THE CHURCH IN CRISIS
CATHOLIC ACTIVISM AND ‘1968’
Rebecca Clifford
History Department, Swansea University
Nigel Townson
Department of History, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Complutense University of Madrid
ABSTRACT This article explores radical Catholic activism in Italy, France and Spain and its
place within the broader protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It addresses three key
aspects of activism. First, how and why did individuals become involved in Catholic activism?
Second, what did it signify to be a Catholic activist? And third, how did activists situate their
militancy within the wider experience of ‘1968’? The convergences between this activism and
the greater mobilization of the 1960s and 1970s are analysed by focusing on commonalities of
language, participatory formats, engagement with the working class and with the marginalized
sectors of society, and the impact of global issues such as the Vietnam War.
Keywords: religion, politics, 1968, protest, Marxism, oral history
The fortieth anniversary of 1968 generated an enormous amount of public and
academic attention, but the protest movements of that momentous year have been
portrayed as inherently secular in nature. Few commentators or scholars have
acknowledged, let alone addressed, the question of religiously inspired revolt in this
context. Radical activism in many European countries, however, had a pronounced
religious dimension, and nowhere was this more so than in southern Europe, where
left-wing Catholic militancy often represented a salient feature of broader social and
political mobilization. This article focuses on radical Catholic activism in Spain, Italy
and France, the three principal Catholic countries bordering the Mediterranean. In
each of these countries, Catholic activism played a vital role within the wider cycle of
protest that unfolded in and around 1968. Not only did it provide a training ground
for activists in the student, labour, women’s and other movements, but it also
constituted a redoubtable source of protest and mobilization in its own right. Catholic
activists challenged the political status quo by adopting a Marxist discourse, by
agitating for social justice for those living on the margins of society, and by founding
and fomenting student, labour and neighbourhood groups. They strove to transform
the Church from within and even endeavoured, in some cases, to forge a ‘parallel’
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 531 The Church in Crisis
Cultural and Social History, Volume 8, Issue 4, pp. 531–550 © The Social History Society 2011
DOI 10.2752/147800411X13105523597896
Addresses for correspondence: Dr Rebecca Clifford, History Department, Swansea University,
Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. E-mail: r.a.clifford@swansea.ac.uk; Nigel Townson, Departamento de Historia
del Pensamiento y de los Movimientos Sociales y Políticos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: ntownson@cps.ucm.es
church. In dictatorial Spain, they played a leading role in the anti-Francoist opposition,
championing the cause of students, regional nationalism, family and neighbourhood
associations and above all the clase obrera, or working class. In democratic Italy and
France, they sought to negotiate a third way between the staunch anti-communism of
ruling political elites and the anti-Catholicism of Communist Party supporters,
offering a spiritual Marxism intended to bridge both religious and class-based societal
divisions.
This article explores radical Catholic activism and its place within the broader
protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, drawing on interviews with former activists
to examine why individuals and communities felt inspired to wed spiritual ideas to
Marxist-led demands for social change. The activists interviewed participated in
representative networks in each country. In France, interviewees were involved with the
Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne (JAC), the Catholic trade union Confédération Française
des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC) and its secularized 1964 successor, the CFDT, the
worker-priest movement, and progressive discussion groups such as the Cercle Jean
XXIII.1 Italian interviewees participated in the Catholic trade union Confederazione
Italiana dei Sindacati Liberi (CISL), the workers’ advocacy group Associazione
Cristiana Lavoratori Italiani (ACLI), the student wing of Catholic Action, Gioventù
Studentesca (GS), and a number of ‘base communities’ – networks of lay people, often
headed by progressive priests, who endeavoured to combine religious devotion with
calls for social and economic improvements in their neighbourhoods and beyond.2 In
Spain, activists were members of the youth and working-class sections of Catholic
Action, as well as the worker-priest movement.3 The article addresses three key aspects
of activism. First, how and why did individuals become involved in Catholic activism,
and to what extent was this decision influenced by larger developments within the
Church (above all the Second Vatican Council of 1962–5), as well as by those within
society at large? Second, what did it signify to be a Catholic activist? Catholic militancy
adopted many forms, embracing base communities, worker and youth organizations,
trade unions, neighbourhood associations, study and discussion groups, renovatory
theological currents and new paradigms of spirituality. These initiatives, while
diverging from one another, grew overwhelmingly out of the encounter between
Catholic and Marxist currents. Consequently, a crucial question is how and why
activists sought to reconcile previously antithetical Catholic and Marxist concepts and
what were the implications – both theological and practical – of these new directions
in Catholic thinking? Finally, how did activists situate their militancy within the
broader experience of ‘1968’? We explore the convergences between this activism and
the greater mobilization of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on commonalities of
language, participatory formats, engagement with the working class and with the
marginalized sectors of society, and the impact of global issues such as the Vietnam
War.
The importance of radical Catholic ideas, groups and networks to the broader
experience of ‘1968’ in Mediterranean Europe challenges the assumption that the new
social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were innately secular in nature. As an
enduring symbol of youthful revolutionary protest in the modern era, ‘1968’ is
532 Cultural and Social History
invariably associated with secular ideas, practices and ideologies; this conflation of the
modern and the secular generally precludes consideration of religion, leaving us with
an incomplete picture of the period. This is not to say that secularization was not a
powerful force in the 1960s; indeed, the decline of religion in the ‘long 1960s’ was, as
Hugh McLeod stresses, ‘a rupture as profound as that brought about by the
Reformation’ and established the pattern for the rest of the twentieth century.4 Radical
Catholic activism did not constitute a counter-narrative to this ‘secularization’ thesis so
much as a parallel development: like the increasing secularization of European societies,
radical Catholicism was a response to a growing rift between the approaches of the
traditional Church and the realities of living in a modern, urbanized, industrial society.
As historian Guido Crainz has noted, radicalization in Catholic circles was always the
preserve of a minority (if a sizeable one), but it was born of the same crisis of traditional
organizations that led so many people to abandon religion in the post-war period.5
I. BECOMING AN ACTIVIST
In contrast with many of the other protest movements of the late 1960s and early
1970s, Catholic activists came from a remarkably diverse range of social, regional and
economic backgrounds. French Catholic activists may have grown up in wealthy
households in Neuilly or on poor farms in the deepest countryside of Brittany, Franche-
Comté or the Massif Central. In Italy, they may have come from solid middle-class
families of the staunchly Catholic regions of the north-east, but they were equally likely
to trace their origins to a predominantly communist working-class suburb, an
impoverished southern village, or even a slum (many of which ringed Italy’s larger cities
in the period of the ‘economic miracle’). In the Spanish case, most activists were from
working-class families, but some were from solidly middle-class and even upper-class
backgrounds, whether from pueblos and towns in the two Castiles, Cantabria and
Galicia in the north, Extremadura in the south, or from the capital, Madrid.
