THE SPANISH BISHOPS AND NAZISM DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

Abstract

The anticommunist position of the Spanish bishops was unanimous during the Spanish Civil War. Their attitude toward Nazism, however, underwent a gradual evolution, from indifference (1936-37) to concern (1938-39). This change was due, in part, to the sympathy for Germany exhibited by the Spanish Falange and, above all, to the warnings of the Holy See. It did not, however, result in a unanimous and open criticism of the Nazis. The opposition of the bishops was primarily in response to papal documents and warnings from German bishops critical of Nazism's stance against Christianity, leading the bishops to question the compatibility of totalitarian ideas and Catholicism to create the new state that Francisco Franco wanted to build in Spain. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Headnote

The anticommunist position of the Spanish bishops was unanimous during the Spanish Civil War. Their attitude toward Nazism, however, underwent a gradual evolution, from indifference (1936-37) to concern (1938-39). This change was due, in part, to the sympathy for Germany exhibited by the Spanish Falange and, above all, to the warnings of the Holy See. It did not, however, result in a unanimous and open criticism of the Nazis. The opposition of the bishops was primarily in response to papal documents and warnings from German bishops critical of Nazism's stance against Christianity, leading the bishops to question the compatibility of totalitarian ideas and Catholicism to create the new state that Francisco Franco wanted to build in Spain.

Keywords: Gomá, Isidro; Nazism; Pius XI; Spanish Civil War; Spanish bishops

1. The Second Spanish Republic and the Catholic Church

In 1930, a year before the birth of the Spanish Republic, Catholicism in Spain was in decline. Major segments of the population were indifferent or hostile to the Church, including much of the peasantry in the southern and central regions, the urban proletariat, large portions of the bourgeoisie, officials, lawyers, intellectuals, and journalists. A significant part of the country had distanced itself from the Church, but in 1930 Spain was still a Catholic confessional state that had laws protecting Catholicism and many citizens loyal to the Church due to custom, tradition, and an extensive network of Catholic charitable and educational institutions.1

When the Republic was declared on April 14, 1931, the Catholic Church was in an enormously important social position.Ten days later the Vatican instructed the Spanish bishops to tell Catholics that they should obey the new regime.The bishops did so, including Cardinal Pedro Segura, the archbishop of Toledo who was well known for his loyalty to the king and his anti-Republicanism. However, two factors were to make this initial obedience into nothing more than an empty and scarcely credible formality during the five years of the Republic.2

First, there were the anticlerical laws of the new government. The socialists and liberals led by Manuel Azaña believed that modernizing the country would require a resolution of the "religious question." The coalition in power between 1931 and 1933 feared the powerful Church that opposed the Republicans and was emotionally tied to the monarchy, judging its hold over the consciences of the people to be incompatible with progress and freedom. Therefore, ecclesiastical influence would have to be countered and reversed if the new Republican project were to survive and prosper. Thus, the new Constitution had a strong anticlerical bias. Moreover, a wave of laws between 1931 and 1933 sought to reduce the social hegemony of Catholicism. Among these, in particular, was the June 1933 law of religions and religious orders that denied the right of religious orders to teach in their own schools and placed ownership of Catholic churches under state control.3 The Catholic promises of obedience were unnecessary or irrelevant for the Republicans in government.

The second factor was church tradition that was imbedded in the culture. Over the course of centuries, cordial relations existed between the throne and the altar.The experience of a first, brief, and unstable Republic in 1873-74 gave way to the Restoration. In the peace that Antonio Canovas del Castillo made with the Church in 1876, it was agreed that Spanish political institutions could be liberal, but, in exchange, the government promised to protect the religious monopoly of the Church in a country without religious freedom.

However, this alliance was shattered in 1931. For Spanish Catholics and their bishops, the end of the monarchy meant the twilight of the secure and stable world in which they had lived. But the Republican era was not only a period of nostalgia for lost privileges but also was one of lamentation for the present, because a political-religious confrontation began in 1931 that Spanish Catholics and their bishops viewed as a persecution of their faith. In this atmosphere, they greeted with relief the victory of the confessional Catholic CEDA party in the November 1933 elections, which interrupted the government policy of secularization.4

The Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) has been viewed in dichotomous ways. Some studies emphasize its role as a Trojan horse dedicated to destroying the regime, restoring the monarchy, or establishing a fascist state in Spain. Other perspectives, however, assert that its participation in political life and elections convey a genuine adherence to democratic ideals and to the Republic on the part of the Vatican, the bishops, and Spanish Catholics.5

However, it is not accurate to speak of Spanish Catholics during the period of the Republic as a discrete group with homogenous social and political attitudes. In fact, there was a great deal of fragmentation in the Catholic and conservative electorate.The clergy and bishops supported a variety of Catholic electoral options, although the CEDA was their clear favorite. However, a broad sector of the clergy in the Basque region supported the Partido Nacionalista Vasco, whereas those in Catalonia tended to support the Lliga Catalana or Unió Democrática. As these confessional parties advocated political autonomy for their communities, the CEDA viewed them as rivals that weakened national unity. For the CEDA, Spain did not necessarily require a monarchical form of government, but it definitely had to be a Catholic country. The nationalist parties, on the other hand, had little sympathy for the monarchy. The need for the unity of Spain strengthened their loyalty to the Republic that had given them political autonomy.6

There also were two monarchist political forces composed of Catholics, but each was hostile to the other. On one side were the Carlists, who considered themselves the true defenders of the interests of the Church and conspired against the Republic from April 1931 to July 1936. There also were the followers of Alfonso XIII who were members of the Renovación Española, which contested the February 1936 elections as the Bloque Nacional. Its leader, José Calvo Sotelo, was assassinated on July 13 of that year.7

Finally, the young fascists of the Falange, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in late October 1933, also were Catholic in their origins and sympathies. Like the Carlists, the Falange was antidemocratic and had violent tendencies. But their sanctification of the nation, antimonarchism, revolutionary rhetoric, and indifference to the Church explain their minority status among Catholics. The violence of spring 1936, followed by the outbreak of the Civil War, transformed the elitist Falange of the Republic into a party of the masses.8

The elections of February 1936 reflected the sharp division of Spain into two electorally and socially balanced blocs: the Popular Front and the CEDA, which wished to punish the revolutionaries of October 1934, opposed the land reform of recent years, and faced charges of fascism as a result of its positions.

In the months leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War, positions of those in Parliament and elsewhere radicalized. The reforms initiated in the first two years of the Republic were accelerated with the intention of thwarting a new conservative reaction. In addition, frequent strikes, closures of right-wing newspapers, burnings and other attacks on churches, and assassinations committed by socialists and Falangists threw daily life into turmoil.The civil and military conspiracy that formed in July 1936 not only failed to deal with the unrest but also gave rise in half of the country to the very revolution it had sought to avoid.9

The debate regarding the motives of the CEDA (as well as the Church) regarding the Republic is closely related to other controversies involving the causes and nature of the Civil War and its protagonists. Intensive propaganda activities by both sides took up these questions during the war, seeking to gain an advantage.

According to the rebels, the coup d'état occurred to prevent social chaos, thwart the danger of a communist revolution, and toss out a government comfortable with revolutionaries and passive in the face of public disorder. In this view, the military uprising was a preventive measure against the forces that sought to break up the nation: liberals, communists, anarchists, socialists, nationalists, Freemasons, and so forth.10

Republican propaganda, on the other hand, held that the privileged (including the Church) were trying to recover their lost position by force, overthrowing a democracy that was fighting to defend itself and the Spanish people.11 Thus, in the Republican view, the persecution of the Church was the response of the people against an aggres9See sor-an act of self-defense that resulted in deplorable but justified killings because of the political stance taken by the clergy.

Like the Francoist zone, the Republican side had a conglomeration of forces under different banners. Anarchists, socialists, and communists shared a violent anticlericalism, completely different from the peaceful secularism of Azaña and his followers of the center left. Furthermore, the anti-Catholic violence declined as the government managed to reassert its authority over the revolutionary forces. Yet the Republicans agreed, regardless of faction, that the Church was responsible for its own persecution by a people hostile to it.

