Red Terror ()Unearthing Franco's Legacy, Julian Casanova, pp. 105-106, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010 is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups involved.Beevor, Antony (2006), The Battle For Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, p. 81 Weidenfeld & Nicolson The May 1931 arson attacks against Church property throughout Spain and the determination of the Republican Government to never compromise upon and strictly enforce its ban against classical Catholic education were the beginning of a politicidal campaign of religious persecution against the Catholic Church in Spain. No Republican-controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country.Mary Vincent, The Splintering of Spain, pp. 70-71 The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people, including 6,832 Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the wake of the rightist military coup in July 1936, the Spanish nobility, small business owners, industrialists, conservative politicians, and known or suspected supporters of the right-leaning parties or the anti-Stalinist Left, and the desecration and arson attacks against monasteries, convents, Catholic schools, and churches.
A process of political polarisation had already characterized the Second Spanish Republic; party divisions became increasingly embittered, and whether an individual continued practising Catholicism was seen as a sign of partisan loyalty. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Conservative and far-right parties, which had set themselves against the far-left.Hilari Raguer, Gunpowder and Incense, p. 115
While the violence long preceded the failed coup of July 1936, the immediate aftermath let loose a violent onslaught on everyone that the revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies; "where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards, merely to be identified as a priest, a religious, or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial."Raguer, p. 126 Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Penguin Books. 2006. London. p. 87 to 110,965 people killed.
Historian Julio de la Cueva wrote that "despite the fact that the Church... suffer[ed] appalling persecution," the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists." Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, alleging that it was the failed rightist coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish: "its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution."Unearthing Franco's Legacy, University of Notre Dame Press, p. 7 Other historians allege that they have found evidence of systematic religious persecution and revolutionary terror long preceding the military uprising and have pointed to a "radical and antidemocratic" opposition to religious toleration among supporters of the Second Spanish Republic and even within its constitution.Redzioch, Wlodzimierz (interviewing historian Vicente Carcel Orti) The Martyrs of Spain's Civil War, Catholic Culture These attitudes and policies attracted harsh criticism at the time, even from fellow Republicans Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, and ultimately from Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.
According to historian Julius Ruiz, the Red Terror also included politicidal infighting within the Republican faction, particularly after the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain declared POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (an anti-Stalinist Left and Trotskyist political party), to be an illegal organization, alongside all other real and suspected Trotskyists and anarchists. The Stalinists, aided by the Comintern, the NKVD, and the GRU, accordingly unleashed a revolutionary terror almost identical to the simultaneous Purge of 1937 in the Soviet Union against the International Brigades and all other Republican factions, including en masse arrests, interrogation under torture, and mass executions. The Stalinist Red Terror against fellow Republicans and the decision to immediately transform Spain into a prototype for "the people's democracies" of the Cold War-era Soviet Bloc instead of first defeating Francisco Franco were nothing short of catastrophic for the Republican faction.Julius Ruiz, The “Red Terror” and the Spanish Civil War: Revolutionary Violence in Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2014) onlineGeorge Esenwein, "Review" The Journal of Modern History 88#2 (June 2016), pp. 469-471 online
George Orwell, an English socialist who fought during the Spanish Civil War as part of the POUM, would describe the Soviet-decreed Purge of the Republican faction in his memoirs Homage to Catalonia, as well as writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm to make the case that both fascism and Stalinism are two sides of the same coin. Other formerly pro-Soviet Westerners who witnessed the Purges, including John Dos Passos and Arthur Koestler, were left similarly disillusioned.
In recent years, the Holy See has beatified hundreds of the victims of the Red Terror (498 in one 2007 ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in the Catholic Church's history).
