Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic
Similarly, Frances Lannon asserts that, "Catholic identity has usually been virtually synonymous with conservative politics in some form or other, ranged from extreme authoritarianism through gentler oligarchic tendencies to democratic reformism."
"[13] Spanish Catholics participated in an enormous number of religious rites quite separate from the minimal obligations of orthodoxy - (church on Sundays, the sacraments) - processions and devotions connected with statues and shrines, for example.
The Jesuit campaign to spread the devotion of the Sacred Heart was " inextricably linked in the early 20th century with the integrist values of the extreme Right of the Catholic political spectrum.
[25] Republicanism represented a confrontation with all that had gone before and could be offensive: " In August 1931 in Málaga, for example, the usual celebrations in honour of Our Lady of Victory under whose patronage the Spanish Crown had driven out the 'Moors' in 1497 were replaced by a beauty pageant to find the city's "Miss Republic".
"[26] The right's political losses in 1931 left some prepared to give the new regime a chance, "but many more, particularly those in the circles around Ángel Herrera Oria and Gil-Robles accepted the rules of the democratic game only as a means to destroy the 1931 Republic.
The Spanish landed aristocracy and upper middle classes gave buildings and income to the religious congregations to fund schools, hospitals and orphanages - conspicuous examples included Tibidabo hill in Barcelona to Don Bosco, and the Jesuit University in Deusto, from which young men would leave, 'fully armed against all modern errors.
He accused their educational endeavours of being corrupted by materialistic and apologetical aims, that they were subservient to an anti-intellectual plutocracy, and that they choked modernity, reform, creativity and even true spirituality with their philistinism and intolerance.
'[33] Political militancy did not fit easily with these stereotypes, there was no Catholic equivalent of the anarchist Federica Montseny, 'though the Falange's Sección feminina was aggressive in its propagation of an authoritarian, anti-feminist and ever more conservative ideology.
[36][37] Victor Perez Diaz, in a recent book, characterised the Catholic reaction to the anticlerical offensive as one that mobilized "the mass of peasants and the middle classes and channeling them into professional and political right wing organisations, prepared for by decades of careful organizational work.
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.
[47] 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.
[3] 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."
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'.
"[48] 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.
"Thus the Catholic Church is compelled to pay taxes on what was violently taken from her"[53] Religious vestments, liturgical instruments, statues, pictures, vases, gems and similar objects necessary for worship were expropriated as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"[60] 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.
"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.
"[61] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[81] Benedict XVI beatified 498 more Spanish martyrs in October 2007,[82] in what has become the largest beatification ceremony in the history of the Catholic Church.
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.
we should ask for forgiveness and change direction,”[88] 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.
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.
