Made Flesh? Gender and Doctrine in Religious Violence in Twentieth-Century Spain

The incarnation is the central doctrine of Christianity yet has received little attention from historians. The idea of God made flesh, and the embodiment of the divine in the person of Jesus Christ, distinguishes the Christian religion from other monotheistic faiths and makes gender fundamental to Christianity. From the Reformation, Protestant creeds brought a new emphasis on God as word while Catholicism continued to stress the bodily reality of the incarnation and the physical—and gendered—presence of Jesus, Mary and the saints. In artistic terms, this emphasis on physicality reached its apogee in the Baroque Catholicism of southern Europe, particularly Spain. Holy Week processions, maintained this tradition of acute physical representation into the modern period, even as iconographic traditions changed. This article examines the religious conflicts of twentieth-century Spain in relation to competing beliefs around the incarnation. Catholic violence against protestants (which erupted at certain points in the 1940s and 50s) was often directed against books and bibles while anti-Catholic violence (widespread in the 1930s) was targeted against bodies, both real and unreal. Much of this violence had a sexual theme yet women featured far less commonly than men, particularly priests, in the lists of victims. This article argues that this differential treatment reflects the gendered structures of both Spanish society and Catholic doctrine. Significantly, doctrinal understandings of Mary from the 1850s, made her into not only the most popular icon in the Catholic world but also an increasingly inhuman presence.