Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic

Despite the anticlerical aspects of the constitution, the Republican coalition's electoral policy stated: "Catholics: the maximum program of the coalition is freedom of religion ... The Republic ... will not persecute any religion."[38] According to historian Stanley Payne, 'though a deliberate deception,... this propaganda was obviously accepted by many Catholics.'[38] Although at the outset tensions were apparent between the Church hierarchy and the republic, the hierarchy likewise formally accepted the statement, hoping for a continuation of the existing Concordat.[38] Official or organized opposition did not exist at the beginning.[38] The first formal dissent was in May 1931 when the archconservative Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Toledo, Pedro Segura, published a writing in defense of the former king.[38]

Following a monarchist insult on the previous day, when the royal march was played to the crowds on their Sunday paseo in Madrid's Retiro Park, mobs of anarchists and radical socialists sacked the monarchist headquarters in Madrid on May 11, 1931 and then proceeded to set fire or otherwise wreck more than a dozen churches in the capital. Similar acts of arson and vandalism were perpetrated in a score of other cities in southern and eastern Spain. These attacks came to be referred to as the "quema de conventos" (the burning of the convents).

It was alleged that this anticlerical violence was undertaken, for the most part with the acquiescence and in some cases the active assistance of the official Republican authorities. Despite the protests of Miguel Maura - who as minister of the Interior was ultimately responsible for public order - the government refused to intervene and the fever of anticlerical incendiarism spread rapidly around the country - Murcia, Málaga (the most extensive damage occurred in this city), Cadiz, Almería. When criticized by the Catholic Church for not doing more to stop the burning of religious buildings in May 1931 Prime Minister Azaña famously retorted that the burning of "all the convents in Spain was not worth the life of a single Republican".

The burning of the convents set the tone for relations between the Republican left and the Catholic right. The events of 11 May came to be seen as a turning point in the history of the Second Republic. For example, José María Gil-Robles claimed to regard the convent burnings as 'decisive'. He claimed that the fires of 11 May destroyed the precarious coexistence which had been established between Church and State. (Indeed, Gil-Robles persisted in seeing the burnings as the result of planned and co-ordinated action by the republican government. The liberal catholic Ossorio y Gallardo also believed in the likelihood of conspiracy - but as the work of monarchist agents provocateurs.) "From now on", wrote Ossorio", the right was utterly opposed to Maura as if he, a sincere Catholic, had been responsible for burning churches." The political fate of the moderate Catholic Miguel Maura exemplified the predicament of the centre in periods of intense political polarization - though he demonstrated his defence of Church property in May 1931 he was still dubbed by the Catholic right as one who consented 'to Spain being lit by burning churches'.

Gil-Robles was one of the prime beneficiaries of Maura's discomfiture and one of the first to capitalise on it. Following the passage of the 1931 Constitution with its anticlerical clauses Maura (on 14 October 1931) and Alcalá-Zamora resigned - though their resignations did nothing to reconcile them to the agrarian Catholic right. The position of the Catholic republicans was an isolated one.[39]

In the fall of 1931, a new constitution was passed that prohibited public religious processions and outlawed much of the work of Catholic religious institutes. No fewer than six constitutional articles were used to define the new, subordinate place of the Catholic Church, many modelled on the Portuguese Constitution of 1911. The conservative Catholic Republicans Alcalá-Zamora and Miguel Maura resigned from the government[40] when the controversial articles 26 and 27 of the constitution, which committed the Spanish government to phasing out state funding of clergy stipends,[41] and strictly controlled Church property and prohibited religious institutes from engaging in education were passed.[42] Not only advocates of a confessional state but also certain advocates of church/state separation saw the constitution as hostile; one such advocate of separation, José Ortega y Gasset, stated "the article in which the Constitution legislates the actions of the Church seems highly improper to me."[43] Article 26 - " one of the most divisive articles in the constitution..debarred religious from teaching though not from welfare work.[44] (This attempt to close the religious schools altogether and to keep religious out of the state system was unsuccessful - "the necessary legislation was only completed in June 1933 to take effect for 1 October 1933. The victory of the Right in elections at the end of 1933 immediately rendered it dead.")