The generational divides that characterized student and New Left activism were less
pronounced in radical Catholic circles, although they did exist. There was a great range
of ages amongst lay participants, with some groups incorporating everyone from
children to the elderly, but young adults often played particularly important
organizational or leadership roles. Priests associated with these groups also tended to be
young: many had come of age during the inter-war period or Second World War, and
their approaches to theological issues bore the marks of pre-Vatican II progressive
Catholic movements, such as Jacques Maritain’s ‘true humanism’, the worker-priest
movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the nouvelle théologie of thinkers such
as Pierre-Dominique Chenu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Yves Congar.6 At the
beginning of the 1970s, an Italian priest, Silvano Burgalassi, published an informal
census of the state of Catholicism in Italy, determining that the number of ‘innovators’
was small but growing, particularly among the young ‘students and workers […] young
idealists, heavily involved in working for others in both practical and existential ways,
fighting misery and war in the name of the Scriptures’.7 Similarly, a survey carried out
by Church authorities in Spain between 1967 and 1970 found that a quarter of the
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 533 The Church in Crisis
clergy defined themselves as socialist, but the figure rose to nearly half for priests under
thirty years of age.8
Among lay people who became involved in radical Catholicism, many were active,
or had previous experience, in the sections of Catholic Action, especially those for
students. Others, particularly in France and Spain, passed through or became
radicalized within the Young Christian Workers movement, or the rural unions
associated with Catholic Action.9 Some also came to activism through Catholic
workers’ associations and trade unions, such as the CFTC-CFDT in France, the
Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica (HOAC) in Spain, and the CISL and ACLI in
Italy. Others, particularly the young, became involved in radical circles through youth
camps, Scouts and Bible study groups in which members discussed the relation of the
Gospels to contemporary social problems.
In describing why they became involved in Catholic activism, interviewees’ stories
pivot on three interconnected themes. The first is the desire for social justice for the
exploited, whether the working classes, marginalized members of society or ThirdWorld
peoples. The second is the concept of a just community in which everyone is treated
equally. And the third is the notion that the laity should have the freedom to engage
directly with and question ecclesiastical interpretations of Catholic teachings. The stress
on social justice was born of concern that the Church was failing to reach out to or
support the working classes and marginalized members of society. Activists argued that
the Church had an obligation to champion the rights of the most vulnerable, and that
exploited peoples should not merely be on the receiving end of Church teachings and
charity, but should themselves comprise a vital part of the body of the Church itself.
Some activists recall being drawn to the issue of social justice through their own
experiences of inequality or oppression, and this was particularly true of female
activists, who were often drawn into radical Catholicism because they became
frustrated with the limitations placed on women’s roles in traditional Church circles
and in society in general. Gioietta Torricini (b. 1937), who became involved as a young
woman in the Isolotto base community in Florence, recalls her frustration on
discovering, at a very young age, that she was barred from certain experiences within
the Church because she was female:
I was very pious and even when I was tiny I used to say that I wanted to be a priest
when I grew up, without realizing that in the Catholic Church this isn’t possible […]
I used to go to church every morning at 7:00 for mass, but the priest wouldn’t let me
touch the sacred vessels because this was a male prerogative […] and slowly I began to
have doubts.10
Marie-Claude Betbeder (b. 1933), who later participated in a network of Catholic
family associations that emerged out of the French Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne
(JOC), similarly recalls that her attraction to a Catholic vision of social justice emerged
out of her own sense of being marginalized as a girl:
I was a girl who, from an early age, had the sense that girls […] are sort of disqualified
in advance, and I think that’s why I’ve always been interested, even as a child, in people
who are disqualified without ever having the chance to prove themselves.11
534 Cultural and Social History
Although it is beyond the scope of this article to explore fully the gendered dimensions
of radical Catholic activism in this period, it is worth noting that there was strong
female participation in many of the groups studied, and that these same groups often
proved to be open to the ideas and ideals of the women’s movement. Many female
interviewees found ways to wed feminist theories to radical Catholic beliefs as the
women’s movement grew in the 1970s; others transferred the skills learned as Catholic
activists into an equally committed activism in the women’s movement.12
Many Catholics were moved to activism by the plight of the poor within the context
of rapid, often badly planned, urbanization. When the young Basque priest Pedro
Solabarría arrived at the northern industrial town of Baracaldo in the early 1960s, he
encountered a
very poor neighbourhood, without water, without electricity, without bathrooms,
without roads. The majority of the population were immigrants from the south. All
very poor miners. Really hard jobs. There was no postman and no doctor because of
the lack of roads. There was only one telephone for 600 people, in a bar. The school
was third-world and without a teacher because of illness. Muddy roads full of puddles.
I said to myself: ‘This has a cause, so much misery […] The injustice of the capitalist
system.’13
He decided to become a worker-priest, stripping off his cassock in front of the workers
on his first day at the construction site, and remained one for the next thirty years.
Similarly, when the young priest Enzo Mazzi approached the archbishop of Florence to
request a post in a deprived urban area, he was sent to the Isolotto, a new working-class
suburb of Florence ‘full of immigrants [from southern Italy and the Istrian peninsula],
without roads, without a church or a presbytery’. He took a sleeping bag and a tent
with him when he took up the post, and he spent the next decade working to establish
an open and progressive church for the (largely Communist Party-supporting) manual
workers of the impoverished suburb.14
The notion of community was also vital in drawing interviewees into activism.
