It was another dark day during the Spanish Civil War. Two nuns were fleeing a group of Communist guerrillas who had threatened to rape them. Running through the streets of Tarrasa, a small town in Catalonia, they took shelter in the small house of Protestant pastor and publisher Samuel Vila.
One of these two nuns turned out to be a relative of the Spanish general, whose forces won the war. Francisco Franco subsequently ruled Spain with an iron fist as the head of a military and ultra-Catholic dictatorship that lasted 36 years.
But Franco made one small concession. As an act of gratitude for protecting his family member, he issued Vila a safe conduct permit that allowed him to travel freely inside and outside the country. A permission that few were granted in those nearly four decades, it allowed for a small evangelical publishing house to build the partnerships it would need to survive a religiously hostile Spain—and to celebrate its centennial this year.
Today, Editorial Clie is Spain’s largest Protestant publisher and has distributed or published nearly 3,000 titles since its founding in 1924. But during the dictatorship (1936–1975) and the years leading up to it, its work existed primarily underground.
Except for a brief respite in the 1930s, for decades Spain was ruled by a monarchy that did not separate church and state. In this environment, the Catholic church controlled schools, hospitals, and social services, and its leaders were vehemently opposed to any movement that might challenge its authority, be it secularism or Protestantism.
“We [evangelicals] were considered heretics,” said Antonio Cruz, a biologist who has published numerous books with Clie. “Children were taught at school that Luther was a rebellious monk who abandoned Catholicism because he wanted to marry a nun.”
Born in 1902, Vila grew up in this environment as the son of a prosperous family of Catalan merchants who converted to Protestantism due to the ministry of English missionaries. Despite the centuries of repression that Protestants had experienced during the Inquisition (which began in 1478 and lasted for centuries), there was slightly more tolerance at the start of the 20th century for expressions of faith other than Catholicism, at least in Catalonia.
As a child, Vila received a toy printing press with movable rubber type from the Methodist church the family attended. He began to print Bible verses on pieces of paper that he threw out of the train window on his regular trips to Barcelona, in the hope that someone would read them and find Jesus.
As Vila continued with his studies, his love of printing was soon rivaled by his passion for writing essays, in which he defended his Christian faith from Catholics who called it a heresy. These essays became his first book, A las Fuentes del Cristianismo (To the Sources of Christianity), in which he sought to give pastors tools to defend their beliefs.
In 1924, Vila opened Clie, or Comité de Literatura para las Iglesias Evangélicas (Literature Committee for the Evangelical Churches), a publishing house that would print books helping Protestants to defend their faith under the premise that “a reasoned faith is a solid faith.”
Courtesy of Editorial ClieAfter an ugly civil war devastated the country, Franco established his nationalist regime, a 40-year rule characterized by human rights violations and oppressive censorship. During the harsh years of persecution under the dictatorship, Clie had to operate primarily in secret since publishing any book by a Protestant author was prohibited by the state. The number of people who could gather for a Protestant service was limited by the police.
For decades, Clie printed its books at the workshops of two friends of the Vila family, who had become Protestants. It was not until 1965 that Vila was able to import an industrial printing press from the United States that had been discarded as scrap metal and install it in his home to create the printing workshop for his publishing house.
“Samuel Vila was a courageous man. He never hesitated to write letters to regional governors to complain about the many forms of discrimination against evangelicals at the time. He was also clever,” said Cruz, noting that Vila evaded state censorship of Protestant books by registering them as if they had been printed in the United States.
After Franco’s death in 1975, the 1978 Constitution officially recognized freedoms of religion, conscience, assembly, and expression, which had historically been denied to Protestants.
“We were hoping for a great revival after Franco’s death,” said Cruz. “But this just did not happen.”
On the contrary, the secularization of Spain accelerated after the dictator’s death. Today, only 19 percent of the population consider themselves practicing Catholics.