In October 1931 José María Gil-Robles the leading spokesman of the parliamentary right declared that the constitution was 'stillborn' - a 'dictatorial Constitution in the name of democracy.' Robles wanted to use mass meetings "to give supporters of the right a sense of their own strength and, ominously, to accustom them 'to fight, when necessary, for the possession of the street.'"[45] Frances Lannon characterizes the constitution as creating a secular democratic system based on equal rights for all, with provision for regional autonomy, but also calls the constitution "divisive" in that the articles on property and religion had a "disregard for civil rights" and ruined the prospect of conservative Catholics Republicans.[46] Likewise, Stanley Payne agrees that the constitution generally accorded a wide range of civil liberties and representation with the notable exception of the rights of Catholics, a circumstance which prevented the formation of an expansive democratic majority.[2]

Frances Lannon, addressing the fears of the Left that Church influence in the schools was a danger to the republic has observed that, "it was demonstrably the case the ideological ambience and spirit of the congregations was anti-socialist, illiberal, and pervaded with the values of the political Right." She gives as one example, "to convey the wider reality", a journal kept by a women's community with a prestigious convent school in Seville. It laments, in April 1931, the departure of the King, its wariness of the Republic antedating any moves against the Church, in November 1933 they go to vote, 'a sacred duty', 'in grave circumstances', the Right's victory greeted as 'better than we could have hoped'. The Asturian rising brings forth the declaration that 'the conduct of the army was magnificent and the rebellion crushed step by step.' In February 1936 there is despair until, 'Relation of the heroic patriotic days of Seville, July 1936', the account of the rising against the Republic is euphoric. In 1937 the convent school hears from Queipo de Llano himself, and there are delirious accounts of military parades and speeches by Quiepo, and Franco in August, until 18 April 1939 official recognition of the school and a letter from Franco's secretary in Burgos thanking the community for its good wishes. "The journal is not exceptional" Lannon concludes, "The politically reactionary sympathies of the teaching religious were formed and sustained by the sociological context and limitations of the schools."[47]

Disease, poverty, and illiteracy were urgent problems, but in a country with a fiscal system that left most real wealth untaxed, and a large army budget, little public money was directed towards meeting them. Education and welfare needs were met only patchily and religious communities filled the spaces between the patches. Frances Lannon (writing in Privilege, Persecution and Prophecy) observes that even institutions funded by the state or provincial or municipal authorities, were dependent upon religious personnel. The Brothers of St John of God for example specialised in children's hospitals and mental homes. Where welfare was concerned central and local government relied absolutely on the religious congregations to staff as well as supplement their institutions. This was made explicit in the debates on the religious congregations in the constituent Cortes on 8–14 October 1931, and was a major reason then, why the congregations were not entirely disbanded. Yet the religious sometimes found themselves excoriated. Sometimes this was because of the different cultural worlds inhabited on the one hand by religious, almost always from devout and traditional milieux, and on the other by the urban poor. To the former it seemed axiomatic that religious practice should order the daily lives of their various charges, be they children, workmen or reformed prostitutes. There is overwhelming evidence however to show that this typical imposition of religious observance as a condition of eligibility for aid was widely resented. Working class areas of the large cities were notorious for the virtual absence of formal religious practice. w:fr:Margarita Nelken, in the 1920s, said that the poor residents of the most rundown areas of Madrid had terrible things to say about the charity given by women lay associations and 'not a single word of thanks'. Frances Lannon has further speculated that perhaps the resentment, generated by making charity dependent upon religious tests, and by the sale of goods and services from religious houses, (undercutting those struggling to make a living on the margins of urban society ) goes some way to explain why so many brothers, and even some nuns, whose laudable work might have been expected to save them from popular hatred, were nevertheless massacred in 1936 in the first months of the civil war.[48]

The most bitter controversies about the congregations in the pre-war years, however, had always centred on their schools and colleges to which about half of all male communities and one-third of the female were dedicated.

The Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas or CEDA) was founded in February 1933 and was led from its inception by José María Gil-Robles. Despite dismissing the idea of a party as a 'rigid fiction', the CEDA leaders created a stable party organisation which would lead the Spanish right into the age of mass politics.[49] The campaign against the constitution began in CEDA's Castilian heartlands.[50]

On 3 June 1933, in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis (On Oppression Of The Church Of Spain), Pope Pius XI condemned the Spanish Government's deprivation of the civil liberties on which the Republic was supposedly based, noting in particular the expropriation of Church property and schools and the persecution of religious communities and orders.[51] He demanded restitution of the expropriated properties which were now, by law, property of the Spanish State, to which the Church had to pay rent and taxes in order to continue using these properties. "Thus the Catholic Church is compelled to pay taxes on what was violently taken from her"[52] Religious vestments, liturgical instruments, statues, pictures, vases, gems and similar objects necessary for worship were expropriated as well.[53] The encyclical urged Catholics in Spain to fight with all legal means against these injustices.

The announcement of a general election in November 1933 brought about an unprecedented mobilization of the Spanish right. El Debate instructed its readers to make the coming elections into an "obsession", the " sublime culmination of citizenly duties," so that victory in the polls would bring an end to the nightmare of the republican bienio rojo. Great emphasis was placed on the techniques of electoral propaganda. Gil-Robles visited Nazi Germany to study modern methods, including the Nuremberg Rally. A national electoral committee was established, comprising CEDA, Alfonsist, Traditionalist, and Agrarian representatives - but excluding Miguel Maura's Conservative Republicans. The CEDA swamped entire localities with electoral publicity. The party produced ten million leaflets, together with some two hundred thousand coloured posters and hundreds of cars were used to distribute this material through the provinces. In all of the major cities propaganda films were shown around the streets on screens mounted on large lorries.[54]

The need for unity was the constant theme of the campaign fought by the CEDA and the election was presented as a confrontation of ideas, not of personalities. The electors' choice was simple: they voted for redemption or revolution and they voted for Christianity or Communism. The fortunes of Republican Spain, according to one of its posters had been decided by 'immorality and anarchy'. Catholics who continued to proclaim their republicanism were moved into the revolutionary camp and many speeches argued that the Catholic republican option had become totally illegitimate. 'A good Catholic may not vote for the Conservative Republican party' declared a Gaceta Regional editorial and the impression was given that Conservative Republicans, far from being Catholics, were in fact anti-religious.

In this all-round attack on the political centre, the mobilization of women also became a major electoral tactic of the Catholic right. The Asociación Femenina de Educación had been formed in October 1931. As the 1933 general election approached women were warned that unless they voted correctly communism would come " which will tear your children from your arms, your parish church will be destroyed, the husband you love will flee from your side authorized by the divorce law, anarchy will come to the countryside, hunger and misery to your home."[55] AFEC orators and organisers urged women to vote 'For God and for Spain!' Mirroring the female qualities emphasized by AFEC the CEDA's self-styled sección de defensa brought young male activists to the fore. This new CEDA squad was very much in evidence on election day itself, when its members patrolled the streets and polling stations in the provincial capital, supposedly to prevent the left from tampering with the ballot boxes.[56]

In the 1933 elections, the CEDA won a plurality of seats; however, these were not enough to form a majority. Despite the CEDA's plurality of seats, President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora declined to invite its leader, José Maria Gil-Robles, to form a government, and instead assigned the task to Alejandro Lerroux of the Radical Republican Party. CEDA supported the Lerroux government and subsequently received three ministerial positions. Hostility between the left and the right increased after the 1933 formation of the Government. Spain experienced general strikes and street conflicts. Notable among the strikes was the miners' revolt in northern Spain and riots in Madrid. Nearly all rebellions were crushed by the Government and political arrests followed.