Activists often sought out new ways of living together, creating ‘base communities’ that
were modelled at least in part on the base ecclesiastical community movement that had
grown so rapidly in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. These communities were
often situated in specific neighbourhoods, and their members sought concrete ways to
bridge local divides between Catholics and non-Catholics, and the working and middle
classes, in order to create communities in which social hierarchies were flattened. In
Italy and in France, this often meant reaching out to working-class supporters of the
Communist Party, who had been all but given up as lost by the traditional Church. In
Spain, radical parish priests were often conscious of a need, at the community level, to
rebuild the civil society that had been crushed by the Franco dictatorship. Pedro
Requeno (b. 1944) recalls his efforts to build a neighbourhood association in the
working-class town of Getafe outside Madrid:
It was born within the very church […] It was run, directed totally by the neighbours
themselves, who named their committee […] [but] until the association established
itself and had its own place, it operated from our premises or from our own house […]
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 535 The Church in Crisis
Anything that boosted the civil fabric, whether neighbourly, whether trade unionist,
whether political, had to be supported.15
A further draw of radical Catholicism for many activists was the desire to be part of
a spiritual environment where conventional Church teachings could be discussed and
questioned by the laity. Many lay people felt ostracized by traditional Church groups
or had become frustrated with official Church hierarchies. For them, the attraction of
radical communities grew out of the chance to engage in a dialogue with priests, with
other lay participants, and with Church teachings and the very contents of the Bible
itself. Luciana Angeloni (b. 1939) had been involved in Catholic Action as a teenager
in her home town in the Marches in Italy, and joined a youth discussion group after
moving to the Isolotto in 1959. She recalls the liberating experience of being
encouraged, through this group, to explore the Bible for herself:
In the church in the village where I came from, you couldn’t read the Bible yourself, it
was prohibited because […] the Bible was considered a dangerous book: it could lead
to Protestantism. And in the culture of my village then, Protestantism was seen as an
absolute taboo […] But this group of young people took this book in hand and they
weren’t afraid of Protestantism, they took this book in hand to revisit it, to understand
what it was. And at the beginning this really surprised me, but [through it] I
experienced a sort of mental awakening that I welcomed.16
II. TRANSFORMING THE CHURCH: THE SECOND VATICAN
COUNCIL
The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) marked a pivotal moment in the development
of progressive Catholicism: new groups and communities emerged, and those that
already existed were further radicalized by the process and conclusions of the
Council.17 The Council opened up space within the official Church to discuss ideas
already circulating for some time in progressive Catholic environments, and the
documents issued by the Council had potentially revolutionary implications. Several
ideas emerged that were particularly influential and inspiring for progressive Catholics:
the idea that not only the priest but the entire community of the faithful is the subject
of the liturgical celebration, ending the clergy’s monopoly on the liturgy; the notion
that the Church itself is made up of the ‘people of God’, rather than the ecclesiastical
hierarchy; the affirmation of the ‘apostolate of the laity’; the opening to non-Catholic,
and even non-religious, communities; and the recognition that the idea of mission can
be applied to formerly Christian areas which had become de-Christianized – opening
the door to a second wave of the worker-priest movement.18
During and after Vatican II, there was a flurry of activity in progressive Catholic
circles, with a host of new publications, discussion groups and communities emerging
in Spain, France and Italy (and elsewhere). In interviews, activists often speak of the
Council as a fundamental turning point, one that either led them into participation in
radical Catholic communities or gave their pre-existing communities an increasingly
radical spirit. For Antoñita Berges Martín (b. 1922), a life-long lay activist in the
536 Cultural and Social History
workers’ association of the HOAC, the changes wrought by the Second Vatican
Council were long overdue:
We in the HOAC were already aware of them. We were saying that it had to be like
that. This gave us great satisfaction, [knowing] that we were not wrong and that one
had to continue along that path.19
It is worth noting that not everyone who was inspired to activism by Vatican II was
necessarily driven by deep religious convictions. Rosetta Stella (b. 1951), who
participated in a Roman base community that formed around theologian Carlo
Morari, recalls that the Council inspired her to action even though she had lost her
religious faith:
I had had a serious religious crisis and I had ceased to have faith, I had stopped
believing in God. But I rediscovered not so much faith as the passion for and the
interest in religious phenomena, linked to the idea of being on the side of the
oppressed. There was, at that moment, a sort of flowing together of social and political
movements, and there was an immense enthusiasm amongst young people and others
for the Second Vatican Council […] In its wake, my relationship to the Church was
revolutionized […] my interest in and passion for revolutionary movements within
the Church carried me forward and I began to participate actively in a base
community.20
Other interviewees suggest that while Vatican II opened up new possibilities for
progressive Catholics, it was ultimately the disappointment over the conservative
backlash that followed that pushed Catholic radicalism forward. Giancarlo Zani (b.
1935), who was active in the Isolotto youth discussion group at the time of the
Council, recalls both its utopian vision and the devastation the young people in his
circle felt when the Council’s more progressive recommendations failed to bear fruit:
For us [Vatican II] was an enormous sign of hope because it was exactly what we had
been wanting and hoping for: to be able to have a different Church, an innovative
Church that would be capable of dealing with the problems of humans and society
rather than the Church of the last 2000 years, the historical Church disconnected from
reality. And our hope grew larger and larger and as the Council’s decrees began to come
out, we read them and studied them and we were excited. And we dreamed of great
things, and this was […] the rupture, see? This hope was never realized.21
Spanish activists were similarly enthused by the Second Vatican Council but also
dismayed by the onslaught unleashed by the hierarchy between 1966 and 1969 in an
attempt to make the Council’s changes compatible with the ‘National Catholicism’ that
had defined the relationship between the Church and the Francoist state since the civil
war of 1936–9.22 This conflict played out at all levels of the Church. Leonardo Aragón
(b. 1945), who joined the Juventud Estudiante Católica (JEC) Catholic student group
in 1964 and eventually became European and World President of the organization,
remembers the hierarchy’s battle against the apostolic associations and other radical
groups well. Those bishops responsible for Catholic Action:
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 537 The Church in Crisis
declared us, we could say, ‘undesirables’. We no longer had any judicial status. The
Church ceased to recognize us. But we carried on, eh.We would meet where we could.
The situation, as a result, was a much more difficult situation, but this occurred in
Madrid and at the national level. The JEC practically exploded, disappeared, because
they wouldn’t accept the type of approach that we had. So we kept going and even held
a semi-clandestine national meeting or two.We held a meeting in Murcia, I remember,
because we thought it was the safest place.23
III. DIALOGUE WITH MARXISM
Being a radical Catholic activist invariably meant seeking some sort of
accommodation with Marxism. Intellectual activists sometimes struggled to create a
satisfactory synthesis of Marxist and Catholic philosophies, grappling in particular
with Marxism’s atheism. Thinkers such as France’s Paul Blanquart (b. 1934) struggled
to elaborate a hybrid of Christianity and Marxism that would give spiritual meaning
to the revolution. Blanquart, who was ordained as a Dominican priest in 1964,
speaks of his discovery of both the theoretical usefulness of Marxism and its spiritual
poverty:
I had already read quite a bit, I knew Marx, and I had also adopted a good part of his
critique of religion, of the historic forms of religion, Christianity included. I really
agreed with the concepts of exploitation and class struggle, but from the point of view
of the critique of religion, I had some different ideas […] I wasn’t at all in line with the
position of the Communist Party, which just repeated the vulgate. I was Marxist in an
independent spirit. With regards to religion, I approached it with a critical stance
needed to […] to free up the experience of faith itself. So it was a well-developed
cohabitation, and yet at the same time I felt that theoretical Marxism was not enough
to lead a movement of social liberation.24
This sense of being ‘Marxist in an independent spirit’ also characterized the
responses of progressive theologians and intellectuals elsewhere. In Italy, Pope John
XXIII’s tentative attempts to recognize the ‘good and commendable elements’ of
communism’s social and political programmes in the 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris
encouraged the growth of a public dialogue between Catholic and communist
intellectuals. Perhaps nowhere was this convergence of Catholic andMarxist ideas more
apparent than in don Lorenzo Milani’s Lettera ad una professoressa (Letter to a
Schoolteacher), one of the most influential publications of Italy’s ‘1968’.Milani’s book,
which exposed the class divides in the educational system, drew on the language of
Marxism but differed from standard Marxist accounts in its emphasis on the individual
experience of excluded and marginalized students.25 It had a profound impact on the
Catholic activists interviewed for this study, many of whom trace the roots of their
radicalism to don Milani’s ideas. For example, Giancarlo Zani recalls that members of
his youth discussion group were inspired by Milani’s work to set up an after-school
study programme for impoverished youths, and they sought Milani’s direct help in
establishing their successful doposcuola.26
538 Cultural and Social History
In Spain, a very similar pick-and-choose approach to Marxism was in evidence.27
Many activists valued Marxism’s usefulness as an instrument of contemporary socioeconomic
and political analysis, but did not think of themselves as Marxist in a
conventional sense. For Leonardo Aragón, the influence ofMarxism upon JEC activists
was:
very significant and important. It was significant and important because, we can say,
Marxist theory, both from the point of view of the economy and sociology, helped a
lot in analysing reality […] It wasn’t a question of being Marxist or not, but a question
of seeing what was useful to me. And insofar as it was useful to you in order to analyse
reality, just as – I insist – it remains so today in many aspects, why were we not going
to use it?28
For many activists, an accommodation with Marxism seemed, despite the manifest
contradictions, to be a perfectly natural progression. Mariano Gamo (b. 1931) adopted
Marxist ideas ‘without any kind of internal conflict’, arguing that ‘the fundamental
contradiction to whichMarxism responds is the biblical contradiction between the rich
and the poor. The exploited and the exploiters.’29 Others, however, questioned the
extent to which Marxism’s most fundamental concepts could be consistent with faith.
