Between Virgins and Priests: the Feminisation of Catholicism and Priestly Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Spain

In 1843, the French anticlerical republican Jules Michelet wrote the following words in Journal, a newspaper of his country: ‘Dieu changea de sexe, il faut le dire encore une fois’ (‘God changed sex, it must be repeated yet again’). Michelet, who two years later published Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (Priests, Women, and Families), expressed European anticlericalism's fear of what was perceived as a close alliance between women and the Catholic Church.1 In his opinion, the main danger was the priest, ‘born male and strong, but who prefers to be weak so as to resemble a woman’ in order to influence the family life from the confessional.2 It is noteworthy that the ultramontane journalist Louis Veuillot, despite his political and ideological differences with Michelet, shared with him the idea that religion and particularly Catholicism was more and more identified with women. He commented that ‘the time after Voltaire's century could be called Mary's century’.3 Therefore, it seems clear that, either in a positive or in a negative way, both Veuillot and Michelet perceived religion as a matter of women.

More than a century later, from the 1970s onwards, sociologists, anthropologists and historians have been discussing what has been called the thesis of the feminisation of religion. From different points of view, scholars who have participated in this debate have emphasised the increasing presence of femininity and women in the discourse and the practice of nineteenth‐century Christianity, especially Catholicism, and have connected the feminisation of religion with other important debates like those of the secularisation process or the complex relationship between religion and modernity.4 Some recent publications, however, have questioned the feminisation thesis, highlighting the male presence in some realms of religious life beyond the parish and the deep religious commitment of remarkable groups of men.5 Considering these international debates, this paper will focus on the situation in nineteenth‐century Spain, taking into account the broader transformations experienced by Catholicism during this century. I will defend the hypothesis that the Catholic Church identified itself with the same characteristics with which it defined femininity in the nineteenth century through the symbolic link with the Virgin Mary. Although this discursive feminisation of Catholicism left laymen in a difficult situation, it did contribute to reinforcing the patriarchal and hierarchical structure of the Church.

The paper will be divided into three parts. First, I will briefly present the feminisation thesis through a critical view of international studies of this topic. Second, I will explore in detail the concept of the discursive or symbolic feminisation of Catholicism in light of the Spanish case. Finally, I will illustrate how a feminised church was able to reinforce priestly masculinity, that is to say, the role played by a particular group of Catholic men: bishops and priests.