Catholicism In The Second Spanish Republic

Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic was an important area of dispute, and tensions between the Catholic hierarchy and the Republic were apparent from the beginning, eventually leading to the Catholic Church acting against the Republic and in collaboration with the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

The establishment of the Republic began 'the most dramatic phase in the contemporary history of both Spain and the Church.' In the early 1930s, the dispute over the role of the Catholic Church and the rights of Catholics were one of the major issues which worked against the securing of a broad democratic majority and "left the body politic divided almost from the start."Payne, Stanley G. A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2, Ch. 25, p. 632 (Print Edition: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) (LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE Accessed May 30, 2007)
/ref> The historian Mary Vincent has argued that the Catholic Church was an active element in the polarising politics of the years preceding the Spanish Civil War. 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."
The municipal elections of 1931 that triggered the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Constitution of 1931 "brought to power an anticlerical government."Anticlericalism
Britannica Online Encyclopedia Prime Minister Manuel Azaña asserted that the Catholic Church was responsible in part for what some perceived as Spain's backwardness and advocated the elimination of special privileges for the Church. An admirer of the pre-1914 Third French Republic, he wanted the Second Spanish Republic to emulate it, make secular schooling free and compulsory, and construct a non-religious basis for national culture and citizenship, part of the necessary updating and Europeanising of Spain.

Following elections in June 1931, the new parliament approved an amended constitutional draft on 9 December 1931. The constitution introduced civil marriage and divorce.Vincent, p.121 It also established free, secular education for all. However, anticlerical laws nationalized Church properties and required the Church to pay rent for the use of properties which it had previously owned. In addition, the government forbade public manifestations of Catholicism such as processions on religious feast days, banished the crucifix from schools, and the Jesuits were expelled. Catholic schools continued, but outside the state system, and in 1933 further legislation banned all monks and nuns from teaching.

In May 1931, after monarchist provocations, an outburst of mob violence against the Republic's perceived enemies had led to the burning of churches, convents and religious schools in Madrid and other cities. Anticlerical sentiment and anticlerical legislation, particularly that of 1931, meant that moderate Catholicism quickly became embattled and it was ultimately displaced.

In the election of November 1933, the right-wing CEDA emerged as the largest single party in the new Cortes. President Alcalá-Zamora however asked the Radical leader Alejandro Lerroux to become Spain's Prime Minister.

A general strike and armed rising of workers in October 1934 was forcefully put down by the government. This in turn energized political movements across the spectrum in Spain, including a revived anarchist movement and new reactionary and fascist groups, including the Falange and a revived Carlist movement.

Popular violence which marked the beginning of the Civil War, in the Republican zone saw churches and priests become conspicuous targets, viewed as an ideological enemy, and thirteen bishops and some 7000 - clergy, monks and nuns - were killed, nearly all in the first months, and thousands of churches were destroyed. Catholic heartland areas, with the exception of the Basque territory, largely supported Franco's rebel Nationalist forces against the Popular Front government. In parts of Spain, like Navarra for example, the religious-patriotic zeal of priests could be very marked. According to the Benedictine writer Fr Hilari Raguer; "On the outbreak of Spanish Civil War the great majority, that is to say nearly the entire hierarchy of the Spanish Church, and nearly all the prominent among the laity, not only did nothing to restrain the conflict but spurred it on by joining almost ''en bloc'' one of the two sides, the side that ended by being the victor, and by demonizing whoever was working for peace. The Spanish Church heated up the atmosphere before it started and added fuel to the flames afterwards."

Background

Spain entered the 20th century a predominantly agrarian nation – a nation which, moreover, had lost its colonies. It was marked by uneven social and cultural development between town and country, between regions, within classes. 'Spain was not one country but a number of countries and regions marked by their uneven historical development.' From the turn of the 20th century, however, there had been a significant advance in industrial development. Between 1910 and 1930, the industrial working class more than doubled to over 2,500,000. Those engaged in agriculture fell from 66 per cent to 45 per cent in the same period. The coalition hoped to concentrate its major reforms on three sectors: the 'latifundist aristocracy', the church and the army – though the attempt would come at a moment of world economic crisis. In the south, less than 2 per cent of all landowners had over two-thirds of the land, while 750,000 labourers eked out a living on near starvation wages. The country was 'prone to centrifugal tendencies', for example there was a tension between Catalan and Basque nationalist sentiment away from an agrarian and centralist ruling class in Madrid. Moreover, whilst all Spain was Catholic by formal definition, in practice Catholic identity varied, affected by factors that ranged from region, to social strata, to the ownership of property, to age, and sex. General patterns were ones of higher levels of Catholic practice throughout much of the north and low levels in the south - ("the very regions of the final expulsion of the Moors and Catholic reconquest in the 15th century seems never to have been truly conquered for the Church."), and higher levels of Catholic practice amongst peasant smallholders than landless peasant labourers. Further, "the urban proletariat of Madrid, or Barcelona, or Bilbao, or Valencia, or Seville or the mining centres of the Asturias rarely entered a church ..the Church and its affairs were simply alien to urban working-class culture. As Canon Arboleya put it in his famous analysis in 1933, the dimensions of the problem were those of mass apostasy, especially among the urban working classes."