Julio Lois (b. 1935), who knew and admired the leading liberation theologist Gustavo
Gutiérrez and was a founding member of the liberation-inspired ‘Christians for
Socialism’, recalls the tension in his own mind between the ‘Christian’ goals of
socialism and the dialectical materialism of Marxism:
It seems to me that it was convenient and that it continues being convenient to show
that one can be Christian and at the same time assume the socialist vision of reality […]
It seems to me that a – we can call it – conventionally left-wing vision is more coherent
with the faith than a conservative, right-wing vision […] But we never linked – never
linked – the theological reflection with what we could call the ‘materialistic analysis’ or
the ‘materialist conception’ of Marxism. Because it was obvious that this was not on.
That is to say, one cannot be a dialectical materialist in the most explicit Marxist sense
and, at the same time, a believer.30
The partial or wholesale adoption of Marxist perspectives by Catholic activists
frequently led to conflicts with Church authorities, particularly after the death of John
XXIII.31 Some priests – and some communities – managed to negotiate these conflicts
and yet remain within the Church, but others found themselves silenced or forced out.
Dominican priest Jean Cardonnel (b. 1921), who fell out with the Dominican
hierarchy over the condemnation of the worker-priests, was banned from publishing or
addressing public meetings after he gave a series of lectures in Paris in 1968 in which
he argued that resurrection meant revolution.32 Spanish priest Mariano Gamo clashed
repeatedly with the archbishop of Madrid, Casimiro Morcillo, on account of his ideas.
When Gamo was jailed by the dictatorship in 1969, the archbishop had his church
razed to the ground and appointed a new priest to the parish, instead of leaving it in
the hands of Gamo’s like-minded assistant.33 In Italy as well, tensions between the
Church hierarchy and progressive or dissident thinkers increased in the late 1960s. In
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 539 The Church in Crisis
late 1968 tensions exploded in the Isolotto between the conservative archbishop of
Florence, Cardinal Florit, and progressive parish priest don Enzo Mazzi; the Isolotto
community took the collective decision to keep their priest but split with the official
Church, becoming Italy’s first ‘base community’, independent but Catholic in terms of
self-identity.34 As participant Gioietta Torricini recalls, the decision demonstrated that
‘we no longer had to […] obey the bosses and go where they said we should go and be
like sheep, but that instead we could become protagonists’.35
While many Catholic activists were forced out of the Church, and others left after
extended conflicts with Church officials, none of the activists interviewed initially had
the intention of creating an alternative or parallel church; on the contrary, their
activism grew out of the desire to reform the established Church from within. Some
recall with frustration their inability to do so. Giancarlo Zani recollects that ‘we
increasingly had the sense that the official Church was against [us], but we wanted to
remain within the Church. This was the […] point of incomprehension.’36 Workerpriest
Pedro Requeno affirms this idea:
One has to change things from within. And this Church, with which there are many
things with which I was not in agreement, and with which I am not in agreement, and
which made us and makes us suffer […] I will try and change it from within, at all
times.37
IV. BEING AN ACTIVIST
The specific focus of radical Catholic activism varied according to the country, region
and type of group concerned. Activism could, however, be divided into three broad
categories: an ‘internal’ activism that involved exploring and questioning the individual
relationship to faith and to the Church; an ‘external’ activism oriented towards
community-building activities and the fight for social justice; and a ‘global’ activism
that involved gestures of solidarity towards groups perceived as sharing in a common
struggle, whether blacks in the American South, peasants in Vietnam, or other radical
Catholic groups that were fighting a battle with Church or state authorities. As was true
for many other movements that emerged in and around 1968, this particular strain of
militant Catholicism had as its goal both changing the world and changing the
individual self.
One of the most fundamental – and in many ways most radical – elements of post-
Conciliar Catholic activism was the critical questioning of the relationship between the
individual, the Church as an organization, and sometimes the very idea of faith itself.
