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Catholics in the Republic During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9

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Catholics in the Republic During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9 A ‘gigantic struggle between believers and those without God’? Catholics in the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9 Richard Ryan Royal Holloway, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History 2015 1 Declaration of Authorship I declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 2 Abstract This thesis focuses directly upon the lived experiences of priests and lay Catholics who, driven by their faith, remained loyal to the Republic or otherwise refused to identify with the rebel cause during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). It shows that their ability to make sense of the war outside of the Church-backed, rebel narrative of ‘crusade’ hinged centrally on their own understandings of their Catholic faith and its translation into experience. Not least was their recognition of the religious violence at the start of the war as the violent accumulation of larger political, social, and cultural clashes in which the Church had been a central protagonist. From there, it examines their participation in the wartime Republic, arguing that these individuals were agents of their own survival, not simply ‘un-murdered victims’ of revolutionary violence saved by divine intervention, as the epistemological categories of Francoist mythologies would have it. Rather, they were active participants in the Republic, even amidst the pressures of an increasingly fraught war effort, as the Republic fought not only to reconstruct its image as a modernising liberal democracy, and to translate that image into reality for its entire citizenry, but for its very survival. But amidst the Republic’s collapse and the consolidation across Spain of Francoist violence based on the ideologically-charged language of the ‘crusade’, these Catholics were not spared by their faith, their future-oriented aspirations for a more egalitarian society are shown to have cost them dearly. Historiographical silences surrounding this subject indicate that even today, ‘crusade’ mythologies embedded within the Francoist dictatorship continue to reverberate with destructive force. This thesis seeks to work beyond the accumulation of such myths and distorted narratives and thus to recover for the historical record those Catholic individuals who once worked for the incorporation of Catholicism into Spain’s democratic Republic. 3 Acknowledgements This thesis has benefited from an AHRC doctoral award, which funded the bulk of this research, in addition to funding granted by the Friendly Hand Society. My thanks are due in the first instance to Helen Graham, who supervised this thesis and who has throughout provided encouragement, intellectual support, guidance and friendship. Beyond an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Spanish Civil War, Helen has taught me to think about the writing of history and our own places in the world in new ways. For that I am immensely grateful. I am grateful too for the advice and assistance of many others, who have answered questions in more detail than I could have ever hoped, and discussed themes across an entire range of subjects: Daniel Beer, Rudolf Muhs, Paul Preston, Dan Stone, Sandra Souto and Maria Thomas. Thanks too must go to Mary Vincent, who first encouraged me as an undergraduate student to pursue many of the broad themes spread throughout this thesis. Additionally, I am thankful for the willingness of a number of historians to share ideas and information. Amongst many others, I would particularly like to thank Peter Anderson, Richard Baxell and Francisco Espinosa Maestre. Thanks must also go to the staff of various archives in Spain, who patiently provided much needed assistance. I must also thank Carl Bjerstrom and Becky Jinks, who have consistently offered friendship and coffee, along with insightful analysis and advice on various drafts of chapters within this thesis. Their assistance has also often extended to advice about university teaching. I am grateful to everyone at Royal Holloway, University of London who has facilitated that teaching. Various friends have offered more encouragement, company and laughter than I will ever be able to repay. There are too many to name, but special thanks must go to Alex and Mike, not least for encouraging me to take a break once in a while. The final thanks are for my parents and my brother. They have provided constant love, support and encouragement throughout, perhaps dealing with more conversations about the Spanish Civil War than they could have ever imagined. 