As the political situation deteriorated leftist radicals became more aggressive, and conservatives turned to paramilitary and vigilante actions. According to official sources, 330 people were assassinated and 1,511 were wounded in political violence; records show 213 failed assassination attempts, 113 general strikes, and the destruction (typically by arson) of 160 religious buildings.[57]

The Lerroux government suspended many of the initiatives of the previous Manuel Azaña government, provoking an armed miners' rebellion in Asturias on October 6, and an autonomist rebellion in Catalonia. Both rebellions were suppressed (Asturias rebellion by young General Francisco Franco and colonial troops), being followed by mass political arrests and trials.

The Asturias revolt was another defeat for the European left - in Germany Hitler had destroyed organized labour, liquidating Europe's strongest communist party, in Austria, the Catholic corporatist Dolfuss, admired by the CEDA, had used paramilitary forces to crush Viennese Marxists of all varieties. To the right Asturias was proof of the revolutionary left's plans for Spain. The rebels had murdered thirty-four priests and seminarians - the most clerical blood spilt in Spain in over a hundred years.

In Catholic Salamanca, for example, the sons and daughters of the Church were exhorted to mark the victory in Asturias by prayer and penance and make reparation to the majestic and victorious figure of Christ the King. "The figure of Christ clothed in majesty was also used by the Catholic right as a symbol of the triumph of their cause. In Spain, as in Belgium or Mexico, Christ the King had become the symbol of militant Catholicism."[58] For example, the Catholic Gaceta Nacional celebrated the suppression of the rebellions and its editor said that the uprisings had been followed not by repression but by justice. The CEDA paper, El Debate spoke of 'the passions of the beast'. "Against the dehumanized forces of the international revolution - believed to be manipulated by the shadowy figures of Soviet Communists, Freemasons and Jews - the army had stood firm."[59]

As a prelude to the CEDA's 1933 election campaign, GIl Robles had announced the need to purge the fatherland of 'Judaizing Freemasons' and the stock figures of the grasping Jew and Machiavellian Mason occurred again and again in the party's electoral propaganda. The Dominican journal La Ciencia Tomista issued from San Esteban in Salamanca proclaimed the continuing relevance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Jewish Marxists, expelled from ghettos across the world, took refuge in Spain where "they settle down and sprawl about, as in conquered territories".

"This conspiratorial rhetoric came to the fore during the election campaigns of November 1933 and February 1936, in both cases allowing the Catholic right to present the fight at the ballot box as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Extremist rhetoric and anti-semitic theory - prevalent among both supporters and orators of the CEDA - provided immediate common ground between Catholic parliamentarians and the extreme right."[60]

In 1934, a Spanish cleric named Aniceto de Castro Albarrán wrote El derecho a la rebeldia, a theological defence of armed rebellion that was serialised in the Carlist press, published under the usual ecclesiastical licences.

The Juventudes de Acción Popular, the youth wing within the CEDA, soon developed its own identity differentiating itself from the main body of the CEDA. The JAP emphasized sporting and political activity. It had its own fortnightly paper, the first issue of which proclaimed: 'We want a new state.' The JAP's distaste for the principles of universal suffrage was such that internal decisions were never voted upon. As the thirteenth point of the JAP put it: 'Anti-parliamentarianism. Anti-dictatorship. The people participating in Government in an organic manner, not by degenerate democracy.' The line between Christian corporatism and fascist statism became very thin indeed.[61] The fascist tendencies of the JAP were vividly demonstrated in the series of rallies held by the CEDA youth movement during the course of 1934. Using the title jefe, the JAP cultivated an intense allegiance to Gil-Robles. Gil-Robles himself had returned from the 1933 Nuremberg Rally and praised its " youthful enthusiasm, steeped in optimism, so different from the desolate and enervating scepticism of our defeatists and 'intellectuals'."