In base communities and discussion groups, participants were encouraged to pursue
and develop an active relationship with the Bible and with Catholic teachings, rather
than being told what to believe and what to think by the parish priest. Taking to heart
the Council’s ruling that the Church was the ‘people of God’, activists engaged in
critical Bible readings and discussed their own relationship to the world of faith. The
process could be experienced as profoundly transformative on a personal level. Maria
Paola Fiorensoli (b. 1947), who was active in the Gioventù Studentesca and
participated in a base community led by worker-priests in Turin as a young adult,
540 Cultural and Social History
recalls the sense of an inner spiritual revolution that came from the process of personal
reflection. She describes it as a ‘moment of psychological growth, of redemption, the
first real separation from my previous life’, and adds: ‘I learned techniques in the
community of worker-priests that I still use today, if in a different way […] This
activity of self-reflection [changed] your relationship with the world of faith.’38
Such self-reflexive practices were intended to change the very way in which
individual participants lived their lives, interacted with each other and related to their
faith. Many radical Spanish clergy and laity drew upon the ‘Revision of Life’ method
that originated with the Belgian founder of the JOC, Cardinal Joseph Cardijn. The
‘Revision of Life teams’ of the JEC, for example, would meet once a week or fortnight
in order to subject the most significant recent topic to scrutiny. As Leonardo Aragón
explains, they would:
first, identify the topic, that is to say, see; second, evaluate the topic – judge; and third,
see what has to be done in order to respond to this situation […] One analysed, one
judged and one took a decision in order to act. And one tried, of course, to place it in
a context of faith and Christian reflection.39
In addition to an internal activity of self-reflection, activists who participated in base
communities, family associations, student groups or other radical networks were often
also involved in ‘external’ forms of activism, such as community-based projects
intended to eliminate social hierarchies and give disenfranchised people a voice and a
role in decision-making processes. The projects themselves may have been small, but
the goal was lofty: participants often envisaged such projects as steps towards a social
revolution. In this they had much in common with other activists of the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Catholic activists shared with student activists and others a new
conception of the revolutionary subject, at least in certain cases. The Italian and French
activists interviewed in this sample speak of the importance of giving marginalized
peoples a voice and a subjective identity. This view of the marginalized embraced not
only the working classes or the poor, but also the dispossessed in general: slum-dwellers,
drug addicts, mental patients, prison inmates, and so forth. This view of the
marginalized as key players in a process of social revolution was shared by Italian and
French student activists (as well as student activists in other European democracies),
who were concerned both with class issues and with a struggle to reclaim public space
for those who had been pushed to the margins of society or found themselves trapped
in ‘total institutions’.40 The Italian and French activists in our sample often focused
their energies on reaching out to and championing the rights of marginalized groups:
they worked with immigrants and drug addicts, set up workers’ cooperatives for the
handicapped, ran after-school programmes for children living in slums, or fought for
housing for the homeless. Reaching out to the marginalized involved re-thinking the
very idea of difference itself. Maria Paola Fiorensoli recalls that, in her base community
in Turin, a central concept was the apertura al diverso – the acceptance of the person
who is different or deviant as an individual with his or her own subjectivity, rather than
an object of charity:
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 541 The Church in Crisis
[This] was not only about helping the needy – not at all! ‘The needy’ are part of the
great concept of Catholic charity, but il diverso is something else entirely, and so we
started to think about drug addicts, we started to think about prostitutes, we started to
think about the mentally ill […] It was a moment of elaboration and transformation,
and it was certainly shared by a broad swath of those who were in the student
movement and then later in the women’s movement.41
The concept of the ‘marginalized’ seems to have been far less meaningful in the Spain
of the 1960s and early 1970s. Mariano Gamo argues that this was because of the fullemployment
policy under Franco and the strict public order regime. He stresses that
‘the proletariat was, really, for us the embodiment […] of that world marginalized by
society. Not from the point of view of denying it bread and water, but from the point
of view of exploitation.’42 Consequently, the revolutionary subject was still the much
more traditional one of the working class.
Many activists also brought a global perspective to their efforts, endeavouring to
draw parallels between biblical passages and contemporary social and political events
such as the Vietnam War, and publicly proclaiming their solidarity with other social
movements and acts of protest. The Isolotto community, for example, held public vigils
for peace in Vietnam, devoted a Good Friday assembly to the cause of ‘the blacks of
America’, and frequently invited speakers to discuss global issues with the
congregation.43 Community members recall that they were encouraged to draw
parallels between biblical stories and contemporary global events, and then to discuss
these in their study groups. Danilo Lotti (b. 1929) recalls the experience:
I came in the evenings at nine, to read the Bible, which we did freely, and everyone
gave their own interpretation.We’d even [talk about] the parts we couldn’t stomach. In
the Bible you read that the Hebrews, when they occupied a city, would kill everyone
there, children, animals, etc. And it struck me that this was a bit like Vietnam, where
the archbishop of New York had blessed the napalm bombs that were going to
bombard Vietnam.44
Events in Latin America also inspired Catholic activists, and many were particularly
attuned to the actions of radical priests such as Colombian Camilo Torres, who became
a guerilla fighter and was killed in 1966. Theologian Paul Blanquart recalls that Torres
was one of his heroes at the time. In January 1966 Blanquart attended the Congress of
Intellectuals convened by Fidel Castro in Cuba, and drafted a document with three
Latin American priests that drew on the figure of Torres to link Catholic and Marxist
thinking:
This text said that […] we supported Cuba in the difficult situation of her blockade,
and we understood that Marxism was a part of that movement, but that faith also had
something to contribute, and we used the example of Camilo Torres. Castro referred
to it in his closing speech, which was the most anti-Soviet of his thoughts and
writings.45
This focus on international events gave Catholic activists the sense of being connected
to a vast, global movement. Participants recollect a sense of ‘everything being
542 Cultural and Social History
interconnected’, of an international quest ‘for liberation at every level: in factories, in
schools, and in the Church too’.46
V. NEW FORMS OF EVANGELIZATION
For many radical Catholic activists, new forms of evangelization constituted an integral
part of their militancy. The goal of these new approaches was the breakdown or
elimination of social and class divisions between priests and lay people, between
community members, and even between those within and those outside of the
community. They owed much to the models developed by the first wave of workerpriests
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but the new methods that emerged in and
around 1968 were deeply influenced by Vatican II, by the ideas and experiences of local
and national student and workers’ movements, by the growth of liberation theology
and the base community movement in Latin America, and by the rapid modernization
and resulting urban crisis of the 1960s. The radical Catholicism of the post-Conciliar
period exchanged ideas and practices with the other mass social movements of the day,
which in turn gave Catholic activists a powerful sense of participating in a global wave
of protest with a range of common aims.
This often involved first and foremost the elimination of divisions that separated
priests from lay people within Catholic communities. In Spain and elsewhere, many
clergymen deliberately rejected the outward symbols of ecclesiastical authority by
casting off the dog collar and other traditional vestments in an endeavour to diminish
the divide between themselves and their congregation. They also adapted their
language to match their democratizing aims; priests would drop the use of ‘don’ and
adopt the colloquial version of their name: thus ‘don Pedro’ became ‘Perico’. They
would also replace the formal form of address – usted – with the informal tú. The use
of tú, one priest recalls, ‘knocked down many barriers’.47 There is some evidence that
such informal practices were introduced into Italy via Spain. Sergio Gomiti, one of the
three priests of the Isolotto community, recalls that after the group had split with the
hierarchy and had begun to hold their weekly mass in the square in front of the parish
church, ‘the Spanish theologian [José María] González Ruiz came to say mass in the
piazza, and he only had on a white shirt and a sash. So we decided to do the same, not
least because it was a hassle bringing all [the liturgical vestments] out to the piazza.’48
Radical clergy also tended not to live in the traditional parish accommodation next to
the church, but in an ordinary (albeit church-owned) flat ‘as just another neighbour’,
relates the priest Pedro Requeno (b. 1944). ‘Something which is fundamental to
evangelization,’ he explains, ‘is the incarnation: living with, and like, the people.’ He
lived ‘communally’ in an ‘open house […] with the keys in the front door […] a place
where kids, youngsters, married couples could meet’.49
Some radical clergy became worker-priests who made their living from manual
labour. The Spanish worker-priests of this period were partly a response to the Second
Vatican Council – the Pope had banned them between 1954 and 1965 – but also to
the vertiginous urban growth of the 1960s, and in particular to the proliferation of new
working-class neighbourhoods as rural emigrants flocked to the cities in search of work.
