A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #22-26 - National Catholicism and Francoism. Spain 1936 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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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