Complexity of Hispanic Religious Life in the 16th-18th Centuries

"National Catholicism (nacionalcatolicismo), in Spain, was based on the principle of unity of beliefs, turning on an axis of Spanish confessionalization, the identification of shared interests between Church and State, and Spanish messianic providentialism. In A History of the Spanish Heterodox (1880- 82), Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo stridently defended the notion that underlying Spanish National Catholicism was religious unity"--