Spanish Civil War

[Stalin Ate My Homework]

What exactly was the position of the Catholic Church before the outbreak of the civil war and what caused people's anger towards it?

Was it an ideological wish to destroy religion or was it a response to it's unfair stranglehold on society like the Orthodoxy in Tsarist Russia?

[syndicat]

the Castilian catholic church in the early 1900s was still basically the church of the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century. it had a stranglehold on the education system in Spain. this was a reason that Francisco Ferrer, head of a rationalist school in Barcelona, was executed after the tragic week general strike in 1909. he was perceived as a threat by the church.

the church did nothing for the poor. the clergy and especially the hierarchy were entirely oriented to the more affluent upper and middle classes in Spain.

the castilian church was initially vehemently anti-union. once the anarchist and socialist unions had built up a following, after World War 1 the church hierarchy worked with employers to finance the Free Union...run by Carlist skilled workers. The leaders of this union had a kind of proletarian clerical fascist ideology, and their union was openly aided by the police.

the Free Union employed gun thugs, and during the years after World War 1, these made up a kind of death squad, with police support, that hunted down and assassinated dozens of officlals and activists of the CNT union, including its regional secretary. these death squads were partly funded by the church.

for these sorts of reasons the church came to be utterly despised by the working class (except in the Basque country where the priests and bishops took a different approach towards the working class and helped to form a more Christian democratic union).

thus virtually the entire left in Spain by the '30s was hghly anti-clerical...from middle class Republicans to socialists and anarchists.

in 1931 when a coalition of liberals and socialists came to power, they took away from the church control over education and created a public education system.

[Revolutionair]

Thanks for your post Syndicat. :)

Could you source the claims you've made?

[syndicat]

read any competent history of that period.

[Smyg]

Anthony Beevor's The Spanish Civil War has quie some info about it, if I remember correctly.