Pope Benedict has approved the beatification of six more martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. Because they were martyred, a proof of a miracle is not required, only that they had been killed because of hatred of Christ and had forgiven their persecutors.
About 2,000 more cases are wending their way through the Vatican. About 10,000 priests religious, and laity were killed during the war because of hatred of Christianity. It has been on the pope’s mind recently; although much of the criticism of the clergy and sexual abuse is fair, some of it begins to look like the anticlericalism of the Spanish Civil War.
I have been researching the backgrounds of clerical abusers in old newspapers. One, William Kuder, was loathsome. He abused a 9 year old boy with oral and anal rape, and used confession and threats to keep it secret.
Kuder can’t be blamed on dissent or Vatican II; he was ordained in the mid-1930s. He turned up in an old newspaper because he accompanied a black prisoner, who was Catholic, to the execution chamber.
On the same day, September 4, 1936, the newspaper headline was Spanish Premier Resigns Post: City of Irun Engulfed in Flames. The retreating Republican forces had set fire to the city (film of evacuation).
They did something else.
In the early morning the monks of Fuenterrabia monastery had been shot by the defenders of Irun, Their bodies, clothed in white robes, could be seen lying on the roof of the monastery from vantage points in Hendaye [in France].
The Republicans also shot the bishop of Valladolid, who happened to be in Irun.
What to make of it? – the wheat and the tares, the best and the worst. And how to sort them out?
What struck me about the article on Kuder was the fact that the victim mentioned losing his faith in God. One of my high-school classmates, who considered becoming a priest, was molested in seminary and lost his faith.
How many other such victims have lost their faith as a result of clerical sex-abuse? God will severely judge those ostensibly bearing authority in His name who were responsible. On that you can rely.
With respect to the anti-Catholic violence of the Spanish Civil War, the best source I have found for understanding it is “Betrayal of the Innocents: Desire, Power, and the Catholic Church in Spain” by Timothy Mitchell (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). While Mitchell relies too much on modern psychiatric theories for my taste, he also provides a great deal of concrete historical data that can be interpreted independently of his theorizing.
Mitchell situates the civil war’s anti-Catholic violence within the context of centuries of religious authoritarianism and severe sexual dysfunctionality in Spanish Catholicism, marked by widespread (and officially admitted) sexual predation by Catholic priests against the laity; this included not only the systematic sexual terrorization of children and widespread concubinage, but also the frequent seduction of married women who willingly “ministered” to the parish priest at the expense of their own husbands.
Mitchell quotes the words of the papal nuncio in the 1930s: “I daresay that the fundamental cause of the current Spanish revolution resides in the ignorance of the clergy and the people. The seminaries have been barracks or reform schools, full of immoralities and intolerable license.” As Mitchell notes, these are precisely the right conditions for “the manufacture of abusive clergy”, and such conditions “had existed for several centuries.” It is not hard to understand how such a situation could explode into brutal anti-clerical violence once the lid finally came off.
In that light, we may need to re-think our understanding of what happened in Spain during the civil war. As Mitchell points out, the sheer barbarism that was evidenced in so many of these 10,000 martyrdoms suggests that the killers were not motivated by some theoretical anti-Catholicism but rather by a deep-seated desire for revenge on the part of those who were “reacting to a legacy of humiliation” at the hands of a corrupt Church. Certainly many of those who were murdered for their Catholicism were not themselves abusers of the innocent; in some cases we know the exact opposite to have been the case. But they may nevertheless have been perceived by many as willing participants in a system that had been severely abusing the innocent for centuries and getting away with it. As the angels warned Lot in Sodom, when the innocent continue to live side by side with the guilty, they risk being swept away together.
I have wondered whether at least some of continental anti-clericalism could be attributed to a male reaction to sexual abuse. Many good and holy people, some leaders of social reform and friends of the working class, were slaughtered with unbelievable cruelty in Pain.
The raw emotions in the violence might be a reaction to sexual abuse. But then monarchists and industrialists were similarly murdered, so other things were at work. I will read the book.
In one country where the Church was persecuted, revolutionaries were instructed to after priests who were known to be good men of integrity. The reason, such men made the faith credible.
While not denying the truth of Mitchell’s resaearch (I would have to look at it and examine his sources, etc.) we should remember that there are ideologies that are hostile to religion per se. These ideologies presume that God and the afterlife are fantasiies that distract people from fighting social injustice and building a paradise on Earth. Talk to a dedicated Marxist of the traditional sort and hear why religion in and of itself, apart from any corruption , is problamatic and needs to be made a thing of the past.
“the killers were not motivated by some theoretical anti-Catholicism but rather by a deep-seated desire for revenge on the part of those who were “reacting to a legacy of humiliation””
What a pathetic way to justified MURDER!
Is explanation the same thing as justification?
This is not an attempt to justify but to understand, in part because “those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.” Part of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War is that there were horrific atrocities committed by both sides, including degradation, torture, massacres of non-combatants, and execution of disarmed partisans and prisoners of war. Largely in response to the killings of priests and nuns by those identified (not always correctly) as leftists, the Church swung into line behind the fascists and declared the war against the left to be a holy crusade; in that crusade, “faithful Catholics” committed atrocities every bit as terrible as those which had been committed against them, except more systematically and in much larger numbers. Spain still bears the psychic and spiritual scars of that experience, to the lasting detriment of the whole nation.
If revenge is a pathetic excuse for the murder of Catholics by those with grievances against the Church, it is an even more pathetic excuse for murder committed by Catholics in the name of Christ and (allegedly) for the cause of “Christian civilization”. When anarchists and Communists kill priests and nuns, they are at least being true to such principles as they have; but what excuse can Christians claim for retaliating in kind?
I lived in Spain as an adult for five years: three under Franco and two under the “instauration” of Juan Carlos I. After that I moved to Mexico where I have lived for three decades. When I think of the Spanish Civil War and of the Cristero War in Mexico, I see great similarities. Although most people are not particularly angry at the clergy, it takes only a few leaders to enlist masses of sympathizers in an ideological struggle. Now, if only a few of the leaders are former abuse victims, they can bring about a tremendous haulocaust, especially if they are are the caudillos. I suspect (emphasize “suspect”) certain Mexican leaders of the rabid anti-clericalism stripe, to have been abused by priests. Apart from the fact that ideology is not sufficient to breed emotional and personal hatred, clerical sexual abuse has virtually never been addressed in Latin American countries. The same is true for Latin countries in Europe. Italy is not going through any sexual abuse crisis, in spite of the fact that Benedict XVI lives there. Anyone out there know why?
If Mitchell’s thesis is correct, then the reaction of many to the Spanish church reflects this truth about human nature: People will take matters into their own hands when they believe that justice has not been done. That’s why God initiated the “lex talonis” (eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth) through the Mosaic Law; not to encourage vigilantism but to discourage it. The “lex talonis” demands punishment proportional to the crime and the creation of legal structures to adminster that punishment through due process. (That’s another reason why the OT stresses that judges rule fairly, without bias or corruption.). Unfortunately, the Church, in its “wisdom,” effectively believes that capital punishment for murder is immoral and should not be administered, despite centuries of teaching from Scripture and such Doctors as Aquinas and Augustine. Perhaps the Church can learn from the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War what happens when justice is denied, let alone delayed.