Below is a summary of the introduction to the pamphlet "Spain 1936 - National Catholicism and Francoism," written by Daniele Ratti, of the FAI (Italian Federation of Italian Anarchists) anticlerical working group, in collaboration with the Milanese Anarchist Federation. This interesting exploration of the close relationship between Catholicism, nationalism, and fascism in Spain helps us better understand some important historical and political turning points.
The ninetieth anniversary of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 inevitably raises reflections on the relationship between Catholicism, the Spanish Church, and Francoism. A national entity, the Spanish one, unique in Europe, took shape from a religious act: the Crusades against the Moors. From the end of the 9th century until the unification of Spain in 1492, the campaigns against Muslims represented the national epic, which inevitably became identified with the Catholic faith, becoming over the centuries the most extreme and radical symbol of religious traditionalism and the emblem of anti-modernism. It was against this backdrop that Spain entered the 20th century, finding itself completely without the social, political, and cultural tools to address the complexities of that period.
Spain entered the new era completely unprepared, lacking adequate economic and social structures, but above all divided by unbridgeable economic and social differences. A large portion of the population had exceeded the threshold of tolerance for abuse and injustice, which seemed no longer tolerable, and a portion of this population had also, over time, assimilated the practice of rebellion. Revolt became increasingly common during the first decades of the 20th century, just as repression, by contrast, had become more prevalent. Consequently, the conflict that began in July 1936 could not help but be very different from other conflicts of the 20th century. It was a total war, between two irreconcilable Spains, enemies predestined by their very history, which could not coexist. In this context, symbolic and "sacred" dimensions acquired an increasingly important role. The July 1936 rebels, the Nationalist soldiers who launched the coup, argued that their counterrevolutionary movement had a "preventive" nature, anticipating by a few days a communist-inspired, anti-nationalist, godless, and atheist insurrection. Furthermore, they argued that it was an action aimed at putting an end to the intolerable state of social chaos into which Spain had sunk and at defending Spanish tradition from the spread of ideas considered alien to the national spirit.
Spain has lived, throughout the centuries, in a "suspended" time, continually reproducing the same stage, with the same actors. In the background, the nation of bell towers and the silhouettes of its cathedrals and convents, its aristocrats, the Jesuits, the heirs of the Inquisitors; on the other, the near-nihilation of that European culture that had blossomed in the universities, fueled by the vitality of scientific, technical, and cultural discoveries and by the ferment that proposed new models of coexistence. The victors of the 1936-39 conflict were the Nacionales, who defined themselves as the embodiment of the authentic "Spain of tradition," while the vanquished were considered "the anti-Spain."[...]
The counterrevolutionary movement led to the birth of a personal, Catholic, corporate, and single-party dictatorship, representing the demands of the Church, the army, the economic elites, and various right-wing tendencies. In this context, Francoism arose, which, in my opinion, cannot be classified as a European form of fascism, since the cultural roots of its proponents, as well as the reasons for its success, were closely linked to the historical trajectory of Catholic Spain. The nacionales not only found unconditional support in the ecclesiastical apparatus, but also succeeded in making Franco the side directly supported by God, the one who would reconvert Spain. The war was conceived as a struggle between good and evil, in which the Caudillo, by the grace of God, found his "Holy Trinity" in the army, the Church, and the unified Falange. Franco was imbued with a unique and incomparable aura of mysticism, and this was essential to winning the civil war and subsequently maintaining a firm grip on power. Crowned as a new prophet and interpreter of the age-old value of "race," an instrument of evangelization and colonization of the new world, Franco was considered the staunch defender of Spanish unity against regionalist demands for autonomy, which the reactionary and clerical conservative right always interpreted as a desire for independence that needed to be crushed.
However, these aspects have not been and still are not accepted by much of the historiography. The most common view, the one prevalent from the end of 1939 to the present day, has limited the Spanish three-year period from 1936 to 1939 to an initial confrontation between anti-fascism and fascism, focusing solely on the ideological issue and the external support both sides received.