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 543 The Church in Crisis
After six years in the ministry, Pedro Requeno became a worker-priest along with a
colleague, working first as a construction worker and then as a cleaner of metro
carriages. By becoming workers themselves, the priests came to understand far better
the harsh realities of working-class life. ‘I realized that it’s very different to
understanding the working class from books […] even from the testimony of others,’
he affirms. Worker-priests felt that the only way of spreading the Gospel amongst
working-class people was by sharing their lives: ‘only from within and by sharing and
living as the people live could we evangelize a reality such as the working-class one’.50
Engaging with forms of participatory democracy also constituted a revolutionary
rupture with the traditional, top-down relationship between the priest and his
congregation. Notions of empowerment and autonomy were central to the new
evangelization and had their own clear links to the broader movements of ‘1968’. In
Catholic study groups, student organizations, discussion circles and trade unions, lay
activists began to seize the chance to voice their own opinions concerning Church
teachings, rather than passively accepting them. Leda Cossu (b. 1947), who worked in
a textile factory on the outskirts of Venice and who was very active in her quickly
radicalized local branch of the ACLI, recalls that students and workers shared this
experience in common:
It was no longer only the priest who could speak, but also the faithful who spoke. The
students at Trent University started speaking out in church, and those of us in the
ACLI did as well, in the same period, without knowing that the students were doing it
too. It was a way of opening up the internal organization of the Church, with all its
rites and functions, so that it was a bit freer and had a deeper social dimension.51
The act of speaking out in church was radical enough for lay people in Italy and France,
but in Spain it could be profoundly subversive. Mariano Gamo, a leading exponent of
the catechumenal group, recalls that in these discussion groups biblical stories were
linked to the contemporary social and political climate. In studying Moses’ Exodus
from Egypt, for example, not only were implicit parallels drawn between ‘the Pharaonic
dictatorship’ and the Franco regime, but the members of the group were also urged to
‘adopt the Exodus attitude, that is to say, struggle against the tyranny of whatever
“Pharaoh” is in power’.52
Another powerful manifestation of participatory democracy was the popular
assembly, which took hold in radical Catholic circles at the same time as it was growing
in importance within the student and workers’ movements in Mediterranean Europe.
In some base communities and progressive parishes, the assembly was led by lay people
and replaced or augmented Sunday mass. Danilo Lotti, active in the Isolotto base
community, recalls that the community’s weekly assemblies gave lay participants the
chance to tie biblical readings to contemporary social and political issues:
Each group was given the task of choosing an issue, but with reference to the Bible –
the starting point was always a reading from the Bible, which then set the tone for the
discussion. The group of four or five people would meet the week before it was their
turn to speak. And so we didn’t call it ‘mass’ anymore, we called it ‘assembly’, and we
didn’t need the altar cloth any more!53
544 Cultural and Social History
Here again, an act that was radical and transformative in democratic Italy and France
could be subversive and even dangerous in dictatorial Spain. Priest Mariano Gamo
recalls that, at the La Montaña church in the working-class district of Moratalaz in
Madrid, the principal mass on Sunday was transformed into an assembly that was ‘open
to everyone’ and would ‘try and tackle all problems, absolutely all’, ranging from the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to the significance of May Day for
Christians. By discussing such subjects in its assemblies, the La Montaña church was
clearly challenging the power and legitimacy of the dictatorship, and treading a
dangerous line. Following an assembly in which lay people discussed the state of
national emergency in early 1969, Gamo was arrested and imprisoned for three years
in the special jail created by the dictatorship for the clergy.54
VI. CONTINUITIES AND CONVERGENCES
There remains much work for historians to do on the links between radical Catholic
circles and the non-confessional activist networks that developed in and around 1968.
Radical Catholics not only drew on the language and practices adopted by the wider
student and workers’ movements, but they also interacted directly with (and sometimes
formed an integral component of ) these movements. Oral history sometimes
illuminates these personal connections in a way that other sources do not. For example,
Leda Cossu recalls that her confessional workers’ group shared a strong, concrete
relationship with the student movement in Venice and in Trent:
The ACLI brought workers together with [student leaders such as] Marco Boato. We
used to go off into the mountains and run training workshops together […] Our link
with the student movement wasn’t only a meeting of ideas or a shared struggle, it was
also a life connection [un legame di vita]. Your relationship with the students was such
that if they shared a house in Venice, you ended up living with them or staying with
them, and spending a lot of time with them.55
Such concrete connections were evident in France, Italy and Spain (as well as
elsewhere). In France, radical priests and students came together around the events of
May 1968. For example, Dominican priest Jean Raguénès, who was chaplain to the
Paris law students, organized debates on the role of Christians in revolution during
May, and in the aftermath he helped to hide and then legally defend the so-called
‘Katangais’, the unemployed working-class youth who had defended the Sorbonne
against the police.56 Catholic workers of the CFTC and the Action Committee of the
Lip watch factory in Besançon, who included Jean Raguénès, were instrumental in an
iconic strike of 1973–4 where workers assumed control of the factory and restarted
production, while throughout the 1970s Catholic peasants of the JAC played a pivotal
role in the fight against the expansion of military bases in the Larzac.57 In Italy,
Catholic students, many of whom had entered activism through confessional
discussion groups or the Gioventù Studentesca, formed an integral part of the student
movement and of Lotta Continua, the largest of the extra-parliamentary organizations
to emerge out of the student movement. Catholic workers joined forces with
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 545 The Church in Crisis
communist and socialist ones during Italy’s ‘hot autumn’ of 1969; students and workers
– Catholic and otherwise – shared a tighter and more active bond in Italy than in any
other European country.58 Catholic base communities drew in students, workers and
others, and provided fertile ground for a shared exchange of ideas. In Spain, radical
Catholics exploited the Church’s privileged position under the dictatorship not only to
pursue their political aims by means of the apostolic associations of Catholic Action,
but also to create numerous clandestine trade unions. Catholic activists also founded
the Frente de Liberación Popular (Popular Liberation Front), which by the mid-1960s
had become one of the two principal student groups in Spain. Furthermore, radical
Catholics played a prominent role in the emergence and evolution of the two leading
anti-Francoist forces, the Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO.) and ETA.59
In contrast to many of those involved in student activism, the workers’ movement
or other mass social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the vast majority of Catholic
activists interviewed for this study have remained activists. They have continued with
their social and political engagement, working with immigrants, drug addicts and the
homeless, volunteering in and running cooperatives, and participating in peace and
environmental groups. Many of the associations and base communities formed at the
time still exist, and this very continuity may explain why so many of the activists
interviewed feel today that they were involved in (and that they continue to be involved
in) a worthwhile struggle. As Leonardo Aragón explains:
In relation to what we could call the ‘immediacy’, the ‘immediacy’ of ’68, one never
loses the feeling of affection [simpatía]. It lasts. Despite the fact that, now, politically,
many of the things that, at that time, I simply accepted, I couldn’t accept now. But my
simpatía remains […]What was done in that period had its internal logic, and not only
the French May but the Spanish ’68, the German ’68, the English ’68 and the ’66 and
’67 in California. This had a context and this had an origin and this had a raison d’être.
