Spanish Civil War Began 90 Years Ago: Thousands of Catholics Were Murdered by Communists

The Spanish Civil War began 90 years ago today. It is the only conflict that I know of whose history was written by the losers.

From LifeSiteNews

By Alessandra Nucci

The Spanish Civil War is one of the few events whose history has not been written by the victors but by the vanquished, i.e., Marxists, socialists, anarchists.

Reader discretion advised. This article contains descriptions of atrocities.

This Saturday, July 18, marks the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, an upheaval that attracted 35,000 volunteer soldiers from 52 different countries to Spain to fight for what they were told was perhaps the last remaining democracy in a Europe where freedom was dying out.

Yet since the end of the war in 1939, relatively little has been said outside of Spain about those events once at the center of the world’s stage. What little memory there is left of those years in the collective mind is dominated by the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, who was embedded, as a journalist, in the defeated International Brigades. This may explain why, as noted by historian Eric Hobsbawm, the Spanish Civil War is one of the few events whose history has not been written by the victors but by the vanquished, i.e. these very brigades, composed of Marxists, socialists and anarchists who, when they left Spain, fell silent about the butchery they had witnessed (with the notable exception of George Orwell).

In preparation for the Grand Jubilee of the year 2000, St. John Paul II designated an International Theological Commission to single out all possible faults of the past for which the Catholic Church should repent in order to start the third Millennium with a clean slate. The Commission had intended to include among them the Church’s role in the events of the Spanish Civil War, but Spain’s episcopate refused to do so, pointing out that the Catholic Church had been among its victims. The international press left it at that, but the Church has quietly been writing its own history by simply beatifying and canonizing thousands of Spanish bishops, priests, nuns, seminarians and Catholic laity as martyrs of the faith in the 1930s. As recently as last May, Pope Leo XIV signed off on another 80 martyrs, bringing the total number of Spanish martyrs recognized by the Catholic Church to a colossal 2,334. However, this is far behind the totals referred to by historians by about two-thirds.

READ: Pope Leo approves beatification for priests martyred by Communists, declares US nun ‘venerable’

Yet there is still a sort of unspoken gag rule about the events in 1930s Spain, which the bishops made every effort to lift, particularly with the collective letter addressed to their fellow Catholics in the world at large on July 1, 1937, a year after the uprising. Signed by almost all of the bishops still living in their dioceses at the time, and approved by Rome, the letter is a plea for help in getting the truth out to the world, a truth that may be of help in sorting out some of the otherwise inexplicable events of today as well.

Echoing the words of Pius XI’s Divini Redemptoris, which described communism as “intrinsically perverse,” the Spanish bishops tell a story entirely different from those handed down by the mainstream. The main thrust of the letter is what one hardly ever reads anywhere, and certainly not in school books: an indictment of the stealthy communist penetration into the public arena, heavily financed by the U.S.S.R. for years before the Nationalists ever reacted by seeking help from the dictators of Italy and Germany.

“On July 18, 1936, the military revolt took place,” wrote the bishops, “and the war which is still ongoing broke out. But be it noted, first, that the military revolt was not produced, from its beginnings, without the collaboration of the sound element among the people, which joined the Movement in great numbers, and it can therefore be qualified as a civic-military movement.”

This was because the massacres did not begin in 1936, as a result of the conflict between, on the one hand, the left-wing parties that had “won” the elections and, on the other hand, their nationalist opponents — but much earlier, out of an unprecedentedly brutal religious persecution carried out by well-trained communists, anarchists and socialists, who were determined to wipe out the Catholic Church in its entirety.

Elected to office in 1931, the leftist factions, under the common name of republicans, once having done away with the monarchy, immediately created a climate of anti-Catholic hatred which culminated in the burning down of churches and the cold-blooded murder of countless priests, bishops, nuns, seminarians and laity.

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The evidence they left behind is abundant. Not only was there no attempt to conceal it, there was not even a way of failing to see it: the rojos displayed their cynical brutality to the point of exhibiting the corpses they dug up in the cemeteries they desecrated, aiming to demonstrate that even religious people die and stay dead.

In those years, the left worked on corroding social relationships, emptying out the economy, weakening the police forces, and then filling the void with ideas meant to support and perpetuate the revolution.

The bishops wrote that the “political regime of democratic freedom was unsettled through arbitrary actions on the part of the authorities, of the State and through government connivance, which overrode the will of the people,” up to the point when, “at the parliamentary elections of February 1936, despite a majority of more than half a million votes over the Left, the Right had 118 fewer deputies than the Popular Front, because the votes of entire provinces had been canceled at will, thus corrupting at its source the legitimacy of Parliament.”