In the declarations of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), the political center where the united front of anti-fascist resistance in both Eastern and Western Europe was planned, held in Moscow in July-August 1935, point 5 stated: "The united armed struggle of the Social Democratic and Communist workers of Austria and Spain not only offered a heroic example to the workers of other countries, but also demonstrated that success in the struggle against fascism would have been entirely possible had it not been for the sabotage of the Social Democratic leaders and the 'vacillations' of the left (in Spain, according to this ideological vision, one must add 'the open betrayal of the majority of the anarcho-syndicalist leaders') whose influence on the masses deprived the proletariat of a resolute revolutionary leadership and a clear understanding of the purpose of the struggle."[...]
This political perspective was expertly "cultivated" by communist historiography. Muscovite and formed the framework for much of the European resistance, described as a precursor to parliamentary democracies, of which the Communists were among the protagonists. And it is therefore within this historiographical narrative that the "martyrdom" of the Spanish Republic fits, narrated as the martyrdom of democracy.
There were also those who paid greater attention to political and social events, particularly the libertarian achievements in organizing new and revolutionary forms of production and social aggregation, which were short-lived but equally profound and significant. Because of the form they took, they presented themselves as new and possible ways of egalitarian coexistence.
Regarding the events involving the Catholic Church, historiography has largely focused on the persecutions of the summer of 1936 and the "martyrdom" (as most interpreted it) suffered by the clergy, along with its structures and symbols, in the Republican camp. Little has been written or discussed, however, about the Church's participation or influence in the events of 1936-1939[...].
The Church, or rather, the Catholic tradition, was an integral part of the Nacionales movement. Franco's regime, as already mentioned, was the culmination of a long journey, a centuries-long path, which saw the tragic clash of two Spains, inevitably opposed: the National Catholic and the secular. National Catholicism identified with the first Cruzada. The Moors were expelled and the royal insignia placed beneath those of the Cross, symbolizing that, from that moment on, the interests and supremacy of the Church were first and foremost, and one was defined as Spanish only if one's blood was not "contaminated" by Jewish and Moorish ancestry. From then on, Spanish identity coincided with the unity of Spain, with Catholicism and the Cross as a symbol of the Cruzada, as the founding act of the nation and the monarchy. At the same time, a complex process began in the rest of Europe, gradually involving all spheres of human activity and thought, placing the "old continent" at the center of historical transformation. Spain participated in these changes only through territorial divisions, but at the same time it hermetically closed itself to everything that, from then and in the centuries that followed, circulated-new ideas in the technical and scientific fields, as well as social and political experiences. It chose to remain in the shadow of the bell towers and cathedrals, where for centuries the invectives of the Holy Inquisition and the sermons of the Society of Jesus resounded, remaining faithful to the principles of the Tridentine reaction, of which the Jesuits were the most faithful guardians.
These are the most significant, yet equally unfortunate, legacies that Spain has left behind in European and world affairs. A preponderant segment of the Spanish clergy, those with a traditionalist worldview, have always viewed any change as political and religious heresy. A crucial moment in Spanish history and the Iberian Church was the Napoleonic invasion, which, along with French troops, brought modernity. It was the moment when the Spanish ruling class, the Church, and the aristocracy had to choose: either to move toward new, undiscovered European horizons, or to remain anchored to the certainties of privilege. The conservative choice was made, and at that moment, a patriotic mysticism was born within the clergy, founded on the concept of Crusade, Holy War, religious mobilization, a struggle in which Catholics were called to mobilize for the salvation of the faith and the unity of Spain.
The underlying concept is that religion represents the foundation of the monarchy, and therefore the Church is invested with total authority over Spanish intellectual life. Intolerance is the hallmark of Hispanic Catholicism, just as political absolutism is that of the Iberian monarchy; together they form a perfect pair, which characterized the identity between Catholicism and Hispanicism. Religion and nation: this is also the reason why any request for autonomy by a community on the Iberian Peninsula was perceived by nationalists as an attempt at independence, a threat to the unity of Spain.
Conservatives rejected everything that Europe, from the sixteenth century onward, had expressed as novel in philosophical and scientific thought and in political and social experiences. They sought only the continuity of the Catholic tradition, social norms, and economic privileges.[...]. Clerical and anti-modernist Spain increasingly distanced itself from the European and Western cultural context, adopting the notion of race, which was entirely consubstantial with Spanish Catholicism and which was the main instrument for the empire's colonization.
Daniele Ratti
https://umanitanova.org/nazionalcattolicesimo-e-franchismo-spagna-1936/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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