In July 1968, I went to Spain to work in a youth camp along Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Previously I knew Spain only as a Catholic country, rich in saints and martyrs; It was a place of quaint holdovers from the past: taking a night train, the conductor had to roust peasants carrying live chickens out of my sleeper car. I remember waking one morning to the clank of milk cans on the back of donkeys walking through the main street of town. I experienced Spain as a warm and welcoming place, a land singing to the rhythms of hand clapping and guitars.

As a seminarian in my mid-twenties, I also found what seemed an idyllic if somewhat rigorous  Catholic society.  Divorce was not allowed, nor birth control pills, the Catholic religion was required teaching in every school, and summer was filled with religious festivities. I recall a spectacular night of fireworks put on by the bartenders on the feast of their patron saint.

But there were undercurrents in this sunny land. Traveling on the train, I was surprised when plain clothes policemen entered my train compartment to check my passport.  Walking streets in pairs were members of the Guardia Civil, in their dark green uniforms, heavy truncheons  and side arms, unsmiling faces and glossy, black tri-cornered hats turned up in the back. It was a land of law and order where the newspapers could make only bland affirmations of the good things the government was doing.  A lay brother had a drama production canceled by the local authorities because its author was deemed a Marxist.  No one showed concern about such things. Stranger still, no mention was made of the national tragedy that had devastated the country three decades earlier. 

Between 1936 and 1939, Spain had suffered a bloody Civil War in which the Catholic side had proven victorious. But when I would ask priests and brothers about this, almost nothing was said.  Only on one occasion did a lay brother mention that in a communist town, a child had been executed because he was caught carrying the Eucharist to a shut in. He told me of another boy who had turned in his parents to the police because they had spoken privately against the government. I was told that the boy’s father and mother were brought before a firing squad and shot. 

How these things could happen in good Catholic Spain no one explained. No one spoke about the decades of social strife in which peasants had lost their lands to large agribusinesses, and factory workers and miners were poorly treated, and the large portions of the population including the intelligentsia who drifted away from the Church. Atheism and anarchism became widespread and society fractured. Rather than grapple with these perplexing issues, the Church chose sides. The Spanish hierarchy joined with wealthy, families, supporters of monarchy, the military, and many  traditional Catholics in opposing the elected government. Through the nineteen twenties, relations between these two blocs were uncompromising. The Catholic side was convinced they were engaged in a war between God against the godless, nothing less.

Nor was the intensity of the horrific bloodletting that ensued ever explained to me. In the year before the outbreak of hostilities, 160 Churches were destroyed by fire or explosives. During the conflict 6,832 priests, nuns, and brothers were executed. When the Catholic side prevailed in 1939, hundreds of thousands of opponents were placed in internment camps, and many –estimated as high as 50,000– were put to death. In the nearby seaport city of Alicante, large numbers of Communist supporters had committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Spanish army.  It is said that in the course of the war over a million lives were lost on both sides.

When hostilities ended, Spain found itself under the control of a single man who was a staunch supporter of family values and traditional Catholicism, General Francisco Franco. He dominated the country for the next thirty years, and the Church for better or worse was intimately tied to him. II was in this context that a 1953 a treaty was.signed between the Spanish government and the Vatican whereby Catholicism became the sole religion of Spain and would be protected and promoted. 

In Spain that summer of my visit, faith and politics were still intimately connected, and I found that unraveling the two was not easy. I remember traveling on a train on a stifling afternoon and speaking with a young soldier who wore a heavy woolen jacket with a stiff, high collar. He enthusiastically explained that he was going to serve in the Moroccan Desert and that Saint Barbara was the patron of artillerymen. I recall a young seminarian waxing eloquent about the government’s youth movement, the Falange, and how it stood for peace and progress. But such forays into politics were the exception.  

There seemed to be a fear that any expression of differences could re-ignite still smoldering embers of the past. Most of those who I met appeared to deal with this history by pretending it had never happened. Or at least, so it seemed.

What I did not realize was that during the period that I was in Spain, change was occurring. Inspired by Vatican II’s teachings on religious liberty, the Spanish Catholic Hierarchy had already begun to disassociate itself from the Franco regime, supporting government authority on the one hand, but also favoring the rights of workers, of freedom of the press, and landless peasants. A Church that hitherto had been heavily bankrolled by the Franco regime, began to cut its dependency on the government, affirming the rights of non-Catholic religions and of non-believers. Spanish bishops went from unquestioning support of a dictatorship, to the role of peacemaker and healer, to encourage dialogue rather than debate. In the process. the Church became more Catholic, more Christian.

In hindsight, there is much for American Catholics to learn from this. There is an insidious quality to hatred and the dismissal of others out of hand that can lead to unspeakable violence. A modern, pluralistic society requires constant dialog and bridge building if it is to be maintained. Injustices and wrongs cannot be allowed to fester but require constant effort at reconciliation.  There is in the Catholic faith a hierarchy of truths that one can never renounce. But belief in these truths is not an end in itself.  Our beliefs need to move us to tend our fragile society, to care for others, and  to embody love and reconciliation of Christ who taught us: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  

10/29/2020 -2/17/2024