And this, then, received the simpatía of all the youth of that period.60
Given the influence and importance of radical Catholic thinking both in its own
right and within the student and workers’ movements that are most often associated
with 1968, it is remarkable that historians have paid the topic so little attention. Recent
comparative works on 1968 in Europe ignore the religious dimensions of protest
almost entirely. For example, not one of the twenty-five chapters inMartin Klimke and
Joachim Scharloth (eds), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977
(Basingstoke, 2008) is dedicated to the topic, and the question is likewise overlooked
in Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion inWestern Europe and North America
(Oxford, 2007). This silence on the part of historians impedes our understanding of
this remarkable period in twentieth-century history: Catholics contributed hugely to a
broader, global 1968, both in terms of ideas and in terms of concrete linkages, but the
history of this contribution remains to be written. The strength of radical Catholic
activism during these years qualifies existing dominant narratives of 1968, and
challenges us to re-think this ‘secular’ moment of transformation.
546 Cultural and Social History
NOTES
1. On the JAC, see Anne Tristan and Médard Lebot, Au-delà des haies. Visite aux paysans de
l’ouest (Paris, 1995), pp. 49–58. On the CFTC-CFDT, see especially Guy Groux and René
Mouriaux, La CFDT (Paris, 1989). For a local study of the Cercle Jean XXIII, see Guy
Goureaux, Le Cercle Jean XXIII. Des Catholiques en libérté (Paris, 2004).
2. On the CISL and the ACLI in the 1960s, see Gian Primo Cella, Paola Piva and Bruno
Manghi, Un sindacato italiano negli anni sessanta. La FIM-CISL dall’Associazione alla classe
(Bari, 1972); Guido Baglioni (ed.), Analisi della CISL. Fatti e giudizi di un’esperienza
sindacale (Rome, 1980); Gino Bedani, Politics and Ideology in the ItalianWorkers’ Movement
(Oxford, 1995). On the GS in this period, see L. Tomasi, La contestazione religiosa giovanile
in Italia (1968–78) (Milan, 1981). On the base community movement in Italy, see Mario
Cuminetti, Il dissenso cattolico in Italia (Milan, 1983); Roberto Beretta, Il lungo autunno.
Controstoria del Sessantotto Cattolico (Milan, 1998); Silvano Burgalassi, ‘Dissenso cattolico
e comunità di base’, in F. Traniello and G. Campanini (eds), Dizionario storico del
movimento cattolico in Italia, 1860–1980 (Milan, 1988).
3. On the youth and worker sections of Catholic Action in Spain, see Javier Domínguez,
Organizaciones obreras cristianas en la oposición al franquismo (Bilbao, 1975) and Feliciano
Montero, La Acción Católica y el franquismo. Auge y crisis de la Acción Católica Especializada
en los años sesenta (Madrid, 2000). On the JEC see Feliciano Montero, Juventud Estudiante
Católica 1947–1997 (Madrid, 1998), and on the JOC see José Castaño Colomer, La JOC
en España (1946–1970) (Salamanca, 1978). On the worker-priests, see José Centeno
García, Luis DíezMaestro and Julio Pérez Pinillos (eds), Curas obreros. Cuarenta y cinco años
de testimonio 1963–2008 (Barcelona, 2009); Julio Pérez Pinillos, Los Curas Obreros en
España (Madrid, 2004); Esteban Tabares, Los Curas Obreros, su compromiso y su espíritu
(Madrid, 2005).
4. Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), pp. 1–2.
5. Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato. Dal miracolo economico agli anni ottanta (Rome, 2003), p.
175.
6. The influence of these movements and thinkers is evident both in the oral record and in
the written memoirs of many of these priests; see, for example, Enzo Mazzi, Cristianesimo
ribelle (Rome, 2008), part III, and Jean Cardonnel, Fidèle rebelle (Paris, 1994). On the first
wave of the worker-priest movement, see Oscar L. Arnal, Priests inWorking-Class Blue: The
History of theWorker-Priests (1943–1954) (New York, 1990) and Emile Poulat, Les Prêtresouvriers.
Naissance et fin (Paris, 1999). On the nouvelle théologie of Chenu et al., see
especially Etienne Fouilloux, Une église en quête de liberté. La pensée catholique française entre
modernism et Vatican II, 1914–1962 (Paris, 1998).
7. Quoted in Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato (Rome, 2005), p. 176.
8. William J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 (Washington, DC, 2000),
p. 502.
9. The equivalent branches of Catholic Action in Italy did not play as significant a role in the
formation of radical networks as they did in France and Spain. On the fragility of the Italian
branch of the Young ChristianWorkers in this period, see the useful history on the website
of the Gioventù Operaia Cristiana: http://www.gioc.org/chi%20siamo/storia/storia.asp
(accessed 8 September 2010).
10. Interview with Gioietta Torricini, recorded by Rebecca Clifford (RC), Florence, 5 May
2008.
11. Interview with Marie-Claude Betbeder, recorded by Robert Gildea (RG), Paris, 8 June
2007.
12. The issue of women’s participation in radical Catholic circles, and of the links between
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 547 The Church in Crisis
Catholic activism and the women’s movement, has been almost completely ignored by
historians working on the 1960s in Europe. This is an area that calls for further research.
For an insightful study of the links between (Protestant) religious activism and later
feminist commitments in the American case, see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of
Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1980).
13. Pedro Solabarría, ‘Pedro Solabarría, “Periko”’, in García et al., Curas obreros, pp. 250–5.
14. Enzo Mazzi, Cristianesimo ribelle, p. 69. More than five decades later, Mazzi remains the
spiritual head of the Isolotto base community.
15. Interview with Pedro Requeno Regaño, recorded by Nigel Townson (NT), Madrid, 28
August 2009. On the Church’s contribution to the rebuilding of civil society under the
Franco dictatorship, see the revisionist articles of Pamela Radcliff, ‘La Iglesia católica y la
transición a la democracia’, in Carolyn Boyd (ed.), Religión y política en la España
contemporánea (Madrid, 2007), pp. 209–28, and, more broadly, ‘Associations and the Social
Origins of the Transition during the Late Franco Regime’, in Nigel Townson (ed.), Spain
Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–1975 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 140–62.