In contrast, the armed forces that joined the coup and the Spanish conservatives who joined the rebels (rural landowners in the northwest, center, and north, as well as the urban middle classes of Andalusia, Castile, and Navarra) made the defense of the Church the fundamental justification of their fight. They saw the issue as neither a civil war nor a conflict between classes but rather a crusade. The coup d'état failed in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Bilbao because of its weak organization and the quick reaction of the Republican forces. The coup d'état, which sought neither to protect the Church nor restore the monarchy, triggered a violent revolution in Republican Spain and a religious revival in its Francoist counterpart. The bishops and the clergy-with very few exceptions12-thus supported a rebellion that shared their anti-liberal, anticommunist, and antirevolutionary values-the values necessary, they believed, to construct a Spain in accordance with its historic roots.13

However, that was not all in a civil war of extraordinary complexity. Francisco Franco, an ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, received weapons and troops from these countries as well as decisive ideological influences to rebuild the New Spain that was to emerge from victory. Thus, on the rebel side there were two different projects of national reconstruction, covertly opposed to each other during the war and openly hostile to each other in the postwar period. One was Falangist, fascist, and revolutionary, favoring a strong and centralized state in which the Catholic religion would be subordinated to the nation.14 The other was Catholic, conservative, traditional, and antirevolutionary, suspicious of the power of a Falange that only valued Catholicism as a cultural factor and thus an advocate for a different foundation for the New Spain.15

The following seeks to explore the suspicions of the Spanish bishops regarding the arrival of Nazi ideology in the country during the Civil War.16 Their reaction to Nazism was rooted in cultural-religious reasons, unlike two of their other attitudes: their condemnation of the religious persecution of the Republic (categorizing those who carried it out as communists, without further nuance)17 and their view of Franco (believing he would rebuild the country in accordance with its cultural and religious heritage). But although criticism of the communist revolutionaries was common in Francoist Spain, the condemnation of Spanish revolutionary fascists was a phenomenon that was specifically Catholic. The bishops did not extend their condemnation to Nazism as an ideology or to the strained relations between Adolf Hitler and the Catholic Church in Germany, either because they knew very little about the subject, or because they understood their duty was limited to Spain. However, it is possible to deduce that they shared the concerns of the Vatican regarding Nazism from the Magesterium regarding the question, as can be seen here.

2. Two Encyclicals from Pope Pius XI

The Spanish bishops' agenda was filled with domestic concerns during the Second Spanish Republic (1931-36). Anticlerical laws worried the prelates as well as Pope Pius XI who, in the June 1933 encyclical Dilectissima Nobis, condemned the secularist hostility of the newly approved law concerning religious denominations and organizations. As a result, the Spanish bishops did not register any public reaction in this period to the problems of the Catholic Church in Germany.The civil war that began three years later emphasized the purely domestic concerns of the prelates.

This preoccupation is evident in their pastoral writings, as they expressed their wish to avoid what they viewed as the mistakes of the Republican period. For them, the primary object was the essential unity between Spanish national identity and Catholicism. The discourse of the Spanish prelates manifested the same concerns about national identity as the Spanish Republicans and Franco's supporters. But the international character of the war soon manifested itself and altered this view. The German and Italian support for the rebels, as well as the Russian alliance with the Republicans, had decisive consequences in military matters and propaganda. Each side argued that the other was the mortal enemy of Spain and had sold out the nation to Russian and German foreigners who would take control if the war were lost.18 Spain was the arena where Germany and Russia would solve their differences; and the winner would impose its hegemony internationally.

Pius XI condemned both totalitarian regimes in March 1937. On March 14, he signed the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety and Concern), which was read in Catholic parishes throughl8On out the Reich on Sunday, March 22. Earlier, on March 19, the pope had rejected communism in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris. The Spanish bishops shared the papal doctrine in an irregular fashion. Prior to the war, they had seen the incompatibility between communism and Catholicism.They had nothing to oppose, or clarify, in what Pius XI said. For them, communism represented an update of the old errors that had undone Spain. Against this final stage of the Second Republic and its efforts to create "misbegotten laws and practices"19 in a secularized Spain that was no longer truly Spain20 stood the National Movement to recover the real Spain and that therefore should be firmly supported by good Spanish Catholics.

On the other hand, the Spanish bishops regarded Nazism as a distant ideology despite the German support for Franco, which may explain their weak efforts to publicize Pius XI's criticism of the Nazis in a Spain where the Catholic Church was free. Even so, the bishops also endorsed papal teaching on the subject, albeit slowly and somewhat reluctantly It is an undisputable reality that Nazi stance against Christianity does not appear in the writings of bishops on the Civil War as a threat to the regeneration of the country. In episcopal documents, only sporadic warnings appear about the danger posed to the revival of Spanish Catholicism by the alliance with a German neopagan. Thus, in the bishops' view, the old communist enemy- unleashed with impunity in half of Spain-embodied evil rather than the youthful, remote Nazi ideology.

Two March 1937 encyclicals of Pius XI condemning communism and criticizing the Nazi ideology provide illumination on the bishops' attitudes toward the two ideologies.The press in Franco's Spain issued Divini Redemptoris of March 19 without impediment; it also appeared in ecclesiastical bulletins. The encyclical publication occurred throughout 1937 and even into 1938, eventually appearing in almost every bulletin of the forty dioceses in the rebel Spain.21

The importance of Divini Redemptoris as propaganda in Franco's Spain suggests that the bishops would order their priests to read or explain it to their parishioners during Mass. But it was much more customary for the instructions, addresses, and pastoral letters of bishops to end with the instruction "read to the faithful" rather than papal documents. This is why it was surprising that some bishops ordered their priests to read Divini Redemptoris to the people.The following eight of the forty bishops gave this instruction to their priests: Enrique Pía y Deniel (Salamanca), Luciano Pérez Platero (Segovia), Manuel López Arana (Ciudad Rodrigo), Rafael Balanzá (Lugo), Florencio Cerviño (Orense), José Eguino Trecu (Santander), Balbino Santos (Málaga), and Justo Echeguren (Oviedo).22

3- The Reception of Mit brennender Sorge in Francoist Spain

The complete harmony between Nationalist propaganda and the papal magisterium of Pius XI with regard to communism disappeared with the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. The encyclical, which addressed "the situation of the Catholic Church in the Germanic Reich," strongly criticized Nazi hostility toward the Catholic Church. In Germany, parish priests read it to the faithful at all Masses in the country on March 21,1937, which was Palm Sunday. In response, the Reich orchestrated a campaign accusing Catholic priests of pedophilia.

None of these events became known in Franco's Spain, for the National Delegation of Press and Propaganda prevented the encyclical against the allied country to reach the civil and ecclesiastical press. In fact, some weeks earlier, a circular letter to the governors of Spanish provinces under Nationalist control had banned "any publication of any kind whatsoever relating to Protestantism in its relations with Judaism and Freemasonry."23 No Spaniard should make the connection between Protestantism and Germany, and (from this point of view) the mention of the conflict between the Reich and the Catholic Church was even less reasonable.

In his encyclical, the pope stated that the German government had violated the Concordat of 1933. Pius XI condemned the racism that "superficial minds" were preaching as a new ethical guideline instead of God, thus justifying the teaching of anti-Christian principles and the use of amoral violence. Pius XI rejected the "[s]ecret and open measures of intimidation" and various pressures used by the authorities to encourage Catholics to apostasize and advised the faithful to fight to the cry of "Depart from me, Satan, for it is written: you shall worship the Lord thy God and him alone shall you serve." Moreover, the pope lamented (and openly revealed) the persecution unleashed against the Church's hierarchy, stating that "to all those imprisoned in jail and concentration camps, the Father of the Christian world sends his words of gratitude and commendation." Pius XI did not want "to be an accomplice to equivocation by an untimely silence" and noted at the end of the encyclical that those responsible for this state of affairs are "oppressors of the Church," the "enemies of Christ," and "renegades and destroyers of the Christian West."24

This proved too much for the rebels to stomach in a black-andwhite civil war, in which such qualifications could only be applied to the "Reds." In both encyclicals, it was clear that communism and Nazism were comparable dangers to the Church. Unlike his writing on communism, the pope did not now synthesize and expressly condemn the Nazi ideology, but rather its belligerent stance against Christianity. But anyone who then read Mit brennender Sorge could not help but ponder the question about a Nazi threat to Spanish Catholicism and even view with suspicion the monotonous propaganda regarding the defense of the Church by Franco and his army, when they were allied with a country persecuting Catholics.

