AFTER THE STORM. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL ACTION OF CATHOLIC INTELLECTUALS BETWEEN 1956 AND 1962

After the dismissal of Rafael Calvo Serer in 1953 and the Minister Joaquin Ruiz-Gimenez in 1956, the confrontation between the two groups of Catholic intellectuals continued for several years in an attempt to recover their lost positions by focusing on the three strategies of unity, institutionalization of the regime and cultural initiatives. However, what would soon become more evident was the disintegration and loss of political weight of both groups of intellectuals, including the authoritarian royalists linked to Opus Dei, even though they were able to place some of their members in government in February 1957. The institutional and cultural stagnation of the Franco regime was to alienate these two protagonists of the controversy, in spite of the increasingly strong challenges to the legitimacy of Franco from liberal-democratic Europe, the Holy See and from the workers' strikes in 1962.