16. Interview with Luciana Angeloni, recorded by RC, Florence, 5 May 2008.
17. On the impact of the Second Vatican Council in France, see Emile Poulat, Une Eglise
ébranlée. Changement, conflit et continuité de Pie XII à Jean-Paul II (Paris, 1980) and Denis
Pelletier, La Crise catholique. Réligion, société et politique en France, 1965–1978 (Paris,
2005). On Spain, see Feliciano Blázquez, La traición de los clérigos en la España de Franco.
Crónica de una intolerancia (1936–1975) (Madrid, 1991), ch. 6 and 7; Callahan, Catholic
Church in Spain, pp. 501 and 509–34; Guy Hermet, Los católicos en la España franquista.
II. Crónica de una dictadura (Madrid, 1986), ch. 6 and 7; Frances Lannon, Privilege,
Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain 1875–1975 (Oxford, 1987), pp.
224–5 and 246–53. On Italy, see especially Cuminetti, Il dissenso cattolico in Italia, part II,
ch. 1 and 2.
18. McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp. 93–4.
19. Interview with Antoñita Berges Martín, recorded by NT, Madrid, 19 June 2009.
20. Interview with Rosetta Stella, recorded by RC, Rome, 8 December 2008.
21. Interview with Giancarlo Zani, recorded by RC, Florence, 10 May 2008.
22. On the conflict between the hierarchy and Catholic Action in Spain, see Blázquez, La
traición, pp. 165–6; Callahan, Catholic Church in Spain, pp. 519–23; Hermet, Los católicos
en la España franquista. II, pp. 344–7; Lannon, Privilege, pp. 235–7.
23. Interview with Leonardo Aragón Marín, recorded by NT, Madrid, 14 April 2008.
24. Interview with Paul Blanquart, recorded by RG, Paris, 15 May 2007. See also Blanquart’s
memoirs, En Bâtardise. Itinéraires d’un Chretien marxiste, 1967–1980 (Paris, 1981).
25. Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London,
1990), pp. 82–3.
26. Giancarlo Zani interview.
27. On the debate within Spain, see, for example, Jesús Aguirre et al., Cristianos y Marxistas.
Los problemas de un diálogo (Madrid, 1969); Daniel Francisco Álvarez Espinosa, Cristianos
y Marxistas contra Franco (Cádiz, 2002); Guy Hermet, Los católicos en la España franquista.
I. Los actores del juego político (Madrid, 1985), pp. 151–61 and 353–5; Reyes Maté, ¿Pueden
ser ‘rojos’ los cristianos? (Madrid, 1977), as well as the journal Iglesia Viva, 52–3
(July–October 1974), 60 (November–December 1975) and 66 (November–December
1976).
28. Leonardo Aragón Marín interview.
29. Interview with Mariano Gamo Sánchez, recorded by NT, Madrid, 26 July 2009.
30. Interview with Julio Lois Fernández, recorded by NT, Madrid, 22 June 2009. See also his
548 Cultural and Social History
books El Dios de los pobres (Salamanca, 2007) and La cristología de Jon Sobrino (Bilbao,
2007), as well as his edited text Teología de la liberación. Opción por los pobres (Madrid,
1986).
31. Gino Bedani, Politics and Ideology in the ItalianWorkers’ Movement, pp. 118–21.
32. Interview with Jean Cardonnel, recorded by RG, Montpellier, 20 May 2008. See also his
J’ai épousé la parole (Paris, 1972), pp. 166–8, and his essays in Frères du monde, 57, 59 and
60 (1969).
33. Mariano Gamo Sánchez interviews, 26 July and 2 August 2009.
34. On the history of the Isolotto community and its split from the official Church, see their
collectively authored texts Isolotto. 1954–1969 (Bari, 1969) and Isolotto sotto processo (Bari,
1971). See also Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy
1965–1975 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 200–16.
35. Gioietta Torricini interview.
36. Giancarlo Zani interview.
37. Pedro Requeno Regaño interview, 25 July 2009. For groups that were striving to create a
‘parallel’ church, see Blázquez, La traición, pp. 186–7 and 219–20, and, for a local example,
Laura Serrano Blanco, Aportaciones de la Iglesia a la democracia, desde la diócesis de
Valladolidad. 1959–1979 (Salamanca, 2006), pp. 361–80 and 410–22.
38. Interview with Maria Paola Fiorensoli, recorded by RC, Rome, 11 December 2008.
39. Leonardo Aragón Marín interview.
40. On ‘total institutions’, see the classic work of sociologist Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays
on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago, IL, 1962). On the
importance of the ‘marginalized’ for activists in the 1960s, see Peppino Ortoleva, I
movimenti del ’68 in Europa e in America, 2nd edn (Rome, 1998), pp. 181–5.
41. Maria Paola Fiorensoli interview.
42. Mariano Gamo Sánchez interview, 2 August 2009.
43. Archivio storico della Comunità dell’Isolotto, EMD 0654 and EMD 0662.
44. Interview with Danilo Lotti, recorded by RC, Florence, 21 April 2008. On the pro-war
stance of Cardinal Spellman of New York, see McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, pp.
144–5.
45. Paul Blanquart interview.
46. Interviews with Urbano Cipriani (b. 1935) and Casimira Furlani (b. 1937), recorded by
RC, Florence, 19 April 2008 and 8 May 2008.
47. Mariano Gamo Sánchez interview, 26 July 2009.
48. Interview with Sergio Gomiti, recorded by RC, Florence, 21 April 2008.
49. Pedro Requeno Regaño interview, 25 July 2009.
50. Ibid.
51. Interview with Leda Cossu, recorded by RC, Venice, 31 March 2009. On the radicalization
of the ACLI in the 1960s, see Sergio Turone, Storia del sindacato in Italia (Bari, 1976), pp.
404–16, and Cuminetti, Il dissenso cattolico in Italia, part II, ch. 5.
52. Mariano Gamo Sánchez interview, 2 August 2009.
53. Danilo Lotti interview.
54. Mariano Gamo Sánchez interviews, 26 July 2009 and 2 August 2009.
55. Leda Cossu interview.
56. Jean Raguénès, De Mai 68 à Lip. Un dominicain au couer des luttes (Paris, 2008).
57. On the role of Catholic workers in the Lip strike, see Jean Divo, L’Affaire Lip et les
catholiques de Franche-Comté (Yens-sur-Morges, 2003).
58. On the concerns of Catholic students at the time, seeMarco Boato, Contro la chiesa di classe
(Padua, 1969). On the interaction between Catholic and communist workers’
CLIFFORD AND TOWNSON 549 The Church in Crisis
organizations and trade unions in the 1960s, see especially Gino Bedani, Politics and
Ideology in the ItalianWorkers’ Movement.
59. Blázquez, La traición, pp. 131, 140 and 179–80; Callahan, Catholic Church in Spain, p.
505; Hermet, Los católicos en la España franquista. II, pp. 408–10; Lannon, Privilege, p.
235.
60. Leonardo Aragón Marín interview.
550 Cultural and Social History