Official censorship prevented these concerns from reaching the public.25 This did not occur with the bishops, however. They were able to consider these and other questions because the Vatican had sent to Cardinal Isidro Gomá, its unofficial representative to Franco since December 1936,26 copies of Mit brennender Sorge to be translated, sent to the prelates, and disseminated throughout the country as widely as censorship would permit.27 In late April 1937, Gomá sent two circulars to the bishops. The first, dated April 22, indicated that they could publish Mit brennender Sorge in their newsletters, but "in the current circumstances" it was best not to give it wider distribution. But on April 27, Gomá stated in Latin (for greater security) that he did not advise publishing it even in church bulletins, because the times were "extremely difficult and very dangerous."28

Gomá told Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, on April 24 that Franco had decreed the unification of political forces on April 19 and that circulation of the encyclical should be delayed because it "could serve as a pretext for censoring one of the members of the union, the Spanish Falange, whose tendencies were more or less similar to those of Hitler."29 He worried that Mit brennender fSorge would weaken the unity needed by Franco to win the war and destroy the "anti-Spain." It was a pragmatic tactic by Gomá. He preferred to win the war rather than seek an immediate lifting of the censorship of ideas against the Nazis in Spain.

However, in this report to Rome, Gomá did not mention that failing to disseminate the encyclical with its strong message against Nazism would allow the Nazi influence in Spain to grow. Instead, he stressed once again, as he had since the beginning of the war, that he was satisfied with the "repeated declarations favorable to Catholicism" by Franco and his promises to root out in Spain "Hitler's pagan racism."30 Rome gave no answer to Gomá's recommendation to delay the publication of the encyclical, so that the bishops were free to proceed as they wished.31

Before the encyclical, the Spanish bishops knew little about Nazism, and the subject had received very little treatment in the episcopal bulletins.There were only a few such articles in the November 1936 bulletin of Vitoria. One mentioned the project to banish Catholicism in Germany, and a second praised the revival of the Church "in its heroic defense against the assaults of neo-paganism."32 However, a brief piece in the "Variety" section of an episcopal bulletin was quite different than a pastoral document from a Spanish bishop condemning Nazism. Despite the pope's statements about the situation in Germany, and despite the Reich's position as an important ally of Franco (and the danger that Nazism could spread throughout the country), the Spanish bishops believed that what could most easily repeat itself in Spain was the anti-Christian Russian experience, not the German one. For evidence, they could point to the persecution of the Church on the Republican side by the "communists"-the common label for the Republicans, regardless of their ideas. Thus, when Pius XI issued Mit brennender Sorge, the bishops did not feel they had to sound the alarm in Spain against Nazism.

The correspondence of Gomá simply confirms that Germany and its problems were far from the minds of the Spanish bishops. The communications from the bishops confirm that they did not refer to Nazism from the start of the war until March 1937. Only Monsignor Luciano Pérez Platero, bishop of Segovia, said something about a possible German influence in the country On March 13, 1937, he sent Gomá a letter from a priest of his diocese, Andrés Herranz, "who is perfectly aware of what is going on in Germany for having spent a great deal of time there."33 Herranz believed that after the war, many Germans would come to Spain, and he wanted them to be Catholics. In any case, his views on Nazism coincided with what Pius XI at that time expressed as the vox populi:

However, it is necessary to prevent Protestants and national-socialists from coming to Spain. The majority of the former are overwhelmingly liberal. The latter are statists, rationalists, materialists, neo-pagans, atheists, usually surreptitiously, rarely openly, and enemies of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.34

It is possible that the Spanish prelates had the same ideas about Nazism after reading the encyclical of Pius XI. However, none of them said it was time for their flocks to know about it.Thirty bishops failed to respond to Gomá's circular of April 17 proposing a delay in the publication of Mit brennender Sorge. The other ten were in agreement, but only Pía y Deniel supplied reasons. Regarding asking the government for advice on the matter, he pointed out that a precedent should not be set as to what could or could not be published in diocesan bulletins. Instead of publishing Mit brennender Sorge and annoying "the German officers who are presently in Spain," the bishops could touch on the warnings contained in the encyclical from time to time.35 Gomá agreed and pointed out that in Spain "[the Encyclical's] teachings will soon be very applicable, depending on how things develop."36 The bishops concurred with Gomá that if it was published, friction with the Nationalists would occur. They also agreed with Pia that such publication would create problems with their German allies. But Pla's stance gave more weight to the bishops' authority than the pope's, even though the danger was that many of them might not say anything at all about a subject that could annoy the rebels.

In any case, the papal warning against Nazism alerted the bishops about risks other than communism. From spring 1937, Gomá began alluding to the growing German influence in Franco's Spain in his reports to Rome.37 He also spoke publicly about the issue in the bishops' collective letter (the emblematic text outlining the Spanish bishops'vision on the Republican past, the war, and the future of Spain), of which he was the editor.The letter was made public at the beginning of August 1937, although dated July 1,1937. It justified the "noble countenance of a national movement" to prevent a communist revolution, vaguely outlined such a revolution's Republican origins, and described the Republicans' excesses during the war. The following warning about the country's future may not have registered with readers of the time, because the extensive account of the anticlerical and iconoclastic fury that had occurred in Spain has assumed first importance, and because the language was somewhat enigmatic. However, the quote is important, because it is the first official document by the bishops that indicates the lines that the New Spain should not cross. It includes the adherence to the teaching of the pope (although expressed in veiled terms):

We trust the wisdom of the leaders of the government, who will not want to accept foreign molds for future configuration of the Spanish state, but take into account the demands of the nation's interior affairs and the path marked by past centuries. . . . We would be the first to lament the irresponsible autocracy of a parliament being replaced by the more terrible one of a dictatorship whose roots are not of our nation. We cling to the legitimate hope that it will not be so.38

They were not referring to communism, against which the "wisdom of the leaders of the government" was fighting. If parliamentary liberalism also had to be excluded, what Gomá and the Spanish bishops rejected was German fascism and its "terrible dictatorship" as damaging to the nation and the Church.Thus, the only public reference in Spain to Mit brennender Sorge a few months after it was written was the letter's comment about the incompatibility between the Spanish history and "foreign molds" that would bring "a terrible dictatorship."

Faced with this reluctant reception, it is understandable that the Vatican would want to accelerate the publication of the encyclical in Spain; in fact, the long road to its publication cannot be understood without recognizing the role of the Vatican. Warning Catholics about Nazism became a priority of Vatican diplomacy in Spain.

In summer 1937, several factors moved the Holy See to mend its diplomatic estrangement with Franco's Spain: first, the military actions against Basque nationalist priests arrested in Guipuzcoa intensified when Bilbao, the capital of Vizcaya, fell on June 19, 1937.39 In addition, a Vatican diplomat would judge more impartially than Gomá the old question of full diplomatic recognition, which Gomá had been demanding unsuccessfully. Finally, such a Vatican representative also could better assess the danger of the Nazi influence in Spain that Gomá had started to denounce.