Background According to historian Ronald Radosh, "The Spanish Civil War was the culmination of long-standing tensions and social strife that no government had been able to address satisfactorily. The divide between rich and poor in Spain was immense, and the powerful Catholic hierarchy did little to ameliorate conditions. The result was that destitute peasants and dissatisfied workers supported either radical anarchism or socialism, buttressed by a bitter anticlericalism, while liberalism in Spain tended to be more extreme than in most of Europe. Yet the wealthy landowners and certain areas of the country, especially the North, maintained a staunchly conservative outlook that precluded any serious reconsideration of the nation's social ills. Many Spaniards in fact had monarchist leanings and believed that their country's salvation lay in native Spanish traditions and a strong centralized government. Meanwhile, nationalist movements in the Basque provinces and Catalonia encouraged these people to think of themselves as distinct from the Castilians who ruled in Madrid, and as deserving of more autonomy or even outright independence from the central government... As a result, political instability prevailed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period was characterized by numerous military coups, a short-lived Republic, and monarchies with varying amounts of political power." Ronald Radosh (2001), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press. Pages xxvii-xxviii.
To add to past instability, the revolution of 14 April 1931 that overthrew King Alfonso XIII and established both the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Constitution of 1931 also brought to power a left-wing anticlerical coalition government.Anticlericalism Britannica Online Encyclopedia
The relationship between the new, secular Republic and the Catholic Church was fraught from the start. Between 10 and 13 May 1931, in retaliation for left-wing demonstrators allegedly hearing a recording of the former Royalist national anthem being played through the windows of a nearby flat, more than 100 religious buildings were burned down in a wave of church arson that began in Madrid and then spread to cities and towns throughout the Second Spanish Republic.De la Cueva Merino, Julio (1998). «El anticlericalismo en la Segunda República y la Guerra Civil». Emilio La Parra López y Manuel Suárez Cortina, ed. El anticlericalismo español contemporáneo. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. . While some cabinet ministers in the Provisional Government of the Second Spanish Republic wanted to intervene and restore order, others opposed the idea. According to the canonical narrative, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña overruled those who wished to intervene by stating, "All the convents of Spain are not worth the life of a single Republican". Among the many works of cultural heritage that were lost during the 1931 arson attacks was the copy of Marko Marulić's De institutione bene vivendi per exempla sanctorum ("Instruction on How to Lead a Virtuous Life Based on the Examples of Saints") that once belonged to St Francis Xavier. Ante Kadič, St Francis Xavier and Marko Marulić, "The Slavic and Eastern European Journal", Spring 1961, pp. 12-18.
In response to this and other similar attacks by the Government, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, the primate of Spain, urged Catholics to vote in future elections against the government parties, whom the Cardinal alleged wanted to completely destroy religion.A. Beevor, Battle for Spain p.23 Those who sought to lead the 'ordinary faithful' had insisted that Catholics had only one political choice, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA): "Voting for the CEDA was presented as a simple duty; good Catholics would go to Mass on Sunday and support the political right".Mary Vincent, Catholicism in the Spanish Second Republic, p. 1
The constitution respected civil liberties and representation, but placed some restrictions on the church's use of its own property and stripped the Catholic religious orders of their previous role in the public education system.Payne, Stanley G. A History of Spain and Portugal, Vol. 2, Ch. 25, p. 632 (Print Edition: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) (LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE Accessed May 30, 2007)Smith, Angel, Historical Dictionary of Spain, p. 195, Rowman & Littlefield 2008 Even advocates of the separation of church and state had serious problems with the Constitution; one such advocate, José Ortega y Gasset, stated, "the article in which the Constitution legislates the actions of the Church seems highly improper to me".Paz, Jose Antonio Souto Perspectives on religious freedom in Spain Brigham Young University Law Review June 1, 2001
In 1933, Pope Pius XI also condemned the Spanish Republican Government's refusal to grant religious toleration to Catholics in the encyclical Dilectissima Nobis.Dilectissima Nobis, 2
Since the left considered reform of the anti-clerical passages of the constitution absolutely unacceptable, historian Stanley G. Payne believes, "the Republic as a democratic constitutional regime was doomed from the outset", and it has been posited that such a "hostile" approach to the issues of church and state was a substantial cause of the breakdown of democracy and in the onset of the civil war.Stepan, Alfred, Arguing Comparative Politics, p. 221, Oxford University Press One legal commentator has stated plainly "the gravest mistake of the Constitution of 1931—Spain's last democratic Constitution prior to 1978—was its hostile attitude towards the Catholic Church".Martinez-Torron, Javier Freedom of religion in the case law of the Spanish Constitutional court Brigham Young University Law Review 2001