Manuel Revuelta González (1936-2019), Historian of religious life in contemporary Spain

Historia Contemporánea

Abstract

The versatile and expansive magisterium of Fr. Revuelta is crucially important to understand, within its own context (the revolutionary and liberal context of the 19th and 20th centuries), the lives of the Spanish religious men and women throughout these two centuries. Revuelta invested an immense amount of time to recover documents and with these texts to reconstruct the lives of thousands of religious men and women who suffered the most adverse effects of the Spanish liberal Revolution because of their faithfulness to their vocation and to their religious congregations. With the approval of the «confiscator decrees», Spanish liberal politicians outlawed religious, essentially illegalizing their lives as religious. As a result, monks, nuns, and friars found themselves suddenly poor and without a future inside their national territories. In the second part of this article, we will point to the attempts to reconstruct religious life during the Borbonic Restoration period.