A tax dodge gives the impression that multinationals paid for the Pope’s trip to Spain in 2011. Yet despite record unemployment among Spanish young people, taxpayers subsidised the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day and the papal visit. Protests came from unemployed youth and Catholic groups of laymen and priests. The Pope’s wealthy corporate sponsors paid for only 20% of “their” donations.
A Spanish judge questioned the legality of the Concordat before the Constitutional Tribunal. His ruling says the State cannot delegate education to the Church.
Queen Isabella's concordat of 1851 was abrogated in 1931, but General Franco, restored Church privileges in his concordat of 1953 (for which the pope decorated him). However, he guarded his right to appoint bishops, and only his death allowed the pope to regain control of the clergy through a new concordat in 1976. By then the Vatican was obliged to agree to more separation of church and state.
As a wartime ruler Franco got a modus vivendi — and only when his survival seemed assured was he dignified with a concordat. He gave the Church a religious monopoly and control of education and the press. In return, he secured the royal concordat privilege of choosing clerics, which helped him consolidate his grip on the country.
With the death of Franco, the Church had to revise his concordat and accept the loss of its religious monopoly. However, the new constitution was arranged so as to still give the Church a special status. (And no wonder, since the concordat, though signed later, was negotiated at the same time.) It proved easier to remove Franco's statue than the Church privileges that he helped entrench.
To guard against the spectre of democracy, the 1851 concordat gave the Church a religious monopoly and control of education and the press. Isabel II, a weak monarch, got only a face-saving vestige of royal patronage. Her concordat was abrogated by the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, but General Franco revived its first four articles in his 1941 Convention, including the requirement that Catholicism be "the sole religion" in Spain.
Franco wanted a full concordat with royal rights of patronage. The Vatican, uncertain of his future, compromised with a less official "convention" which gave him only a limited role in choosing bishops. After Franco's regime (unlike the other Fascist ones) managed to survive WWII, this royal privilege was confirmed in Articles 7 and 8 of the 1953 Concordat.
"The agreement was more favourable to the Vatican than to Franco....The Concordat served, nevertheless, to legitimise the regime in the eyes of many Spaniards, and it was instrumental in strengthening Franco's hold over the country."
The year after the death of General Franco, when democracy returned to Spain, a swift modification of his 1953 Concordat kept Franco's concordat from being swept away along with his dictatorship. The revision of Article 7 largely rescinds Franco's royal patronage (patronato real), by which he helped select bishops. And Art. 16, which had placed clerics largely above criminal law, is quietly replaced.
When Franco died in 1975 Spain became a constitutional monarchy. The next year a couple of article in Franco's concordat were revised and then in 1979 there followed more "revisions". These are actually four full-scale concordats concerning legal, educational, military and financial matters. These concordats have proven to be controversial, provoking several court challenges and a European Commission investigation.
