Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Claves belgas para la lectura de <i>Por la Europa católica</i> de Emilia Pardo Bazán

2013; Spanish National Research Council; Volume: 75; Issue: 149 Linguagem: Espanhol

10.3989/revliteratura.2013.01.007

1988-4192

Lieve Behiels,

Galician and Iberian cultural studies

In 1901, Emilia Pardo Bazán took a trip to Belgium in order to familiarize herself with Belgian social Catholicism; the result was an essay, Por la Europa católica.In this article we will try to answer the following questions: did the author interview relevant personalities, did she document herself with trustworthy sources and did she provide a faithful image of the Belgian socio-political reality to her Spanish readers?First we will offer data about the publication of the texts, second we will sketch the context of the social role of the Church in Belgium and Spain at the turn of the century, and then we will analyse the chapters on social policy in the essay.We may conclude that Pardo Bazán interviewed Catholic figures of the highest level and visited important social works supervised by the Church, but she made no contact with the early Christian democracy.Her main source of information on the socialist movement is Le socialisme en Belgique, still a historical reference work.Although she knew about the tensions in the Catholic party and the huge social antagonisms, in her book she tends to present a too idyllic image of Belgium, probably in order to be able to present the country's social Catholicism as an example for Spain.