muslim territories and through captives brought north by Christian expeditions. Severe persecution of Mozarabic Christians in al-Andalus occurred particularly after the invasions of the Almoravids and Almohads. The Almoravids decreed the expulsion of the Mozarabs in 1126, and the Almohads ordered the expulsion of Jews from al-Andalus in 1146.
After the expedition of Alfonso the Battler, with which the Mozarabs collaborated, a multitude of them were deported to Africa by decree of the Almoravid emir Ali ibn Yusuf in the year 1126 (thousands of them would manage to return to Spain two decades later, settling in Toledo) and a few years later those who remained, subjected to continuous harassment, were forced, by decree of the Almohad sultan Abd al-Mu'min, to emigrate to Castile and León or Islamize, under penalty of death and confiscation of their property. According to Francisco Javier Simonet, the tyranny of the Almoravids was such that the Muslims of Seville themselves requested the protection of Emperor Alfonso VII of León, obliging themselves to pay him tribute.
After Lower Andalusia was reconquered by King Saint Ferdinand in the following century, the Muslims would finally be expelled from this region as a consequence of the Mudéjar revolt of 1264. Following the departure of the former Muslim population, the region was gradually repopulated with Christians from the north.
From the reign of Alfonso X the Wise, legislation began to incorporate the principle of Catholic unity, which would be reflected in the Fuero Real, the Siete Partidas, and the Ordenamiento de Alcalá.
Early Modern period
After the culmination of the Reconquista with the taking of Granada, the Catholic Monarchs would set out to definitively recover the peninsular religious unity lost in 711, as coexistence between different religions in Spain generated frequent and bloody tumults. The Jews, in particular, were hated by Christians, who considered them a cursed and foreign people of excessive greed, and accused them of practicing horrendous crimes, such as the ritual crucifixion of Christian children. For their part, the Hebrews organized themselves to confront the Christians, and in 1485 they assassinated the inquisitor Saint Peter of Arbués in La Seo in Zaragoza, which aroused a wave of indignation throughout the kingdom and increased hatred towards Jews and false converts.
All this led to the decree in 1492 of the expulsion of the Jews who did not wish to convert to Christianity. This measure was added to the establishment in 1478 of the Spanish Inquisition, with jurisdiction only over baptized Christians, which had to ensure the integrity and purity of the faith. The main reason for the creation of this tribunal would have been to put an end to the widespread Judaizing practice of the converts. According to Modesto Hernández Villaescusa, one of the main functions of the Holy Office would be to avoid collisions between Old Christians and New Christians, since the former distrusted the latter, who were suspected of being sacrilegious, heretical, and Judaizing. Jaime Balmes would go so far as to say that "Ferdinand and Isabella, in establishing the Inquisition, responded more to the wishes of the people than to their own policy."