The martyrs of the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable plea of the bishops

A few weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV authorized the beatification of 80 more martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, bringing the total number of recognized martyrs of the Church to 2,334.

This is still only a fraction of the Catholics murdered for their faith in that cataclysmic event in the 1930s, but it suffices to certify the huge dimension of what is among the most immense persecutions of Christians since the times of Roman Emperor Diocletian.

However, in commemorating these victims, there is no mention of the perpetrators. It’s as if the civil war had been an inevitable natural catastrophe, in which thousands of Catholics had been unintentionally caught in the crossfire between the opposing factions, both of which were merely interested in gaining power over the country.

It is at last time for Catholics at large to answer the lengthy plea that was penned by the bishops of Spain and published on July 1, 1937¹, a year after the start of the military insurgence known as the “Alziamiento”. The bishops begged their fellow Catholics all over the world to help them spread the truth, a truth that is progressively being registered in the Vatican archives but not in the collective mindset of the people because, as noted by historian Eric Hobsbawm, the history of the Spanish civil war was not written by the victors but by the vanquished.

“Help us spread the truth,” wrote the bishops, “help us by spreading the content of this letter, surveilling the Catholic press and propaganda, correcting the mistakes of those who are indifferent or inimical to us. The enemy has abundantly sown his chaff; help us sow the good seed abundantly.”

What mistakes are there still to correct?

First of all, the massacres did not begin in 1936 because the conflict between, on the one hand, the left-wing parties that had “won” the elections and, on the other, their nationalist opponents. It began much earlier, out of an unprecedentedly brutal religious persecution carried out by well-trained communists, anarchists, and socialists, determined to wipe out the Catholic Church in its entirety.

Elected to office in 1931, the leftist factions, under the common name of republicans, once having done away with the monarchy, immediately created a climate of anti-Catholic hatred that, as early as 1934, the year of the insurrection in the Asturias, led to the burning down of 58 churches and the cold-blooded murder of dozens among priests, nuns, and seminarians. In the meantime, they worked on corroding social relationships, emptying out the economy, weakening the police forces, and then filling the void thus created with ideas that were meant to forge “Modern Man”, the man who was to support and perpetuate the revolution.

As the bishops wrote:

Another powerful country, Russia, in agreement with the communists of Spain, by means of theater and cinema, with exotic rites and costumes, using intellectual charm and material subornation, was preparing the people’s spirit for the revolution, which they believed to be imminent, almost to the date.

This explains why “the political regime based on democratic freedom crumbled under the weight of the decisions of the authorities, of the State and of governmental coercion, which deformed the will of the people, up to the point when, at the last parliamentary elections of February 1936, despite the right wing parties having reaped a majority of over half a million votes MORE than the leftists, they were assigned 118 fewer seats than the Popular Front. This came about because the results of entire provinces were arbitrarily annulled, thereby vitiating the very source of the legitimacy of Parliament.”

In particular, continued the bishops:

on the 27th of February 1936, after the triumph of the Popular Front, Russia’s Komintern decreed the outbreak of the Spanish rebellion and funded it with tremendous sums of money. On the 1st of May, hundreds of young people in Madrid publicly amassed ‘bombs and guns, powder and dynamite for the imminent revolution’. On the 16th of that same month, there was a meeting between the envoys from the U.S.S.R. with the Spanish delegates from the Third International, where it was determined, in the ninth of their agreements, to entrust No. 25 of the Madrid “Radios” Committees, together with the policemen on duty, with the task of the elimination of certain political figures. Meanwhile, from Madrid to the remotest of the villages, the revolutionary militias were receiving military training and were so abundantly armed that, when the war began, they numbered 150,000 assault troops and 100,000 line soldiers.

To prove their contention that “the massacre of people and things by the communist revolution was premeditated,” the bishops also specified that “79 specialized agitators had arrived from Russia shortly before the uprising. In those very same days the National Commission of Marxist Unification ordered revolutionary militias to be set up in every country. The destruction of the churches, or at least of their furniture, was systematic and in series. In a matter of a month, every single temple was rendered of no use for the purposes it was meant to serve.”

The unequivocal proof that such an immense devastation was premeditated

are the terrifying numbers. Although the estimates are not final as of yet, we can safely say that about 20,000 churches have been destroyed or totally ransacked. The priests who have been put to death, even just limiting the count to the secular clergy, amount to about six thousand. They even set the dogs on them, hunting them down all the way up into the mountains; they were hunted down savagely into every possible hiding place. Most of the times they were killed without any trial, with no charges held against them except for their very social mission.

Many had their limbs cut off, or were mutilated before being killed; they had their eyes gouged out, their tongue cut off, or they were shot at from a dominant position, others were burned or buried alive, or hacked to death with an axe. The utmost ferocity was used against the ministers of God. Women were violated, showing no respect even for the ones who had consecrated themselves to God. Tombs and cemeteries were desecrated. This work of destruction was carried out with the battle cry “Long live Russia!”, under the banner of international communism […]

To those who claimed that if only Francisco Franco had refrained from leading the uprising, then thousands upon thousands of religious clergy and laity would not have died but could have continued their service to the church, the bishops’ reply is that “it’s the other way around: the detailed plan aiming to carry out a Marxist revolution, which would have broken out all over the world if it hadn’t been prevented in a large measure by the military-civic movement, was preordained for the following purposes: to exterminate the Catholic Clergy and the most qualified Catholic right-wing men, to sovietize all the industries and to install communism.”

This was also openly admitted to on the radio, in January of that year, by one of the leaders of the anarchists: “… we must tell about things the way they are; the armed forces preceded us in order to prevent us from succeeding in unleashing the revolution.”

After leaving Spain, when it was all over, the defeated forces remained silent, in order not to help the enemies of their great cause, the revolution. The only exception to this silence, of course, was George Orwell.

And so, today, people still think of Spain in the 1930s in terms of the epic romantic events narrated by Ernest Hemingway—then a journalist embedded with the republican forces—or of Gary Cooper, who starred in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” as a heroic fighter against Francisco Franco’s nationalist army.

The world-wide disinformation campaign, financed directly by Moscow, used the classical subversion technique of the Left, managing to blame the tragedy on the victim—that is, placing the Catholic Church in the defendant’s docket, so that, after having destroyed her material presence, they might succeed in annihilating her reputation and moral standing as well.

These are basic facts that should be widely known today, but are not. Perhaps the beatification of these 80 martyrs will help rectify that sad fact.

Endnote:

¹ “Joint Letter of the Spanish Bishops to the Bishops of the Whole World Concerning the War in Spain, July 1st, 1937”. The excerpts here are translated by the author; a complete English translation can be read here.

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