Church burning : desecrating and recreating sacred space in twentieth-century Spain

This article examines ideas of sacred space in twentieth-century Spain, looking in particular at the phenomenon of church burning. Arson attacks on ecclesiastical buildings punctuate Spanish history from the 1909 Tragic Week to the Civil War. The form of the attack was consistent, with the assailants targeting church interiors rather than the building itself. This, the article argues, reflected an anticlerical imaginary in which confinement, seclusion, and conspiracy featured heavily. But it is also the case that churches are hard to burn. During the Civil War of 1936–39, when Catholic practice was illegal and churches requisitioned, often after arson attacks, the question of what to do with them became acute. Just as they were hard to burn, so they were often hard to repurpose. On occasion the reuse appeared to be symbolic rather than practical, despite the claims of rationality and secularization put forward in the historiography. A central theme of the article is that these buildings have to be understood as material objects that impose their own demands on those who interact with them, including those who would burn them down. The sacred space they enclose is contained and demarcated by their walls, the “skin” of the building, which was always the first point of attack.