Jacques Maritain vis à vis a crusading Catholicism, Spain, 1934-1937

Abstract

In August 1934, the French Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain gave several conferences in Santander, origin of his bets known essay Humanisme Intégral (Integral Humanism), published in Spanish in 1935 and in French in 1936, and reprinted three more times until 2000. The Dominican French theologian and thinker, Father Garrigues,aims to picture the context in which the lessons were pronounced, both the European and the Spanish context, very turbulent by then, two months later the cruelly stifled mining revolt in Asturias broke out and it led to the attempted separatist rebellion in Barcelona, and largely influenced by the electoral results and the changing Governments between 1933 and 1934. The author emphasizes that Maritain spoke with the 0ther Spaniards , those that did not trapped themselves in manichean positions between the Two Spains . Although Maritain was still not considered a political thinker by that time, as he would be later, specially during his North American stage, the position he adopted in his lessons in Santander, already reflected his deep religious convictions that gradually led him to defend a Catholic intellectual independence not subject to partisan positioning: Maritain never aligned himself with the Republican Government of the time or the subsequent Government during the war of Spain, to whose study the author subsequently devotes an analysis based on the position taken by Maritain, particularly in the preface to the work of the philosopher and jurist from Oviedo, Alfredo de Mendizábal, Aux origines d une tragédie.