The diplomat chosen was Monsignor Ildebrando Antoniutti. Born in 1898, he had held various diplomatic posts in China and Portugal. He was serving as the Vatican's apostolic delegate in Albania on July 15, 1937, when Pacelli called him to Rome. He received instructions and read a report on the religious and political situation in the Basque Country, which was the geographic destination of his mission. He arrived in Nationalist Spain on July 27.40

Franco received him some days later. Common themes in the meetings of the two men were the Nazi influence in Spain and the clergy accused of Basque nationalism. Franco tended to reiterate what he had said on July 31,1937, the first time they met-the current racist theories in Germany "would not be permitted among us," but it was impossible to "thoroughly mount a campaign against such doctrines" during the war because the Germans were needed to win the war.41 As Franco said to Antoniutti on October 7,1937, was it not sufficient that he had forced the replacement of the German ambassador, Wilhelm Faupel, who had wanted to infect the Falange with the Nazi ideology?42

But neither that fact nor Franco's argument that the Spanish press did not praise Nazi ideology, but rather Germany as a nation and ally, convinced the secretary of state. Pacelli wanted Antoniutti to remind Franco that the Nazi ideology was essentially antiChristian and that its leader was a fierce persecutor of the Church who, as he stated to a politician, would "sink her into ignominy and the shame."43 When Antoniutti transmitted this message on November 22,1937, Franco said:

Our traditions and our civilization are essentially opposed to that of Germany, with which we have no sympathy at all. Nazism has a pagan program; we have another, a Catholic one. Spain must be Catholic according to her traditions and the teachings of the Church. Believe me, I say this with the deepest possible conviction.44

At the meeting, Antoniutti handed him a copy of Mit brennender Sorge and suggested that it be released publicly in Spain. However, he was talking to a ruler eager to please both the Vatican and Germany. The efforts of Gomá and Antoniutti only came to fruition in January 1938 after a cascade of complaints to Franco and the head of his diplomatic cabinet, José Antonio de Sangroniz, in fall 1937. Antoniutti had protested against incidents of press bias such as reports praising Germany and criticizing the Holy See, the lack of press attention to speeches of Pius XI, and press accounts of an exhibition of German books in Salamanca.45 The Jesuit magazine Razón y fé (Reason and Faith) received permission to publish the encyclical. Significantly, that permission coincided with the establishment of Franco's first government on January 30,1938.That government was supposed to coordinate state affairs, to embody the idea of political normalization and the unity of the groups that had joined forces in April 1937. The permission for the encyclical's publication should not be seen as an example of Franco's Catholicism. Rather, this move seems to have occurred to advance the normalization of diplomatic relations with the Vatican and was viewed as unlikely to provoke substantial German protests.

Without asking for permission to publish the encyclical in other venues, Gomá told the bishops on February 4 that they now could reproduce it in their diocesan bulletins. He noted, "Its publication can be of great edification for many souls, especially the leaders of public opinion at the present time."46 Gomá, who knew very well that the encyclical's appearance in the bulletins "would not reach the attention of the public,"47 did not indicate to the bishops that they read or explain the encyclical to the faithful.

Only two bishops responded to his letter. The first was Cardinal Pedro Segura, who had endured a forced exile in Rome from 1931 to 1937; his episcopate in Seville had begun in October 1937. Segura preferred not to publish the encyclical"in order not to create difficulties." Although he did not believe that it would have any influence over the authorities or edify souls, as Gomá believed, he would do whatever was suggested.48 To the other bishop, Tomás Gutiérrez of Osma, it seemed that the matter was not an urgent one and that "at least around here" its publication would "cause bewilderment."49 The rest of the prelates, whether or not they agreed with the publication of the encyclical in their diocesan newsletters, offered no explanation to the cardinal of Toledo.

The details of the chronological appearance of Mit brennender Sorge in the newsletters of 1938-39 appear in appendix A. Twenty dioceses incorporated into Franco's Spain in the final months of the war are not included,50 as their bulletins had been suspended during the Civil War and, once resumed, did not contain the encyclicals of Pius XI dated 1936 and later. Apart from these dioceses, there were still another forty, thirty of which did reproduce the encyclical in 1938. Nine dioceses did not publish Mit brennender Sorge: Burgos, Canarias, Ibiza, Jaca, Orense, Santander, Sigüenza, Tenerife, and Vallado lid.51 The Republicans imprisoned Anselmo Polanco, bishop of Teruel-Albarracín, and the bulletin of his diocese was not published during this time.

Publication of Divlni Redemptoris and Mit brennender Sorge occurred within eight months, except for certain newsletters that experienced a substantial delay.52 From this point of view, the Spanish bishops faithfully communicated papal teaching without distinctions of the issues addressed by Pius XI. As previously stated, the events in Spain prompted them to share his teaching about communism more urgently. On the other hand, the bishops' experience with Republican anticlericalism could have been a factor that caused nine dioceses to refrain from issuing the encyclical against Nazism.

A content analysis of the bulletins suggests possible reasons for this situation.The bulletin of Orense was sparing in publishing papal documents. In addition, this bulletin does not display a pattern of swift dissemination of information, given that Divlnl Redemptoris was published a year late. But it seems problematic to accuse Orense Bishop Florentino Cervino of totalitarian sympathies when he had ordered the publication of Segura's pastoral letter protesting the state's absorption of Catholic religious associations in the bulletin of January 14, 1938, and the letter of the Vatican congregation to the rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris condemning the erroneous claims of Nazi racism.53

In Burgos, Archbishop Manuel de Castro Alonso refused to publish Mit brennender Sorge, but the inclusion of two documents in the diocese's official gazette is significant. These were the pastoral instructions of Gomá against the absorption of Catholic students into the Spanish Union of Falangist University Students (SEU), and the German episcopate's joint pastoral letter on the Nazi persecution of the Church in Germany.54 As the archbishop resided in Burgos-the capital of Franco's state-some might theorize that he may have wished to avoid government pressure and leave the encyclical unpublished (there is no documentary evidence on the subject). However, such reasoning does not follow, for he published the two other documents that were equally critical of the Spanish government or contradicted the official propaganda on the friendliness between the Reich and the Catholic Church.

José Eguino, bishop of Santander, resumed publication of his diocesan bulletin in November 1937, just a few months after the rebel capture of the capital in August 1937. His irregularly published newsletter, only a few pages long, contained a summary of Divini Redemptoris but nothing on Mit brennender Sorge. Given the anticlerical vandalism in Republican Santander during the war, it is easy to see the bishop's publication decision influenced by that rather than a distant fascism.

It is difficult to assess the influences on Hilario Yeben,the diocesan administrator of Sigüenza. Eustaquio Nieto y Martín, bishop of Sigüenza, had been killed in the early days of the war, and part of the diocese lay in Republican territory. Divini Redemptoris was published piecemeal in the bulletin from April 21 to September 30,1937; the collective letter of the Spanish episcopate was finally published on December 13. Yeben's choice, however, in publishing an October 1937 encyclical on the rosary in 1938-rather than the previous encyclical condemning Nazism-may suggest a view of the latter's concerns as remote.

The clergy on the Canary Islands and Tenerife knew nothing of the encyclical on Nazism through the ecclesiastic bulletins. Moreover, Antonio Victor Pildáin y Zapiáin, bishop of the Canary Islands, cited Divini Redemptoris but not Mit brennender Sorge in the editorial "The Pope Has Died." This editorial, which included writings of Pius XI, was signed by Pildáin and appeared in February 1939.The bishop, who avoided refering to Nazism, was more cautious than Juan Alonso Vega. The latter, a professor in the seminary, did speak about the encyclical in his funeral eulogy for Pius XI in the cathedral of Las Palmas.55 Perhaps Pildáin's caution could be attributed to his experience as a new bishop in 1936, when Franco's government accused him of Basque nationalism.56

As noted previously, eight of the forty Spanish bishops instructed their priests to explain Divini Redemptoris to the people.The press had disseminated the encyclical, but these bishops wanted to ensure its explanation in their churches. With regard to Mit brennender Sorge, none of the thirty who published it instructed the clergy to read it or explain it at Mass-the usual custom with papal documents. Every priest was to decide for himself whether or not to inform their parishioners of the papal teachings that had been silenced by the press.57 The lack of guidance was a prudent way to avoid clashes with the Falangist authorities, who could have denounced parish priests for reading a text that contradicted the official version of the German ally or for associating Nazism with the Falangists.The bishops agreed to issue the encyclical, but did not order its disclosure to the faithful so that the cordial relationship with the civil authorities could be maintained.

It is impossible to argue that publishing the encyclical but not explaining it was part of a pact between Gomá and Franco or the latter's government.The opposite had occurred in Germany. Although the bishops had been unable to release officially the encyclical, it was read in the 11,500 Catholic parishes around Germany, intensifying an anti-Catholic persecution that did not at that time exist in Spain. With the exception of some of the Basque clergy, bishops did not express the thought that Franco was persecuting the Church in Spain. Such an action was something done by the "communists."