4 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations 6 Introduction 7 – 43 Chapter One: A Pandora’s Box of violence and Catholic ‘martyrs’ on all sides 44 – 73 Chapter Two: Catholics in the Republican media, standing ‘side by side with the people’ 74 – 115 Chapter Three: Francoist anticlericalism and the consecration of the ‘crusade’ 116 – 152 Chapter Four: Beginning to breathe again? Negrín’s normalisation of life amidst total war 153 – 207 Chapter Five: The monastery jail of Carmona, Franco’s prison for priests 208 – 247 Conclusions 248 – 256 Bibliography 257 – 293 5 List of Abbreviations ACCAM Archivo Central de Curia de la Archidiócesis de Madrid AHCB Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de Barcelona AGA Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares AGMJ Archivo General del Ministerio de Justicia AHN Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid ANFD Alianza Nacional de Fuerzas Democráticas ATTP Archivo del Tribunal Territorial Primero CCUC Catàleg Collectiu de les Universitats de Catalunya CDMH Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica CEDA Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas CNT Confederación Nacional de Trabajo FAI Federación Anarquista Ibérica FFLC Fundación Francisco Largo Caballero FJCC Federació de Joves Cristians de Catalunya FNTT Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra FSA Fundación Sabino Arana IR Izquierda Republicana JSU Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas LSE LSE Archive, London School of Economics and Political Science MML Marx Memorial Library, IB Association Archive PCE Partido Comunista de España PNV Partido Nacionalista Vasco PSOE Partido Socialista Obrero Español SHD Service Historique de la Défense, Paris TERMC Tribunal Especial para la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo UDC Unió Democrática de Catalunya UTCC Unió de Treballadors Cristians de Catalunya UKHJP University of Kent Archives, Hewlett Johnson Papers 6 Introduction In late September 1936, just a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the Bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Plá y Deniel, issued a pastoral letter entitled The Two Cities. In it, the bishop justified the military rising that had collapsed and initiated the civil war as necessary; ‘not a civil war but a crusade for religion and for the fatherland and for civilisation.’ The battle lines were drawn and the message to the Catholic faithful was clear: it was, he said, an apocalyptic battle of ‘heroism and martyrdom’ against those ‘without God and against God.’1 Just two weeks earlier in Madrid, in the beating heart of the Republic portrayed by Plá y Deniel as ‘without God and against God’, the daily newspaper La Libertad had carried a prominent advertisement for an ‘exceptional pamphlet’ entitled ‘¡Tres discursos del presbítero García Morales!’ The pamphlet contained speeches broadcast on Madrid radio by the fifty-three year old priest Juan García Morales during August and early September. In those speeches, García Morales had referred not to a crusade, but a war led by ‘fat cats and aristocrats’ against the people of Spain. The pocket-sized book, on sale for the price of 0,25 centimes, promised renewed availability to a mass market in the capital that had already proven its appetite for the priest’s speeches: the first two editions had sold out so quickly that Socorro Rojo Internacional, the Comintern-organised international aid agency, had quickly ordered the printing of 50,000 additional copies.2 The juxtaposition of the two priests illustrates the striking complexities of civil wartime Spain. Far from the confrontation between ‘good versus evil’ portrayed by the Bishop of Salamanca, the Republic – in peacetime and now at war – was an arena of social change in which debates around religion and the place of the institutional Church became the lens through which larger political, social, and cultural clashes played out. Although priests and devout lay Catholics could therefore be found across 1 Enrique Plá y Deniel, Las dos ciudades: carta pastoral, (Salamanca: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Calatrava, 1936) 2 La Libertad, 19 September 1936. The advertisement was for the pamphlet Texto íntegro de los tres discursos pronunciados ante los micrófonos del Ministerio de la Guerra, el día 21 de agosto; del Cuartel de los Regimientos de Ferrocarriles de Leganés, el día 6 de septiembre y del Partido Comunista el día 13 de septiembre de 1936, por el sacerdote don Juan García Morales, (Madrid: Socorro Rojo Internacional, 1936) 7 the political spectrum, the historiographical silences around the subject inevitably reflect the victory of the Church-backed rebel forces over the Republic in the civil war. Allied to a dictatorship that lasted for forty years, those imposed narratives of a ‘crusade’, ‘for God and for Spain’, were allowed to survive across the transition to democracy in the late 1970s, an afterlife of violence that was the product of a political brokerage driven by reformist Francoism in return for an amnesty law and a ‘pact of forgetting’.3
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