| Publication |
2006.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 1643, the Spanish king Felipe IV instituted an annual national offering to Saint James - the patron saint of Spain - that has been a yearly recurring custom on Saint James' day (25 July) almost ever since. Apart from the material offering, each ceremony is accompanied by an invocation of the king or a delegate (or, between 1939 and 1975, by Franco), and by a response of the archbishop of Compostela. These invocations must be considered very valuable, as they serve as expressive vehicles of the national preoccupations and their interpretation in religious terms under different politico-territorial circumstances. This article describes a content analysis of the invocations that belong to the national offerings to Saint James from the second half of the twentieth century. This period is characterised by some radical changes: it encloses the symbiosis between the centralised state-policy and Catholicism (National-Catholicism) during the Franco-regime (1939-1975), the transitional period (1975-1978) and the non-confessional, decentralised state-system after 1978. Furthermore, the changing European territorial order of the last few decades (whose main features are deterritorialization and reterritorialization) has invoked the rise of supranational and subnational social spaces. The texts of the invocations offer the opportunity to gain insight into the adaptability of a religeopolitical phenomenon and the strength of religion as a binding force for communities under the new politico-territorial circumstances.
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