New millennium, new editorial approach
When the philosopher Alfonso Ropero became an evangelical Christian, he faced the challenge of explaining his new faith to his family. Originally from La Mancha, the region that inspired Miguel de Cervantes to write Don Quixote, Ropero was surrounded by uncles and cousins who were dedicated to the occult arts of spiritualism and divination, popular among the gypsies in central and southern Spain. In the midst of this dilemma, he came across El Espiritismo y los Fenómenos Metapsíquicos (Spiritism and Metaphysical Phenomena), which Vila had published in 1978.
“After reading it, I was able to use theological tools to debate with my relatives who were mediums and believed they had the power to communicate with the dead,” Ropero told CT. “That was my first contact with Clie.”
After publishing several of his own works on theology and philosophy, Ropero became Clie’s editorial director in 2001, only retiring earlier this year. In his two decades leading the publishing house, he initiated the creation of multiple biblical encyclopedias, including the Gran Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Biblia, Historia de la Filosofía y su Relación con la Teología, Biblia de Estudio del Mensaje Profético Escatológico, and the Diccionario Enciclopédico Bíblico Ilustrado.
During this time, Clie also began to publish more female Spanish speaking theologians, including Mexico’s Elsa Támez and Costa Rica’s Irene Foulkes, who grew up in America. They were included in the publishing house’s catalog, and the number of Latin American authors also increased, such as the Colombian Arturo Rojas, the Paraguayan Marcelo Wall, the American Juan Valdés, and the Guatemalan Rigoberto Gálvez.
Another of Clie’s great contributions to the theology of the Hispanic world has been the translation into Spanish of great academic works that at that time were only available in English or German. Of the 413 active books in their catalog, 35 percent are translations and include titles such as The Matthew Henry Study Bible, Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, Keil and Delitzsch’s Commentary on the Old Testament, or Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics.
The next 100 years
Even though the number of evangelicals in the country has been slowly increasing due to immigration from Latin America, protestants make up just under two percent of Spain’s 47 million people. Clie is interested in reaching them all—as well as the country’s Catholics.
“My father’s idea was that we had to serve everyone,” said Eliseo Vila, who took over the publishing house after his father died. “That is why Clie never discriminated denominationally or theologically in terms of what it published.”
Alfonso Triviño, who has been Clie’s CEO since 2006, has further broadened the publishing house’s portfolio, publishing titles that feature potentially controversial takes on social justice or feminism.
Clie published a Spanish translation of American historian Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood, which challenged the idea that gender hierarchy is biblically mandated. It also published Exclusion and Embrace by Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, a deep dive into reconciliation and forgiveness.
“We have always sought to be a bridge between academia, the pastoral world, and society based on the values of our faith,” Triviño told CT. “Many call us conservative. But the truth is that we have always pursued balance by bringing to market books that only a progressive publisher would dare to publish.”
Paradoxically, piracy has been one of the biggest problems that this Christian publisher has had to deal with today. Triviño has been surprised to frequently find PDF versions of Clie’s (and other competitor Christian publishing houses like Editorial Vida or Verbo Divino) books circulating openly in WhatsApp and Telegram Bible study groups or uploaded on the Bible seminar portals of some churches.
“Piracy has slowed us down slightly in our goal of making our entire catalog available in digital format,” he said. “It’s a shame that this happens in the Christian world.”
Reaching new audiences, especially younger ones, is another of the publisher’s challenges in this new century. Besides expanding to audiobooks and e-books (when possible), Clie has also sought out younger writers, including Argentine singer-songwriter and YouTuber Lucas Magnin, who has authored 95 Tesis para la nueva generación (95 Theses for the New Generation) or Teología Pop (Pop Theology).
“To get through over a century, an institution needs the capacity to adapt to all circumstances. Hence, we have been, for example, the first Spanish Christian publisher to have a website, and later, the first on social media,” said Eliseo Vila. “The Lord has brought us this far. If it had not been for the will of God and his hand constantly urging us, we would not exist today.”
Hernán Restrepo is a Colombian journalist. Since 2021, he has been managing Christianity Today’s social media accounts in Spanish.