Between November 1934 and March 1935, the CEDA minister for agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, introduced into parliament a series of agrarian reform measures designed to better conditions in the Spanish countryside. These moderate proposals met with a hostile response from reactionary elements within the Cortes, including the conservative wing of the CEDA and the proposed reform was defeated. A change of personnel in the ministry also followed. The agrarian reform bill proved to be a catalyst for a series of increasingly bitter divisions within the Catholic right, rifts that indicated that the broad based CEDA alliance was disintegrating. Partly as a result of the impetus of the JAP, the Catholic party had been moving further to the right, forcing the resignation of moderate government figures, including Filiberto Villalobos.[62] Gil Robles was not prepared to return the agriculture portfolio to Gimenez Fernandez. Mary Vincent writes that, despite the CEDA's rhetoric supporting Catholic social teaching, the extreme right ultimately prevailed.[63]

In the 1936 Elections a new coalition of Socialists (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE), liberals (Republican Left and the Republican Union Party), Communists, and various regional nationalist groups won the extremely tight election. The results gave 34 percent of the popular vote to the Popular Front and 33 percent to the incumbent government of the CEDA. This result, when coupled with the Socialists' refusal to participate in the new government, led to a general fear of revolution.

In elections on February 16, 1936, CEDA lost power to the left-wing Popular Front. Support for Gil-Robles and his party evaporated almost overnight as the CEDA haemorrhaged members to the Falange.[64] Mary Vincent writes that, "(the) rapid radicalization of the CEDA youth movement effectively meant that all attempts to save parliamentary Catholicism were doomed to failure.[65]

Many CEDA supporters welcomed the military rebellion in the summer of 1936 which led to the Spanish Civil War, and many of them joined Franco's National Movement. However, General Franco was determined not to have competing right-wing parties in Spain and, in April 1937, CEDA was dissolved.

According to Mary Vincent, "The tragedy of the Second Spanish Republic was that it abetted its own destruction; the tragedy of the Church was that it became so closely allied with its self-styled defenders that its own sphere of action was severely compromised. The Church, grateful for the championship offered first by José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones and then by Franco, entered into a political alliance which would prevent it carrying out the pastoral task it had itself identified."[66]

According to Mary Vincent, "The Church was to become the most important source of legitimation for the rebellious generals, justifying the rising as a crusade against godlessness, anarchy and communism. Although such a close identification with the Nationalist cause was not to be fully elaborated until the Spanish hierarchy's joint pastoral letter of July 1937, there was no doubt that the Church would line up with the rebels against the Republic. Nor, at local level, was there any hesitancy. The only sizeable group of Catholics to remain loyal to the republic were the Basques. "[67] Similarly, Victor M Perez-Diaz wrote, "The church reacted to all this by mobilizing the mass of peasants and the middle classes and channeling them into professional and political right wing organisations prepared for by decades of careful organisation. The extreme right took upon itself the task of conspiring to overthrow the regime. The moderate right refused to state its unambiguous loyalty to the new institutions and openly flirted with authoritarianism."[68]

Frances Lannon has propounded a view which suggests the existence of an 'exiguous Catholic minority which saw in the Church's crusade against the Republic not a defensive holy war that began in 1936 and deserved their support, but a long series of class commitments on political and socio-economic policies which themselves powerfully helped to create the ruthless and desperate anti-clericalism unleashed by the war. "Republican Catholics like José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull, Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo, and José Bergamín, all wrote scathing criticisms of the Church's role in covering with a religious cloak the political, military and class aims of the anti-Republicans. The ex-Jesuit Joan Vilar i Costa refuted the 1937 collective pastoral letter, the Catalan democratic Catholic politician Manuel Carrasco Formiguera was executed on Franco's orders in April 1938 because he also failed to agree with official Catholic views. These men emphasised that the Church's anti-Republican alignment did not originate in, although it was certainly strengthened by the massacres of priests, monks and Catholic faithful by groups of Republicans, and Lannon concludes: "The crusade had been waged for a long time by the Church for its own institutional interests, for survival. The cost of its survival was the destruction of the Republic."[69]