Naturally, the intention of the Holy See and its chargé d'affaires, Antoniutti, was to disseminate the encyclical's contents among ordinary people in Nationalist Spain. It is unknown if Antoniutti pressed Gomá to communicate this intention to the prelates; such a move would be logical if the Vatican felt that Franco intended to honor the guarantees given to Antoniutti on the cultural, ideological, and religious differences between Spain and Germany.

4. New Documents on Nazism, 1938 and 1939

Spanish ecclesiastical bulletins greeted Mit brennender Sorge with the same lack of enthusiasm given to the following papal documents published in their pages between 1936 and 1939.Ad catbolici sacerdotii (on the priesthood, December 22, 1935); Vigilanti cura (addressed to the North American bishops on the film industry, June 29,1936); and Ingravescentibus malis (on the rosary, September 29, 1937). Despite the lukewarm reception to Mit brennender Sorge in Spain, the Holy See urged the Spanish bishops to disseminate at least some of the following documents that pertained to Nazi ideology or the Church's situation in Germany.

First was the letter that the Congregation of Seminaries and Universities (headed at that time by Pius XI himself) published in Rome on April 13, 1938. The letter, sent to Cardinal Alfred-HenryMarie Baudrillart, rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, appeared on the front page of L'Osservatore Romano on May 3, 1938, during Hitler's trip to Rome.58 The Vatican wanted academics and Catholic universities to support the "Instructions to Catholic Colleges and Universities to Defend the Truth against False Claims of Germanic Racism."The document detailed eight "abhorrent" propositions regarding the Nazi idolatry of race, the state, and the neo-pagan pantheism, to which "others can easily be added."59

The second document was "On the Situation of the Catholic Church in Germany," the collective pastoral letter of the German episcopate dated August 19,1938. The bishops lamented the "methodical and ruthless demolition" that wanted to eradicate the Catholic Church and even Christianity in Germany and the Austrian lands annexed to the Reich and "introduce a faith that has nothing to do with true divine faith and the Christian faith." The letter, which did not condemn Nazi racism, clearly spoke of the "German Calvary" suffered by the Catholic Church. The bishops reminded the faithful of their duty to obey the state "in all things lawful," but also warned that they should obey God rather than men.60 The pastoral letter of the bishops stressed the patriotism of German Catholics and praised the "heroic struggle" of Spain's Catholics against the "Bolshevik Antichrist." The letter does not criticize the government or the Nazis as Mit brennender Sorge had done, nor does it present an expectation of truce or agreement with the authorities. Nazism was not defined in a comprehensive way, but the reference to Spain illustrated the right of Catholics to resist attacks on their faith.

Sometime in summer or autumn 1938, the Vatican charged Gomá with the translation and dissemination of this document in Spain.The primate hesitated. He agreed that "our Catholics should know what's going on in Germany in order to be on guard and keep themselves immune to any possible unhealthy influence," but he feared the reac- tion of Franco's government.61 Part of his decision to push the publishing of the encyclical was as a form of protest against the seizure of Catholic publications in early November 1938 by the interior minister, Ramón Serrano Suñer.62 By then, the cardinal did not believe that either Franco or Serrano would admit their apprehensions about the Nazi influence in Spain.63

Two pastoral letters by German bishops also were published in a handful of bulletins. Spanish ecclesiastical bulletins rarely inserted pastoral letters from foreign bishops on events affecting the life of the Church in other countries. A summary of both appeared on February 18 and 21, 1939, in L'Osservatore Romano. Cardinal Pedro Segura of Seville published the full translations in his bulletin, and other Spanish bishops reprinted these in their own bulletins. They were the Lenten pastoral letters of Conrad Gröber, archbishop of Freiburg, and Cardinal Karl Schulte, archbishop of Cologne. Both reflected the ideas of the collective pastoral letter of Fulda from August 1938, but Schulte went even further-he cited the Spanish Church, "which these days is just emerging from a most cruel persecution,"64 to encourage Catholic resistance to a Nazism that he did not identify specifically. Like these German prelates, the bishops who echoed their teachings in Spain also had reason to think that communism was not the Church's only enemy.

Other bishops also echoed the sentiments in Blas Goñi's article "The Totalitarian States" that had been published in the newspaper El Pensamiento Navarro on February 27, 1938. Citing Pius XI and the German bishops, Goñi (one of Pamplona's cathedral canons) thought that the Catholic magisterium rejected the totalitarian rule of the state over society, an idea that contained a "grave error" and that had been spreading "without restriction" in Franco's Spain "for several months now."65 It is strange that the article managed to escape the censors at the time. It first appeared in the bulletin of Málaga in June 1938, including references to its original place and date of publication.This information disappeared from subsequent reprintings in other newsletters.

Appendix ? shows the inclusion of these documents in church bulletins in Franco-controlled territory by date of publication, starting with instructions on Germanic racism from April 1938. This information sheds light on the sensitivity of the different bishops with regard to the Church in Germany. They also are useful in assessing the possible suspicions of the bishops over the risk that Spain could slide into a situation similar to Germany's.Thirty-five of the forty dioceses in the territory ruled by Franco since the beginning of the war published some kind of material related to Nazism, especially in the final stages of the Civil War. There were five dioceses that avoided the issue: Canarias, Santander, and Mallorca, which were governed by their respective residential bishops (Pildáin, José EguinoTrecu, and José Miralles); and two headed by a diocesan administrator (Ibiza and Sigüenza).66

Neither Mit brennender Sorge nor any of these other documents were published in the diocesan bulletins of Canarias, Santander, and Sigüenza. The clergy from these dioceses did not learn anything from their bishops during the Civil War about these anti-Nazi sentiments. It seems clear that their bishops were reluctant to air material critical of or hostile to Nazism. In the case of Santander and Sigüenza, it is possible that their leaders were simply worried about the anticlericalism and religious persecution that had afflicted the two dioceses during the Civil War. Pildáin, newly arrived in the Canary Islands in spring 1937, may have wished to avoid actions that could be regarded as evidence of his supposed pro-Basque sympathies.

For episcopal bulletins in former Republican areas, hardly any documents on Nazism or the situation of the Church in Germany appear in their pages. Only five of twenty dioceses in this territory released the letter from the Congregation of Seminaries and Universities in April 1938 (see appendix C).67

Cardinal Segura led the publication of this wave of documents, warning against a dangerous trend that he saw as incompatible with the Spanish Catholic tradition.68 His view was consistent with that of Gomá and the Vatican. As Segura had been sent into exile by the Republican government in 1931, the Spanish bishops regarded him as an icon of anticlerical resistance, but did not unanimously agree with his criticisms of the war period. After publishing Mit brennender Sorge and these other documents in 1938 and 1939, the churchmen who ruled the dioceses in Franco's Spain communicated their fears to the clergy on the possible influence of Nazism into their country, thus making the Vatican's vigilant concern their own.

The press broke the news of the signing in Burgos of the SpanishGerman Cultural Agreement on January 24, 1939, exacerbating this concern in the Spanish and Roman churches.69 Pacelli did not mince words on January 26 when communicating to the nuncio, Gaetano Cicognani, that the agreement would "further concerns about the future organization of the Church in Spain."70 On January 29, Pacelli emphasized to the Spanish ambassador, José de Yanguas Messia, the pope's belief about the "evil that the Agreement would cause to religion in Spain." He lamented that the Spanish government had ignored previous complaints about the "Nazi infiltration in Spain," maintained a misguided position that such infiltration was passing and "inevitable," and erroneously believed that the assistance of the Reich was necessary during the war, but "afterwards everything would come to an end." With bitterness, Pacelli made it clear that "an agreement had been signed that was not political, but cultural, for an indefinite period of time, and with the express intention of expanding relations between the two countries."71

It was a good summary of two years of Vatican misgivings about possible Nazi influence in Spain. The archbishops of Toledo and Seville-the two Spanish cardinals resident in Spain at the time-fully endorsed these Roman warnings and tried to steer the other Spanish bishops in that direction. Segura and Gomá claimed that the other bishops did not seem to treat the threat of the German influence as seriously as Rome did. Segura emphatically and publicly objected to the treaty when he warned Catholics in the cathedral of Seville, in one of his Lenten conferences on March 24,1939, to "[b]eware of cultural exchanges! ... Let us ask the Lord to free us from all these dangers."72 The Vatican and Gomá, through pressure and diplomatic complaints, ensured that the treaty was not ratified.73

It was just then that the rebels were on the point of winning the Civil War in which German military support had been decisive. The tensions surrounding the cultural agreement, however, are eloquent regarding the absence of unity on the victorious side. They show that the Catholic hierarchy would accept neither the ideological guidance of the allied nation nor Falangist hegemony in the administration of the military victory and the construction of the "New Spain." These frictions hid a dispute regarding the model of the state and the role of the Church in the country. The problems between the Falange and the Church did not end with the Civil War, but endured during Spain's alliance with Germany during World War II.74 That is a different story, although one very much related to the story presented here.

