Up to this point in my discussion of Juan Marsé’s multidimensional games of representation, fuelled by desire and imagination and daring to challenge official discourses in order to exploit existing textual conventions in inventive new ways, literary criticism and history have been viewed as two examples of textual convention whose authority he has dared to undermine. The textual games in my remaining three chapters, which consider religious discourses, are bolder still. For even today, the wars that are claiming religion as their cause in the new millennium offer chilling evidence of the passions roused and dangers inherent where that which is viewed as sacred is seen to be an object of mockery.

After the Civil War, as my Introduction indicated, the victorious regime made an ally of the Catholic Church and drew on the Church’s authority and its texts to reinforce the dictatorship’s own authority and rhetoric. In Catalonia, however, sections of the Church would be actively engaged in promoting Catalan nationalism in defiance of Francoist unitarian policy, and before long ideological changes outside Spain would culminate in the revolutionary social and political unrest of the 1950s and 1960s which would bring the authority of Christian doctrine and of the Church into question, even within the peninsula. The repercussions would affect not only the public sphere but also – and equally problematically – the private spheres of personal morality, conduct and belief. The Catholic Church’s response would be to summon a Council – only the second such council in its long history – to debate its position, determine its reaction and decide on policies to be implemented world-wide.

In the context of Marsé’s depiction of the impact on Spain of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Chapter 3 examines his treatment of what has been a major discourse in the Catholic Church both in Spain and world-wide this century: one that has tried to offer practical solutions to practical problems arising from discrepancies between wealth and poverty, repression and freedom.