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. Like the rosary and novenas, these were lay rather than sacerdotal forms of worship. In some public religious rituals, the question of whether the ritual was primarily religious or political became an issue. 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." Its publication the ''Messenger of the Sacred Heart'' was anti-liberal, nationalist and enthusiastic to see 'the social reign of Jesus Christ in Spain.' It campaigned for the enthronement of the Sacred Heart in offices, schools, banks, town halls, and city streets. Statues were erected in hundreds of towns and villages. Seen as symbols of Catholic conservative intolerance, the statues were 'executed' by some anarchists and socialists in the early months of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

The Second Republic

The Second Spanish Republic was established on 14 April 1931, after the abdication of King Alfonso XIII. The government, led by President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, instituted a reformist program, including agrarian reform, right to divorce, vote for women (November 1933), reform of the Army, autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque country (October 1936). The proposed reform was blocked by the right and rejected by the far-left Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. One of the most controversial changes however, was the so-called "separation of the church and state". Article 26 of the 1931 republican constitution, and subsequent legislation, halted state funding for the Catholic Church, banned the Jesuits and other religious institutes, banned clerics from all teaching in schools, appropriated the properties of the Catholic Church and banned processions, statues and other manifestations of Catholicism. These strictures helped to alienate a large mass of the Catholic population. 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". It would have been hard to devise a celebration more calculated to offend Catholics. To convinced Monarchists, the Republic was not merely distasteful, it was an anathema. The Carlist militias, long confined to their Navarrese heartlands, were training in the mountains as early as 1931. " The right's political losses in 1931 left some prepared to give the new regime a chance, "but others, 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 Republic suffered attacks from the right (the failed coup of Sanjurjo in 1932), and the left (the uprising of Asturias in 1934), also it suffered the impact of the Great Depression.

While the coalition held political power, economic power eluded it. In historian Hugh Thomas's words, 'Like so many others before and since it frightened the middle class without satisfying the workers.' It adopted the measures of separation of church and state, genuine universal suffrage, a cabinet responsible to a single chamber parliament, a secular educational system. The new republican nation was partly to be created through a system of state education, which would be secular, obligatory, free of charge, and available to all. This measure antagonised the Church. Pius XI's 1929 encyclical ''Divini illius magistri'' had said that the Church 'directly and perpetually' possessed 'the whole truth' in the moral sphere. Education was, therefore, 'first and super-eminently' the function of the Church. Primo de Rivera's dictatorship had offered the Church the protection it felt was its due. Now however, the Second Republic excluded the Church from education by prohibiting teaching by religious institutes, even in private schools), confiscated Church property and investments, provided for restrictions and prohibitions on ownership of Church property, and banned the Society of Jesus. (The Catholic revival heralded by the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Isabella's son Alfonso XII of Spain saw the number of religious in the religious congregations soar. Catholic Spain was dominated by the schools, colleges, missions, publications, clinics and hospitals of the religious institutes. 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.' Deemed illiberal they attracted particular attention in the years 1931-33. In the crucial 1933 election no fewer than 20 Deusto men were elected to the republican Cortes for various parties of the Right and Centre. Ángel Herrera Oria director of El Debate, inspirer of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right was a Deusto man. The most sustained intellectual onslaught against religious was probably that of Miguel de Unamuno and his denunciation of the 'degenerate sons' of Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits. 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.)

During the democratic republic of 1931-36 multiple Catholic politicians favoured female suffrage because of its likely benefit to the Right, but simultaneously ridiculed campaigns for women's rights or women in parliament. Women constituted the majority of ''practising'' Catholics, but in church always listened to men preach and celebrate the sacraments. Male priests told them to obey their husbands, 'at every turn the message was clear; men were born for authority and social responsibility; women were born for domesticity, motherhood, or sexual renunciation.'Lannon, p.55 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.' "When some Catholic Basque nationalist women turned their attention in the 1930s to organising meetings and making public speechess, they shocked Catholic contemporaries..after conquering the Basque country during the first year of civil war, soldiers of the Catholic Crusade expressed their loathing for both Basque nationalism and politically active women by subjecting these ''Emakumes'' to the humiliation of being dosed with castor oil in public and having their heads shaved."

Since the Republican left considered moderation of the anticlericalist aspects of the constitution as totally unacceptable, the historian Stanley Payne has written that "the Republic as a democratic constitutional regime was doomed from the outset". Commentators have posited that the "hostile" approach to the issues of church and state was a substantial cause of the breakdown of democracy and the onset of civil war. 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. The extreme right soon took upon itself the task of conspiring to overthrow the regime. The moderate right refused to state its unambiguous loyalty to the new institutions and openly flirted with authoritarianism."

Initial reaction of Catholics

Despite the anticlerical aspects of the constitution, the Republican coalition's electoral policy stated:

Catholics: the maximum program of the coalition is freedom of religion ... The Republic ... will not persecute any religion.Payne, Stanley G.
Spanish Catholicism: An Historical Overview
p. 152, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1984

According to historian Stanley Payne, 'though a deliberate deception,... this propaganda was obviously accepted by many Catholics.' Although at the outset tensions were apparent between the Church hierarchy and the republic, the hierarchy likewise formally accepted the statement, hoping for a continuation of the existing Concordat

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