Footnote

1See William J. Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875-1998 (Washington, DC, 2000), pp. 149-69, 217-39; and José Andrés-Gallego and Antón M. Pazos, eds. La Iglesia en la España contemporánea. Vol. I. 1800-1936 (Madrid, 1999), pp. 365-82.

2Regarding church-state tensions during the Republican period, see Julián Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War (Cambridge, UK, 2010), pp. 9-150; Frances Lannon, Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy: The Catholic Church in Spain 1875-1975 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 178-97; Gonzalo Redondo, Historia de la Iglesia en España, 1931-1939, Vol. I: La Segunda República (1931-1936) (Madrid, 1993); Vicente Cárcel Ortí, La II República y la Guerra Civil en el Archivo Secreto Vaticano, Documentos del año 1931, vols. 1.1,1.2 (Madrid, 2011).

3See Feliciano Montero, ed., El conflicto político-religioso en la Segunda República (Alcalá de Henares, 2009).

Footnote

4For an analysis of the attitude of the Spanish bishops up to 1933, see Carmen Frías García, Iglesia y Constitución: la jerarquía católica ante la II República (Madrid, 2000).

5TTiese contrasting approaches can be seen in Frances Lannon, "The Church's Crusade against the Republic," in Revolution and War in Spain, 1931-1939, ed. Paul Preston (London, 1984), pp. 35-58; and in Manuel Álvarez Tardío, Anticlericalismo y libertad de conciencia: política y religión en la Segunda República Española, 1931-1936 (Madrid, 2002).

Footnote

6On the Basque Country and Catalonia in the Republican period, see Hilari Raguer, Carrasco i Formiguera. Un cristiano nacionalista, 1890-1938 (Madrid, 2002), pp. 171-213; Santiago de Pablo, Ludger Mees, and José Antonio Rodríguez Ranz, El péndulo patriótico. Historia del Partido Nacionalista Vasco, 1895-2005 (Barcelona, 2005), pp. 120-68.

7See Antonio M. Moral Roncal, La cuestión religiosa en la Segunda República española. Iglesia y carlismo (Madrid, 2009); and Julio Gil Pecharromán, Renovación Española. Una alternativa monárquica a la Segunda República (Madrid, 1985).

8For information about the Falange during the Republic, see Stanley G. Payne, Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford, 1961),pp. 38-131. For more about the Falange during the Civil War, see Sheelagh M. Ellwood, Spanish Fascism in the Franco Era: Falange Española de las JONS (Basingstoke, UK, 1987), pp. 39-65.The most complete study on Falange is José L. Rodríguez Jiménez, Historia de Falange Española de las JONS (Madrid, 2000).

Footnote

9 Casanova, Spanish Republic and Civil War, pp. 125-49.

10 See, for example, Constantino Bayle, ¿Qué pasa en España? A los católicos del mundo (Burgos, 1937).

11 See, for example, Manuel Aznar Soler and Luis M. Schneider, II Congreso Internacional de Escritores Antifascistas (1937), Vol. III: Ponencias, documentos y testimonios (Barcelona, 1979).

Footnote

12 Regarding the Civil War in the Basque Country, see Javier Sánchez Erauskin, Por Dios hacia el Imperio. Nacionalcatolicismo en las Vascongadas en el primer franquismo, 1936-1945 (Donostia, 1994); and Juan de Iturralde, Ixi Guerra de Franco. Los vascos y la Iglesia, 2 vols. (San Sebastián, 1978).

13 On the attitude of the Church during the Civil War, see Alfonso Álvarez Bolado, Para ganar la guerra, para ganar la paz. Iglesia y guerra civil: 1936-1939 (Madrid, 1995); Julián Casanova, la Iglesia de Franco (Barcelona, 2005); Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense: The Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War (London, 2007); and Gonzalo Redondo, Historia de la Iglesia en España, 1931-1939, Vol. Π: La guerra civil, 1936-1939 (Madrid, 1993).

Footnote

14Regarding the Falangist rebel side, see the intelligent analysis of Zira Box, España, año cero. La construcción simbólica del franquismo (Madrid, 2010).

15Regarding the Catholic rebel faction, the following works are essential: José Andrés-Gallego, ¿Fascismo o Estado Católico? Ideología, religión y censura en la España de Franco, 1937-1941 (Madrid, 1997); María L. Rodríguez Aisa, El Cardenal Goma y la guerra de España: aspectos de la gestión pública del Primado, 1936-1939 (Madrid, 1981); and Antonio Marquina Barrio, La diplomacia vaticana y la España de Franco, 1936-1945 (Madrid, 1983).

""Graciela Ben-Dror alludes to this question but does not deal with it in depth; see Ben-Dror, La Iglesia católica ante el Holocausto. España y América Latina, 1933-1945 (Madrid, 2003), pp. 45-50.

17Thirteen out of sixty Spanish bishops, nearly 7000 priests, and 200 nuns were killed in Republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Similarly several thousand religious buildings were destroyed or damaged by the anticlerical fury. On the roots of Spanish anticlericalism, see Manuel Delgado, La ira sagrada. Anticlericalismo, iconoclastia y antirritualismo en la España contemporánea (Barcelona, 2012). On the reasons and the anticlerical events, see Antonio Montero, Historia de la persecución religiosa en España 1936-1939 (Madrid, 1961) and José L. Ledesma,"Delenda est Ecclesia Sulla violenza anticléricale e la Guerra civile del 1936," in Clero e guerre spagnole in età contemporánea (1808-1939), ed. Alfonso Botti (Soveria Mannelli, 2011), pp. 309-32.

Footnote

this point, compare Xosé M. Seixas Núñez, JFuera el invasor! Nacionalismos y movilización bélica durante la guerra civil española (1936-1939) (Madrid, 2006), pp. 124-45, 245-61; and José Álvarez Junco, "El nacionalismo español como mito movilizador. Cuatro guerras," in Cultura y movilización en la España contemporánea, ed. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid, 1997), pp. 59-67.

Footnote

19Gomá said this in his first pastoral on war, "The Case of Spain," dated November 23,1936 (see Boletín Eclesiástico del Arzobispado de Toledo, January 15,1937, p. 11).

20See the pastoral "The Two Cities" by Pía y Deniel in Boletín Oficial del Obispado de Salamanca, September 30,1936, p. 305.

21 Divini Redemptoris was published in thirty-seven dioceses, which follow in the order of publication of the encyclical: Vitoria, Mallorca, Pamplona, Segovia, León, Sigüenza, Cádiz-Ceuta, Toledo, Coria, Ciudad Rodrigo, Saragossa, Astorga, Seville, Córdoba, Canarias, Tarazona y Tudela, Plasencia, Ávila, Osma, Santiago, Burgos, Huesca, Teruel, Granada, Calahorra-La Calzada, Oviedo, Tuy, Salamanca, Badajoz, Málaga, Mondoñedo, Zamora, Tenerife, Palencia, Lugo, Orense, and Santander. It was not published in the bulletins of Ibiza, Jaca, and Valladolid. It did not appear in the following twenty dioceses, in Republican areas in 1937: Almería, Barbastro, Barcelona, Cartagena, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Gerona, Guadix, Jaén, Lérida, Madrid-Alcalá, Menorca, Orihuela, Segorbe, Solsona, Tarragona, Tortosa, Urgel, Valencia, and Vich.

