A RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SPAIN Diana Myers-Benne Roberts A RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SPAIN From Rome to Philip II To untangle the Catholic Church in its Good and Bad manifestations in México, it is important to explore its Good/Bad and complicated origins in the Mother Country. “The Church as it arrived in the New World was in fact a local variation of the Catholic Church, namely one that developed out of the Iberian Peninsula… On the Iberian Peninsula seven centuries of warfare and contact with the Muslims [and Jews] had created a very special type of Catholic Church…” 1 As will become obvious in this chapter, each Spanish ruler was unilateral and self-assured in his and her beliefs and unwavering in the rightness of the actions imposed upon everyone in his/her domain. It will become clear how this autocracy translated into a government in New Spain in which Church and State were inseparable. For a long time Spain was not a country as such but an agglomeration of warring city-states much like early Italy. The religious history of the Iberian Peninsula began, as with most European countries, with pagan beliefs which were supplanted by the Greco-Roman and Byzantine Empires. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE when Roman soldiers, sent by the Emperor Nero, destroyed the temple there and killed tens of thousands of Jews, those who escaped to settle on the Iberian Peninsula became known as Sephardim, that is Jews of Spanish or Portuguese descent. 2 They also adopted the Latin language and a new lifestyle although they held on to their religious practices and faith. CONSTANTINE AND THE JEWS By the fourth century Christianity was dominant in the Roman Empire, and Rome at that time controlled all the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. “[Christianity’s] predominance as a state religion was confirmed and augmented when the Roman Empire adopted the faith officially in 312 CE.” 3 This was the empire Constantine (c. 272 -337 CE) inherited from his Roman Emperor father, Constantius Chlorus who was a Caesar from 293 to 305 and a Roman 1 Scwaller, Frederick; The History of the Catholic Church in Lan America; p. 9 2 Medieval tradion idenfied the biblical Sepharad (Obadiah v. 20) with the Iberian Peninsula. Hence Jews living in Spain were called Sephardic Jews, a term sll used with reference to the descendants of those Jews exiled in 1492. hp://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-history/visigoths-and-jews 3 Scwaller, Frederick; History; op cit.; p. 13 1