The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Under such circumstances it was inevitable that journalists and famous writers should be courted by the Republic. There was a great deal of ground to be made up after the first reports of the ‘red massacres’, and the tide started to turn in the Republic’s favour only in November 1936 with the bombing of working-class areas and the San Carlos hospital during the battle for Madrid. Five months later the destruction of Guernica gave the Republic its greatest victory in the propaganda war, particularly since the Basques were conservative and Catholics. The non-interventionist policy of Western governments, however, remained unaffected.

In July 1936 the Catholic press abroad sprang to the support of the Nationalist rising and castigated the anti-clericalism of the Republic, the desecration of churches and the killing of priests. The most sensational accusation was the raping of nuns, a similar fabrication dating back to the Middle Ages, when it was used to justify the slaughter of Jews. Two unsubstantiated incidents became the basis for a general campaign of astonishing virulence. The nationalists were on firmer ground when they condemned the murder of priests and they were supported by the Pope, who declared the priests to be martyrs.³

On 1 July 1937 Cardinal Gomá issued an open letter to ‘the Bishops of the whole World’ calling for Church support of the nationalist cause, a letter in which he stated, somewhat defensively, that the war was ‘not a crusade, but a political and social war with repercussions of a religious nature’.⁴ Only Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer and Bishop Mateo Múgica failed to sign it. This was in contrast to the statement of the Archbishop of Valencia a month earlier that ‘the war has been called by the Sacred Heart of Jesus and this Adorable Heart has given power to the arms of Franco’s soldiers’. In addition, the Bishop of Segovia had said that the war was ‘a hundred times more important and holy than the Reconquista’ and the Bishop of Pamplona called it the ‘loftiest crusade that the centuries have ever seen…a crusade in which divine intervention on our side is evident’. Leaflets with photomontages of Christ flanked by Generals Mola and Franco were issued to nationalist troops.

The political role of the Church was ignored when the religious victims were made into martyrs, although some Catholic writers abroad made the connexion. One was François Mauriac, who turned against the right-wing cause after a nationalist officer told him, ‘Medicine is in short supply and costly. Do you honestly think that we’d waste it for no purpose?…We have got to kill them in the end, so there is no point in curing them.’⁵ ‘For millions of Spaniards,’ Mauriac wrote to Ramon Serrano Súñer derided him as ‘a converted Jew’. The publication in 1938 of Georges Bernanos’s book, Les Grandes Cimetie`res sous la Lune, which described the nationalist terror on Majorca, greatly strengthened the liberal Catholic reaction against the Church’s official support for Franco.

In the United States, the Catholic lobby was very powerful. Luis Bolíñer (Franco’s brother-in-law and main political adviser), ‘Christianity and fascism have become intermingled, and they cannot hate one without hating the other.’ Mauriac defended his fellow Catholic writer, Jacques Maritain, when the pro-Nazi Serrano Su ´n recounted that a young Irishwoman, Aileen O’Brien, ‘spoke on the telephone to every Catholic bishop in the United States and begged them to request their parish priests to ask all members of their congregations to telegraph in protest to President Roosevelt’.⁶ As a result of her efforts, Bolín claimed, more than a million telegrams were received at the White House and a shipment of munitions for the Republic was stopped. The power of the pro-nationalist lobby was best demonstrated in May 1938. A group led by the ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, managed to frighten Congressmen who depended on the Catholic vote into opposing the repeal of the arms embargo. They did so even though no more than 20 per cent of the country and 40 per cent of Catholics supported the nationalists.