Chapter 10: Civil War as Crusade
"Religious concern played no overt role in the rebellion of the eighteenth of July that began the Civil War. Mola's original sketch for the new Nationalist system planned to retain not merely a republican form of government but also the Republic’ separation of church and state. The first appeals of the Nationalist leaders made no special call for Catholic support. Some, in fact, had little concern for the defense of Catholicism—especially such Masons as Cabanellas and Queipo de Llano—while others were reluctant to complicate the situation further by giving a religious coloring to their movement. The insurgents hoped for extensive middle-class support and had no interest in antagonizing moderate anticlericals. Only four of the original ten members of Molas Junta de Defensa Nacional could have been identified as overt political supporters of Catholicism in preceding years. Moreover, in his first address as chief of state, Franco promised merely that his state, “without being confessional, will respect of the majority of the Spanish people, without tolerating interference of another power within the state.”
The counterrevolutionary goals of the revolt nonetheless made conservative Catholics its natural allies from the very start. "
"In the Popular Front zone, the revolutionary forces unleashed the most extensive persecution ever experienced by Roman Catholicism at any point in its mod- ern history (with the sole exception of that inflicted on the small Catholic minority in Russia during the Communist revolution). A total of 6,832 clergy were slaughtered in the leftist zone, the great majority even without the simulacrum of condemnation by revolutionary tribunals.’
As news of the explosive revolution and mass atrocities in the Popular Front zone crossed the lines, the volume of Catholic support became overwhelming. This in itself was hardly surprising; only a diametrically opposite result would have been remarkable. As it was, Catholic backing in terms of political support, military volunteers, financial assistance, and perhaps above all, spiritual motivation and cultural legitimization became the most important single domestic pillar of the Nationalist movement. As the initial revolt stalled militarily, then broadened into full-scale civil war, the military leadership moved to take advantage of Catholic backing. By the end of July General Mola, the organizer of the rebellion, used the phrase “the true Catholic Spain.” In a radio address of August 15 he hailed “the cross that was and remains the symbol of our religion and our faith,”* pledging to raise it over the new state. Such pronouncements thenceforth became increasingly frequent. The first formal disposition in recognition of the new regimes Catholicism came on September 4, when it was ordered that school textbooks in the Nationalist zone be revised in accordance with Catholic doctrine and that educational activities be segregated by sex.
Within thirty days of the outbreak of the conflict Church leaders began to speak in favor of the military movement."
"Despite the cautious tone of Francos address on assuming the powers of head of state on October 1, this tendency toward absolute identification of the Nationalist cause with the church soon became even more accentuated. Franco had been raised as a devout Catholic. Though such a domestic background had no discernable effect on his brothers, Francos attitude had always been much more respectful. He had given little outward indication of religious faith as a young officer in Morocco, but marriage re- enforced his Catholic identity. By 1936, if not before, he had come to believe that Catholic faith and Spanish nationalism were inseparable, fully subscribing to the traditional Spanish ideology that stressed a special national relationship to Catholicism and a unique religious mission for Spain. His eldest niece declared that “his faith was genuine and by no means a mask of accommodation, even though his way of understanding the Gospel might leave a good deal to be desired.”* Indeed, religious faith was for Franco an important aspect of the personal sense of destiny that he had developed.
During his first weeks as chief of state he nonetheless felt his way caretully, for the Spanish hierarchy as a whole did not endorse his new regime nor did the Vatican seem eager to grant official diplomatic recognition. Thus the regime first appears to have officially labeled itself a Catholic state in a minor decree of October 30 establishing the plato único (a day of the week in which restaurants served single-course meals as a symbol of austerity). The role of military chaplains was officially instituted in the Nationalist Army on December 6, though they had served with some volunteer units (mainly Navarrese Carlists) from the beginning. Subsequent negotiations with the Church concerning the regulation of their activities nonetheless proved surprisingly tense and difficult.’"
"Goma soon acceded to demands of the Nationalist government that the leading Church officials in Vitoria, ecclesiastical center for the Basque provinces, be removed because of their equivocal attitude toward Basque nationalism. The primate also showed understanding with regard to the Spanish Nationalists own atrocious treatment of certain Basque priests involved in Basque nationalist political activities, some sixteen of whom had been executed. All sixteen had been tried by summary court-martial for secular political deeds,? but after Gomás protest to Franco and to Dávila, the head of the Junta Técnica, on October 26, Franco ordered an immediate end to such condign punishments for Basque nationalist priests involved in politics,'” and none were executed during the remainder of the war."
