The church and its new «status» in the constitution of 1978. The express mention of the term «Catholic Church»

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the parliamentary debate that took place around the article that established the «status» that the Catholic Church would have within the Spanish constitutional order created in the democratic transition. Given the impossibility of repeating situations of the recent past, such as the catholic confessionalism of the spanish state during the Franco´s Regime, or the radical secularism of the Second Republic, the spanish parliamentarians chose the «non-confessionality» state. Within this, it was considered necessary to include the expression «Catholic Church» as a way of highlighting the Spanish christian-catholic tradition. The present research seeks, in relation to this theme, to point out the supporters and detractors of this inclusion and the importance of the «consensus» generated around the specific topic.