Pope John Paul II beatified a total of about 500 martyrs in the years 1987, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997 and March 11, 2001. Some 233 executed clergy were beatified by Pope John Paul II on 11 March 2001.[79] Regarding the selection of Candidates, Archbishop Edward Novack from theCongregation of Saints explained in an interview with L'Osservatore Romano : "Ideologies such as Nazism or Communism serve as a context of martyrdom, but in the foreground the person stands out with his conduct, and, case by case, it is important that the people among whom the person lived should affirm and recognize his fame as a martyr and then pray to him, obtaining graces. It is not so much ideologies that concern us, as the sense of faith of the People of God, who judge the person's behaviour[80]

Benedict XVI beatified 498 more Spanish martyrs in October 2007,[81] in what has become the largest beatification ceremony in the history of the Catholic Church.[82] In a speech to 30,000 pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict XVI paid tribute to the martyrs of the Civil War and put them on the path to sainthood. “Their forgiveness towards their persecutors should enable us to work towards reconciliation and peaceful coexistence,” he said. The Pope's mass beatification of clergy allied with Franco's side during the Civil War caused outrage on the Left in Spain. Some have criticized the beatifications as dishonoring non-clergy who were also killed in the war, and as being an attempt to draw attention away from the church's support of Franco (some quarters of the Church called the Nationalist cause a "crusade").[83] Critics have pointed out that only priests aligned with Franco's troops were honoured. In this group of people, the Vatican has not included all Spanish martyrs, nor any of the 16 priests who were executed by the nationalist side in the first years of the war. This decision has caused numerous criticisms from surviving family members and several political organisations in Spain.[84] “Priests killed in Catalonia or the Basque Country loyal to the republic are not being beatified,” Alejandro Quiroga, Professor of Spanish History at the University of Newcastle, characterized the beatifications as “...a very selective, political reading of the whole thing.”

The act of beatification has also coincided in time with the debate on the Law of Historical Memory (about the treatment of the victims of the war and its aftermath) promoted by the Spanish Government.

Responding to the criticism, the Vatican has described the October 2007 beatifications as relating to personal virtues and holiness, not ideology. They are not about "resentment but ... reconciliation". The Vatican said it was not taking sides, but merely wished to honour those who had died for their religious beliefs.The Spanish government has supported the beatifications, sending Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos to attend the ceremony.[85]

The October 2007 beatifications have brought the number of martyred persons beatified by the Church to 977, eleven of whom have already been canonized as Saints.[82] Because of the extent of the persecution, many more cases could be proposed; as many as 10,000 according to Catholic Church sources. The process for beatification has already been initiated for about 2,000 people.[82]

For the most part, the Catholic Church has always highlighted its role as a victim in the 1936-39 war. The most famous happening of the joint assembly of bishops and priests in September 1971 however, saw the passage by a majority, but not the requisite two-thirds majority for formal acceptance, of the statement that; "We humbly recognise and ask pardon that we did not know how, when it was necessary, to be true ministers of reconciliation in the midst of our people torn by a fratricidal war."[86] In November 2007, Bishop Ricardo Blázquez, head of Spain's Episcopal Conference, said that the Church must also seek forgiveness for “concrete acts” during the strife-torn period. “On many occasions we have reasons to thank God for what was done and for the people who acted, [but] probably in other moments. . . we should ask for forgiveness and change direction,”[87]

In 2009 the bishops of Guipuzcoa, Alava and Vizcaya issued a public apology for the "unjustified silence of our official Church media" regarding indiscriminate killings and executions of the Francoist regime. However, despite repeated papal visits to Spain in recent years so far no apology from the Vatican has been forthcoming. Vatican authorities are evading the question of the historical complicity with a dictatorship that came to power after a bloody Civil War, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, as well as with the atrocities of the White Terror phase.[88][89][90] While the Vatican has recently beatified religious victims of the Red Terror, it has denied beatification to the many Spanish republican religious victims of the White Terror. Thus, by still taking sides, it has not initiated so far a process of reconciliation in Spain.[91]