At the same time: “(A)nother powerful people, Russia, was combining with the communists of Spain, by means of the theatre and the cinema, through the introduction of foreign ways and customs, through intellectual trickery and material bribery, and preparing the people’s spirit for the breaking out of a revolution which could be predicted with almost exact precision.”

In particular, “on the 27th of February 1936, immediately after the triumph of the Popular Front, Russia’s Komintern decreed the outbreak of the Spanish rebellion and funded it with extraordinary sums of money. On the 1st of May hundreds of young people in Madrid publicly amassed “bombs and guns, powder and dynamite for the coming revolution.” On the 16th of that same month, there was a meeting between the envoys from the U.S.S.R. with the Spanish delegates from the Third International at the “People’s House” in Valencia, where it was determined, in the ninth of their agreements, to entrust No. 25 of the Madrid “Radios” Committees, together with the policemen on duty, with the task of the elimination of the political and military personages destined to play an important role in the counter-revolution. Meanwhile, from Madrid to the remotest of the villages, the revolutionary militias were receiving military training and were so abundantly armed that, when the war began, they numbered 150,000 shock troops and 100,000 reserves.

READ: Two Catholic priests executed by communist regime in Czechoslovakia now beatified

To prove their contention that “the massacre of people and things by the communist revolution was premeditated,” the bishops also specified that “79 specialized agitators had arrived from Russia shortly before the uprising. In those very same days the National Commission of Marxist Unification ordered revolutionary militias to be set up in every country. The destruction of the churches, or at least of their furniture, was systematic and in set sequence. In a matter of a month all of the churches had been rendered of no use for public worship.”

The unequivocal proof that such an immense devastation was premeditated “are the terrifying numbers. Although the estimates are not final as of yet, we can safely say that about 20,000 churches have been destroyed or totally ransacked. The priests who have been put to death, even just limiting the count to the secular clergy, amount to about six thousand. They even set the dogs on them, hunting them down all the way up into the mountains; they were hunted down savagely into every possible hiding place. Most of the times they were killed without any trial, with no charges held against them except for their very social mission.”

“Many had their limbs cut off, or were mutilated before being killed; they had their eyes gouged out, their tongue cut off, or they were shot at from a dominant position, others were burned or buried alive, or hacked to death with an axe. The utmost ferocity was used against the ministers of God. Women were violated, showing no respect even for the ones who had consecrated themselves to God. Tombs and cemeteries were desecrated. This work of destruction was carried out with the battle cry ‘Long live Russia!’, under the banner of international communism…”

To those who claimed that if only Francisco Franco had refrained from leading the uprising, the thousands upon thousands of religious clergy and laity would not have died but could have continued their service to the church, the bishops’ reply is that “the truth is exactly the opposite: the detailed plan aiming to carry out a Marxist revolution, which would have broken out all over the world if it hadn’t been prevented in a large measure by the military-civic movement, was preordained for the following purposes: to exterminate the Catholic Clergy and the most qualified Catholic right-wing men, to sovietize all the industries and to install communism.” This was also openly admitted to on the radio, in January of that year, by one of the leaders of the anarchists: “We must tell it the way it is; the armed forces preceded us in order to prevent us from succeeding in unleashing the revolution.”

The worldwide disinformation campaign, financed directly by Moscow, used the classical subversion technique of the left: blaming the tragedy on the victim, i.e. placing the Catholic Church in the defendant’s docket, so that, after having completely destroyed her material presence, they might succeed in annihilating her reputation as well.

Hence among the mistakes to be rectified are also slanders directly aimed at the Church. For example: “The Church has been accused of defending itself against a people’s movement, transforming her churches into fortresses, and thus leading to the massacre of clergy and the ruin of the churches. We deny this. The attack on the churches was sudden, almost simultaneous in all regions, and coincided with the butchery of priests. The churches were burned because they were the houses of God and the clergy were sacrificed because they were the Ministers of God.”

Besides, “We are asked from abroad to say whether it is true that the Church in Spain owned one-third of the national territory and that the people have revolted in order to free themselves from her oppression. The Church did not possess more than a few and insignificant portions of land, presbyteries and schools, and even of this the State had recently taken possession. All that the Church possesses in Spain would not cover a quarter of her needs, and is devoted to the most sacred obligations.”