Footnote

22The bishops' instructions can be seen in Boletín Salamanca, July 17, 1937, pp. 170-71; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico de la Diócesis de Segovia, April 30, 1937, p. 149; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Ciudad Rodrigo, June 10, 1937, p. 136; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Lugo, November 15, 1937, pp. 203-04; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Orense, March 15, 1938, p. 106; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Santander, March 19, 1938, pp. 60-61; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Málaga, June 1937, p. 151; Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Oviedo, August 10,1937, p. 202.

Footnote

23Javier Domínguez Arribas, El enemigo judeo-masónico en la propaganda franquista, 1936-1945 (Madrid, 2009), pp. 189-90.

24For these references, see Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico del Obispado de Pamplona, April 1,1938, pp. 127,129, 130, 137, 139, 140. Quotes from the encyclical: "oberflächliche Geister" (no. 15); "Mit verhüllten und sichtbaren Zwangsmaßnahmen, Einschüchterungen" (no. 24); "Weiche von mir, Satan, denn es steht geschrieben: den Herrn deinen Gott sollst du anbeten und Ihm allein dienen. [Mt 4,10\Lk 4,8]." (no. 24); "[A] 11 denen, die wegen Ausübung ihrer Hirtenpflicht Leid und Verfolgung tragen mußten und müssen, folgt-für manche bis in die Kerkerzelle und das Konzentrationslager hinein-der Dank und die Anerkennung des Vaters der Christenheit" (no. 44); "wollten Wir durch unzeitgemäßes Schweigen mitschuldig werden an der mangelnden Aufklärung"(no. 50);"die Feinde der Kirche,... der Christusfeinde,... im Kampf gegen die Verneiner und Vernichter des christlichen Abendlandes" (no. 51).

Footnote

"Most of the press did not cover the encyclical. Gomá informed the Vatican that only Salamanca Radio had broadcast a report criticizing it on March 23, which was transcribed and printed on the following day in the Salamancan newspaper El Adelanto. See Rodríguez, El Cardenal Gomá, p. 433; see also Archivo Gomá, Documentos de la Guerra Civil. 4, Abril-Mayo 1937, ed.José Andrés-Gallego and Antón M. Pazos (Madrid, 2002-09), pp. 278-84 (hereafter cited as AG with volume and page numbers). See also AG 5, Dispatch from Gomá's office to Eugenio Pacelli, April 30,1937, pp. 309-10.

2óGomá also was the primate of Spain; the ceremonial head of the Spanish Church; and, more important, president of the Committee of Metropolitans composed of the country's nine ecclesiastical provinces. Two recent publications about him focusing on the period just before the Spanish Civil War are Miguel A. Dionisio Vivas, Isidro Gomá ante la dictadura y la República: pensamiento político-religioso y acción pastoral (Toledo, 2011); and Roberto Ceamanos Llorens, Isidro Gomá i Tomás. De la Monarquía a la República (1927-1936). Sociedad, política y religión (Saragossa, 2012).

27AG 4:297. See also AG 5:17,33-34,71.

28AG 5:210,267:"Tempora etenim difficillissima sunt et valde periculosa."

29AG 5: Dispatch to Pacelli,April 24,1937, p. 234:"podría servir de pretexto para censurar a uno de los componentes de la unión, Falange Española, de tendencia más o menos hitleriana."

Footnote

30AG 5: Dispatch to Pacelli,April 24,1937, and May 12,1937, pp. 235, ^i"declaraciones reiteradas de catolicismo ... el racismo pagano de forma hitleriana." See also Rodríguez, El Cardenal Gomá, p. 444.

31AG 5: Pacelli to Isidro Gomá, May 13,1937, p. 411.

32Boletín Oficial del Obispado de Vitoria, November 1, 1936, pp. 494-97; and November 15,1936, pp. 507-08, here p. 507.

Footnote

33AG 4: Pérez Platero to Gomá, April 13, 1937, p. 193: "quien está perfectamente enterado de las cosas de Alemania por haber pasado allí grandes temporadas."

34AG 4: Herranz to Pérez Platero, March 12, 1937, pp. 193-94: "Pues bien, es necesario vigilar para que no se metan protestantes y nacional-socialista[s], liberales en su inmensa mayoría los primeros; estatistas, racionalistas, materialistas, neopaganos, ateos y enemigos, pocas veces abiertos, casi siempre solapados, los segundos, del cristianismo en general y particularmente del catolicismo."

35AG 5: Pía y Deniel to Gomá, May 3,1937, pp. 336-37:"a los alemanes oficiales que hay hoy en España."

36AG 5: Gomá to Pia y Deniel, May 6, 1937, p. 369: "pronto será muy aplicable esta doctrina [de la encíclica], en la forma como van poniéndose las cosas."

Footnote

37AG 6: Dispatches to Pacellijune 25-26,1937, pp. 218-26,233-35; see Rodríguez, El Cardenal Gomá, pp. 457-58. See also AG 6: Letter to Cardinal Eustaquio Ilundain, June 30,1937, pp. 265-66.

38"Collective Letter of the Spanish Bishops," Boletín Vitoria, August 15,1937, dating pp. 314, 321: "Confiamos en la prudencia de los hombres de gobierno, que no querrán aceptar moldes extranjeros para la configuración del Estado español futuro, sino que tendrán en cuenta las exigencias de la vida íntima nacional y la trayectoria marcada por los siglos pasados.... Seríamos los primeros en lamentar que la autocracia irresponsable de un parlamento fuese sustituida por la más terrible de una dictadura desarraigada de la nación. Abrigamos la esperanza legítima de que no será así."

Footnote

39 About this issue, see Sánchez Erauskin, Por Dios, pp. 91-107, 135-59; Alberto de Onaindía, Hombre de paz en la Guerra. Capítulos de mi vida I (Buenos Aires, 1973), pp. 97-123; Santiago Martínez, "Möns. Antoniutti y el clero nacionalista vasco (juliooctubre 1937)," Sancho el Sabio, 27 (2007), 39-79.

40 On the activities and thought of Antoniutti and Pacelli in relation to the Nazi influence in Spain, see Santiago Martínez Sánchez, "El episcopado español ante la encíclica Mit brennender Sorge, 1937-1938," Nuevos horizontes del pasado. Culturas poíticas, identidades y formas de representación, ed. Ángeles Barrio Alonso, Jorge de Hoyos Puente, and Rebeca Saavedra Arias (Santander, 2011), http://www.ahistcon.org/docs/ Santander/contenido/indice-mesaó. html.

Footnote

41 Martinez, "Möns. Antoniutti," p. 45.

42 Archivio Segreto Vaticano [hereafter referred to as ASV], Nunziatura Madrid [hereafter referred to as NM], box 968, fasc. 6, fol. 558,Antoniutti to Pacelli, October 11,1937.

43 Martinez, "El episcopado español," p. 7.

44 Martínez, "El episcopado español," p. 7: "La nostra tradizione e la nostra civiltà sono essenzialmente opposte a quelle germaniche, per i quali non abbiamo simpatie. II nazismo ha un programma pagano: noi abbiamo un programma cattolico. La Spagna dovrà essere cattolica secondo le sue tradizioni e gli insegnamenti della Chiesa. Credetemi che lo dico con la più profonda convinzione."

Footnote

45 Martínez,"El episcopado español," p. 8.

46 AG 9: Letter to bishops, February 4,1938, p. 245: "con ello, además, puede hacerse gran bien a las almas, sobre todo a los dirigentes de la pública opinión, en los actuales momentos."

47 AG 9: Gomá to Segura, February 20,1938, p. 347: "no transciende al pueblo."

48 AG 9: Segura to Gomá, February 15,1938, pp. 311-12:"por no crear dificultades."

49 AG 9: Gutiérrez to Gomá, February 17,1938, p. 323: "al menos por aquí, causaría extrañeza."

Footnote

50 These were the Dioceses of Almería, Barcelona, Cartagena, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Gerona, Guadix, Jaén, Madrid-Alcalá, Menorca, Orihuela, Segorbe, Solsona, Tarragona, Urgel, Valencia (where there was a special issue on February 18, 1939), and Vich.The Diocese of Lérida restarted its bulletin on May 31, 1938; the Diocese of Barbastro did likewise in September 1938. The Diocese ofTortosa published two special issues on April 30,1938, and December 1,1938. None of these three latter diocesan newsletters published the encyclical.

