01/07/2026 09:00 - 18:20

HALL: Pola - A105

Contact: Ruderer S.

Chair: Fernández M.

The purpose of this panel is to bring together recent research findings on the relationship between Catholicism and politics in 20th-century Ibero-America, with the aim of highlighting conjunctures, agencies, and conflicts that allow for a historical understanding of the various dimensions of the link between Catholicism, the public sphere, and the State.
The Ibero-American continent offers a particularly fruitful context for analyzing the interplay between religion and politics, due to the role played by ultramontane Catholics in the first half of the century, the emergence of liberation theology that led many Catholics to participate in the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, and the proliferation of dictatorships, which placed the Catholic field at the crossroads of legitimizing regimes or opposing them. Likewise, the transitions to democracy saw national Catholic Churches assume a leading role, especially in disseminating the Catholic concept of reconciliation.
The panel seeks to foster dialogue among papers addressing these different stages in order to better understand the role of religion in the Ibero-American public sphere. Accordingly, the following axes of discussion are proposed:
1. Catholicism and Dictatorships
2. Processes of Reconciliation and Political Transitions from a Catholic Perspective
3. Catholic Agents and the Public Sphere: Circulation and Controversies
4. Catholic Intellectuals: Concepts and Contingencies