Old orders and new: The nuns as historical actors

For the nuns in Spain, the key event thrusting them into modernity came, perhaps surprisingly, not from awareness of social change or external political movements but from within the Catholic Church itself. This pivotal event was the holding of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II, 1962–65). As Buddhist belief and practices in Thailand were historically linked to the monarchy and a conservative political regime, so a narrowly traditional Catholicism was used in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century to contain the forces of modernisation and to legitimise a largely feudal framework of social and political relations.