51 Alvarez Bolado states that it was published in twenty-five dioceses (the actual number was 30) and that "it was not published in Burgos, the seat of the Nationalist government, or Valladolid, the 'blue city'"; see Álvarez Bolado, Para ganar la Guerra, p. 264. Giuliana Di Febo and Renato Moro share his analysis in "¿Estado católico o estado totalitario? Iglesia, España e Italia (1937-1938)," in Historia, política y cultura. Homenaje a Javier Tusell, coord. Juan Avilés Farré (Madrid, 2009), p. 50. The fact that Burgos was the capital of Nationalist Spain might have brought some pressure to bear on its bishop, although evidence confirming this theory is lacking. However, Valladolid's place as the "Blue City" had little influence on its bishop's decision not to publish Divini Redemptoris or Mit brennender Sorge.

52 For Divini Redemptoris, the bulletins were those of Orense and Santander in March 1938. Mit brennender Sorge appeared in the Osma bulletin in December 1938. In other words, the clergy of Nationalist Spain knew, via diocesan bulletins, the papal teaching on communism within eleven months and within twelve the teaching on Nazism.

Footnote

53 Boletín Orense, March 3,1938, pp. 53-59; and November 14,1938, pp. 296-97.

54 Boletín Eclesiástico del Arzobispado de Burgos, June 6, 1938, pp. 103-11; and December 24,1938, pp. 244-58.

Footnote

55 Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico de la Diócesis de Canarias, February 1939, pp. 58-61, 64-78. The biographical sketches on Pildáin do not shed any light on this issue; see Agustín Chil Estévez, Pildáin. Un obispo para una época (Las Palmas, 1987); and Gabriel de Armas, Pildáin. Obispo de Canarias: biografía inacabada (Las Palmas, 1976).

56 See Onaindía, Hombre de paz, pp. 64-67, 73-74; and Redondo, Historia de la Iglesia, 2:293-95.

57 Further studies are needed on this issue, but a case can be made that censorship and official propaganda (on the government side) and silence (on the clerical side) caused the general ignorance of Spaniards about the papal rejection of Nazism.

Footnote

58 George Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI (New York, 1997), pp. 113-15.

59 Boletín Calahorra, November 23,1938, pp. 259-60: "Instrucciones a las universidades y facultades católicas para defender la verdad contra las afirmaciones erróneas del racismo germánico";"[ocho proposiciones] detestables ... [a las que] fácilmente podrán añadirse otras."

60 Documentation Catholique, 39, n° 880, September 20, 1938, pp. 1103-13. The quotes are from Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico de las diócesis de Tarazona y Tudela, January 15, 1939, pp. 20, 26: "'Sobre la situación de la Iglesia Católica en Alemania'; el trabajo de demolición metódica y sin escrúpulos; introducir una fe que nada tiene que ver con la verdadera fe divina y con la fe cristiana; calvario alemán; en toda cosa lícita."

Footnote

6l AG 12: Modrego to Gomá, November 3,1938, p. 185: "nuestros católicos sepan lo que se cuece en Alemania para estar en guardia o inmunizarse contra toda posible malsana influencia."

62 AG 12: Gomá to Modrego, October 29,1938, p. 150; and November 8,1938, p. 206.

63 AG 11: Letters from Gomá to Serrano and Franco July 4,1938, pp. 38-39; and July 5,1938, pp. 115-17.

64 Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico de la Archidiócesis de Sevilla, March 15,1939, p. 153: "que precisamente estos días está saliendo de una crudelísima persecución."

65 Boletín Tarazona, December 23,1938, pp. 507-08:"idea que encerraba un 'grave error' y que se divulgaba 'en absoluto y sin restricción alguna' en la España nacional 'desde hace algunos meses.'"

Footnote

Teruel is not included because its bulletin was not published in 1938 or 1939.

67There is no reference in the bulletins for Barbastro, Barcelona, Cartagena, Ciudad Real, Madrid-Alcalá, Menorca, Orihuela, Solsona, Tarragona,Tortosa, and Urgell. Starting in May 1939, the Dioceses of Almería, Jaén, and Guadix received the bulletin of the Archdiocese of Granada, in which nothing appeared after that date. The author has no data for Segorbe. In short, the dioceses that suffered the violence of Republican anticlericalism did not relate ecclesiastical concerns to Nazism.

Footnote

68See Santiago Martínez Sánchez, Los papeles perdidos del cardenal Segura, 1880-1957 (Pamplona, 2004), pp. 452-61. Francisco Gil Delgado wrongly indicates that only Segura and Bishop Fidel García of Calahorra published it; see Gil Delgado, Pedro Segura. Un cardenal de fronteras (Madrid, 2001), pp. 323-24.

69Following the news of the cultural agreement, half of the ecclesiastical bulletins (twenty-one out of forty) reproduced some of the four documents on Nazism previously cited.

70ASyAffari Ecclesiastici Straordinari [hereafter referred to as AES], Spagna, fasc. 339, fol. 19: "nuove preoccupazioni circa la futura organizzazione della Chiesa in Spagna."

71ASV, AES, Spagna, fasc. 339, fol. 23. See Marquina, La diplomacia vaticana, pp. 146-48: "ma che non fino a meno di venire de tale Accordo alla condizione religiosa della Spagna"; "infiltrazione nazista in Spagna"; "una conseguenza inevitabile";"dopo, tutto sarebbe finito";"ora invece si conclude un Accordo non politico, ma culturale, e a tempo indefinito, anzi colla espressa intenzione di estendere eventualmente ancor più tali rapporti tra i due Paesi."

Footnote

72Martínez, Los papeles perdidos, p. 466: "¿Mucho cuidado con los intercambios culturales! ... Pidamos al Señor que nos libre de todos estos peligros." Segura and Gomá were the only resident cardinals in Spain at the time. After the Civil War, Franco did not allow Cardinal Francisco Vidal y Barraquer, archbishop of Tarragona, to return to Spain from Italy He was declared persona non grata because of his attempt to reconcile the Republic and Catholicism (as ordered by the Vatican), his opposition to the July 1937 Collective Letter of the Spanish Bishops, and his position as a Catalan nationalist. His ideas were far from the rigid traditionalism of Segura and Gomá. His diplomatic attitude toward the Republican authorities, his conception of a Spain with less central authority and his desire to keep the Church independent from Francoism during the Spanish Civil War caused many problems between himself and the military. See Ramon Muntanyola, Vidal i Barraquer. El cardenal de la paz (Barcelona, 1974); and Josep Maria Tarragona, Vidal i Barraquer. De la República al Franquisme (Barcelona, 1998).

73See Marquina, La diplomacia vaticana, pp. 142-53 and 439-48, where he discusses how the agreement ended the Vatican's willingness to accept the validity of the Concordat of 1851 claimed by Franco's diplomatic representatives.

74Among other works on the issue, see Mercedes Montero, Historia de la Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas. La construcción del Estado Confesional, 1936-1945 (Pamplona, 1993), pp. 187-215; Francisco Verdera, Conflictos entre la Iglesia y el Estado en España. La revista "Ecclesia" entre 1941 y 1945 (Pamplona, 1995); Andrés-Gallego, ¿Fascismo o Estado Católico?, pp. 193-219. On the problem of Bishop Garcia with Francoism resulting from the publication of his March 1942 pastoral letter against Nazism, see Antonio Arizmendi and Patricio de Blas Zabaleta, Conspiración contra el obispo de Calahorra. Denuncia y crónica de una canallada (Madrid, 2008), pp. 194-200. On the tensions between bishops and the government resulting from the control and orientation of the education in the period of time directly after the war, see Gregorio Cámara Villar, Nacional-Catolicismo y Escuela. La Socialización Política del Franquismo, 1936-1951 (Jaén, 1984), pp. 118-37.

Appendix

APPENDIX