According to Marquina Barrio, “Goma always drew favorable conclusions from his interviews with Franco,” whose evident piety and apparent good faith impressed the Cardinal. He was slow to grasp that Franco understood Catholic policy sui generis and, despite his intention to gain maximum support from religion, had no intention of becoming a “clerical politician, for he wanted “little interference from the Church and less from the Holy See” in political matters. "
" small number of devout Catholics had remained with the Popular Front regime, the Catholic Basque nationalists had recently won autonomy and concluded a deal with the Republic, and the Spanish Nationalists, accused of many murders and excesses of their own, could only inspire caution. "
"On December 29 Franco and Gomá signed an informal six-point agreement, much more a gentlemans agreement than a formal treaty, whereby Franco promised full freedom to the Catholic Church for its activities. He pledged to abstain from unilateral control of spheres of overlapping competence between church and state and to bring Spanish legislation into conformity with church doctrine.'* A feeble Vatican effort to propose mediation in the Spanish conflict was brushed aside several months later,” and during 1937, relations between the Church and the new state began to be regularized. Wartime conditions precluded resumption of the old ecclesiastical budget, and in some respects required ecclesiastical assistance to the state, but a long series of measures were adopted to establish Catholic norms in most aspects of culture and education and to foster religious observance. "
"The famous Collective Letter of the Spanish hierarchy that was published on July 1, 1937, soon after the final collapse of Catholic Basque resistance in Vizcaya.
This major document, forty-two pages long, provided a long and detailed statement of the Spanish Church' position on the war along with a carefully argued justification. It catalogued the deficiencies of the prewar Republic and the latter's failure to observe democratic procedure or maintain civil rights, then discussed in detail the onslaught of the Spanish anarcho- Marxist revolution, which it termed simply Communist. The hierarchy rejected the frequently advanced interpretation that the Civil War was essentially a class war, terming it primarily an ideological conflict, a war of ideas. They pointed out that all the wealthier provinces of Spain—those with the highest per capita income—were dominated by the left, while the Nationalist movement was based primarily on the poorer and agrarian regions, whose predominant philosophy was Catholic, not collectivist/ materialist."
"the Spanish hierarchy endorsed the struggle of Franco’s regime in the ivil War. What it did not do, however, was endorse the Franco regime as a specific form of government or as an end in itself.
With respect to the future, we cannot predict what will take place at the end of the struggle. We do affirm that the war has not been undertaken to raise an autocratic state over a humiliated nation but in order that the national spirit re-regenerate itself with the vigor and Christian freedom of olden times. We trust in the prudence of the men of government, who will not wish to accept foreign models for the configuration of the future Spanish state but will keep in mind the intimate requirements of national life and the path marked by past centuries.”
The Collective Letter made it clear that the Church leadership had no intention of endorsing any specific form of authoritarianism. "
"The new state was nonetheless slowly proceeding to absorb the political and social activities of prewar Catholic organizations. The Catholic trade union federation, CESO, was absorbed into the nascent national syndical system during the following year, and the Catholic university student group, Confederación de Estudiantes Católicos, survived only a little longer until it was similarly subsumed into the SEU, the Falangist student organization. Of all Catholic political and social groups, only the agrarian organization, CONCA, endured into the post-Civil War period with its identity and independence at least partially intact, though reduced in support and range of action."
"Manuel Hedilla, for example, had always been careful to distinguish Falangism from secular foreign fascisms, declaring in a news- paper interview early in the conflict: “The pagan sense of the cult of Fatherland and subordination to race, force, and so forth that one finds among some foreign movements of a similar type is substituted in ours by a strong dose of religious spirituality, which is very much in accord with our traditions.” The official statutes of the new FET declared the goal of the movement to be restoration of Spains “resolute faith in her Catholic and imperial mission.” The first article recognized “the Christian freedom of the person,” while article 23 stipulated the naming of a national director of religious education and attendance. This was but part of a trend that the German ambassador found quite alarming in its “reactionary and “clerical” quality. Indeed, when Franco emphasized that Spanish “totalitarianism” would be derived from the monarchism and cultural pol- icy of the Catholic Kings, he was not merely coining a symbolic phrase. The Franquist regime was embarked on the most traditionalist, indeed reactionary, cultural policy of any twentieth-century Western state, bar none. It was an enterprise virtually without parallel."
"Yet most Catholic opinion had little desire to be identified with or use the nomenclature of fascism, preferring instead to invoke the Nationalist cause as a crusade pure and simple.” "
"In March of that year obligatory religious instruction was restored in public schools, crucifixes mandatorily reinstalled in all classrooms, the validity of religious marriage emphasized, and plans announced for a new religiously inspired second- ary school curriculum. The only lingering expression of anticlericalism might be found among the radical elements of the Falange. In rare moments of belligerence, a Falangist newspaper might declare that papal politics were not infallible and denounce the Franciscan aspects of Catholicism.* A brawl in Seville during the autumn of 1938 between a Falangist youth demonstration and a religious procession created a major scandal, which the government tried to cover up.”
That the last expressions of Falangist anticlericalism were not eliminated altogether was due to the fact that they played a role in Francos political balancing act. He administered a primarily but not totally clerical regime, and he wanted to reserve other, nonclerical cards to play, though his public posture of total piety could never admit it"