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

If people in other countries were reminded of the Thirty Years’ War, or the religious persecutions of the Dark Ages, and shuddered at this ‘new barbarism’, it was not surprising. The slaughter did not follow the same pattern on each side. In nationalist territory the relentless purging of ‘reds and atheists’ was to continue for years, while in republican territory the worst of the violence was mainly a sudden and quickly spent reaction of suppressed fear, exacerbated by desires of revenge for the past.

The attacks on the clergy were bound to cause the greatest stir abroad, where there was little understanding of the Church’s powerful political role. The Catholic Church was the bulwark of the country’s conservative forces, the foundation of what the right defined as Spanish civilization. Not surprisingly, the outside world had a fixed impression of Spain as a deeply religious country. The jest of the Basque philosopher Unamuno, that in Spain even atheists were Catholic, was taken seriously. Centuries of fanatical superstition enforced by the Inquisition had engraved this image on European minds. Even so, it was surprising how few foreign newspapers made the connection between the religious repression dating back to the Middle Ages and the violent anti-clericalism that developed in the nineteenth century. The rage which led to such excesses in some areas was fired by one great conviction: the promise of heaven for the meek was the age-old trick by the rich and powerful to make the poor accept their lot on earth. For the anarchists, at least, the Church represented nothing less than the psychological operations branch of the state. As such it was a target which ranked in importance with the Civil Guard.

During the war the nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been slaughtered; afterwards they said that 7,937 religious persons were killed. This figure was still over a thousand too high. Today, we know that out of a total ecclesiastical community of around 115,000, thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other orders and 283 nuns were killed, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.¹ It was a terrible slaughter, yet liberal Catholics abroad were later to state that the killing of priests was no worse than the right’s killing of left-wingers in the name of God. The Spanish Church was furious at this attitude, yet it said nothing when the nationalists shot sixteen of the Basque clergy including the arch-priest of Mondragon. Only the Bishop of Vitoria took a stand and persuaded the Pope to protest to General Franco, who was furious and declared that he would send bishops who supported him to Rome.² Some twenty Protestant ministers were also killed by the nationalists, yet protests were useless.³ The most sensational item of propaganda in the world press involved the raping of nuns, yet the detailed nationalist indictment of republican crimes published in 1946 offers no evidence for any such incident, while hinting at only one.

There were certainly occasions when wanton cruelty was inflicted on priests before they died, particularly in Aragón, Catalonia and Valencia. Some were burned to death in their churches and there are reports of castration and disembowelment, and that some were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Many more churches were set alight and vandalized. Copes were used for mock bullfights in the street. A republican who dressed himself in the archbishop of Toledo’s ceremonial garments as a joke was nearly shot by a drunken miliciano who mistook him for the primate. Communion wine was drunk out of chalices, stained-glass windows were broken and militiamen shaved in the fonts.⁴

Following the collapse of law and order in the republican zone, the anger of the masses was directed first against the rebel generals and their supporters and then against class enemies: clergy, landowners and their señorito sons, factory owners, cacique political bosses, members of the learned professions and shopkeepers. This violence of the first days was like a brutal explosion. But the vengeance was not as indiscriminate and blind as has sometimes been claimed.