The watchdog that didn't bark. The spanish bishops and the francoist repression during the spanish Civil War

Abstract

This study examines the stand taken by Spanish bishops towards Francoist repression during the Spanish Civil War. The aim is to establish the extent of the bishops’ collaboration with Francoist repression and the reasons behind their words or silences. Its main sources are ecclesiastical bulletins, and secondarily some collected letters from the Spanish bishops. Thirty of these bulletins were issued in the summer of 1936 and forty-nine in March 1939, just before the end of the war. Twenty three bishops took a stance over the war period on three aspects of their priests’ activities arising from the repression practiced by the insurgents: the provision of good religious conduct certificates to leftists by parish priests, the clergy’s obligation to report on their parishioners to the authorities and their participation in capital cases. The study emphasizes the Spanish bishops’ division into two groups and offers some hypotheses about the silence of half of them. It also shows the connection between the Spanish bishops’ ideological identity with the rebels and a long-lasting anticlericalism that was intensified several months before the war started. Likewise, it exposes for areas a wide variety of differences both for the episcopal statements and the behavior of the clergy.