Hijos de su tiempo. Los sacerdotes obreros de Tarragona. Mundo obrero, antifranquismo y represión (1951-1977)

Identifier:  TDX:4342

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX4342

Authors:  Baena Gallardo, Neus

Abstract:
This doctoral thesis analyses the phenomenon of worker-priests and worker members of religious orders in Reus and Tarragona from 1951 to 1977. It highlights their genesis, path, concerns and aspirations within the framework of Franco’s dictatorship, which was formally allied with the Spanish Catholic Church. In order to reconstruct this historical fact, we examine the contrast between the education they received at the seminaries and ecclesiastical centres where they were trained and the experience they subsequently had in their respective parishes, the working-class neighbourhoods in which they lived, the factories or workshops in which they worked, and the human relationships that arose in the different environments they lived in. The hopes for renewal sparked universally by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) within a European context of great ferment and with change in the air in May ‘68, the rise of the youth and student movement, and the Spanish context itself left their mark on a generation of seminarians who began to display social concerns. In order to contextualise the life experience of the worker-priests and worker members of religious workers in the peripheral neighbourhoods of Reus and Tarragona, we studied the collectives, groups and individuals with whom they shared their vocation to be close to the working class world, where they wove networks of human relationships, solidarity, thought, denunciation and action against Franco’s regime: other priests with different commitments, the female missionaries from the Institute of Secular Missionaries and the militants of the secular apostolate. Finally, we examine the different types and degrees of repression by the Francoist state suffered by worker-priests and council members, due to their work to protect and disguise political and trade union militancy during the underground period, as well as their participation as ordinary citizens in anti-Francoist protests and demands for basic services in the working-class neighbourhoods of Reus and Tarragona.