Judicial-economic history of the autofinancing of the spanish catholic church and the other religious confessions until 1945

Abstract

The economic History of the auto-financing of the Church has been a result of the Church-State confrontation, which has remained expressed in the different regulating concordates of the relations between the subjects. During centuries the Church did not only self-financed itself, but also financed the very State for their numerous wars that were carried out in great part of Europe. But in the XIXth Century there was a rupture of the traditional model of the Church-State relation and the growth of the paying back process, which started as a consequence of the urgent need of the Spanish State, leaving the Spanish Church in a somewhat difficult situation and compromised in the economical aspect. As from that moment a phase started in which the State would be the very guarantor of the Church, in this way trying to exert an economical, political and moral control on it.