UNDER the monarchical authority of both Philip V until 1746 and his son Ferdinand VI (1746-1759), government ministers who were either Jesuits themselves or favorably disposed to them had pursued greater power over the Spanish church by appointing benefice holders and limiting the powers of the papal nuncio in Spain (initially attempted in the Concordat of 1737). The king’s Jesuit confessor Francisco Rávago and the pro-Jesuit Secretary of State José Carvajal y Lancáster and the young Manuel Ventura y Figueroa were the forces behind the thirteen-year effort of the Concordat of 1753 that effectively gave the Spanish monarch control over all but 52 remaining benefices in the land*

     But it was not until the reign of Charles III from 1759 to 1788, intersecting with what many consider to be the pinnacle of enlightenment in Spain, in which earlier political gains were consolidated to form something of a royal church independent from Rome. not only did this royal church entail the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, but it also necessitated the importation of Gallicanism so that Spanish clergy would become quasi-agents of the state. By the end of the century, the crown’s activity in ecclesiastical affairs had become so «gallicanized» that it became negatively associated with the Catholic strand of Jansenism.

*Teófanes egido, «El regalismo y las relaciones iglesia-estado en el siglo XVIII» in Historia de la Iglesia en España, Vol. IV, 173-88.

BY the 1780s, every Catholic state in Europe wanted to reduce the Pope to a ceremonial figurehead, and most had succeeded. Kings and princes appointed bishops and abbots, dictated which feast days would be observed and which ignored, policed or prevented appeals to Rome, vetted the publication of papal utterances.

This was a theological as well as a political phenomenon. Under the influence of Jansenism and a growing Catholic interest in the early Church many theologians emphasised the supremacy of the bishop in the local church. The Pope was primate, and the final resort in doctrinal disputes, but papal intervention in day-to-day affairs was considered usurpation, and the Christian prince fulfilled the role of Constantine in restricting it.

The powers and actions of papal nuncios focused some of these animosities. Everyone agreed that the Pope should have diplomatic representatives at the courts of Catholic kings. But the nuncios represented the spiritual as well as the temporal authority of the Pope, and had the powers of roving archbishops. They ordained, confirmed, dispensed, they heard appeals in the territories of the local bishops. These activities were resented.When Pope Pius VI (1775-99), at the invitation of the Elector of Bavaria, established a nuncio at Munich in 1785, the heads of the German hierarchy, the archbishops of Trier, Mainz, Cologne and Strasbourg, appealed to the Emperor to curtail the power of nuncios in Germany.

Throughout Catholic Europe in the eighteenth century devout men looked for a reform of religion which would free it from superstition and ignorance, which would make it more useful, moral, rational. [i.e. that would serve the interests of the state in upholding accepted morality]

Many Catholics blamed the popes for upholding "superstition." Men of the Enlightenment disliked relics and indulgences, and Rome was the main source of both. They disapproved of ‘superstitious’ devotions like the Sacred Heart, and the religious orders who propagated them, like the Jesuits; but the papacy was the friend of such devotion. They thought that the parish church and the parish clergy were useful, but that monasteries were a bad thing, refuges for men too lazy to work, or for girls who would be better off running homes and having babies. Yet the popes supported and privileged the monastic orders, and in the process undermined the authority of the local bishops and the parish clergy.

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