Franco-era beatifications did nothing to heal old wounds

Many Spaniards were greatly disappointed when the fresh winds seen blowing through the Vatican since the election of Pope Francis this spring were nowhere in evidence in his brief video message broadcast in Tarragona on Sunday 13 October to inaugurate the beatification of 522 martyrs from the early days of the Civil War.

The Pope did not refer to the many hundreds of thousands of non-Religious who died in the bitter Civil War, or to the wave of torture and executions that held Spain in the grip of terror while the Second World War raged elsewhere. The disappointment was felt all the more keenly since Francis had apparently been involved in situations in Argentina during its military dictatorship that mirrored the dilemmas of the Spanish Church under the Franco regime.

While the Church was at pains to stress that the act was wholly religious, the bitter legacy of Franco's three-year campaign to overthrow the elected Government of the Spanish Republic, coupled with his 36-year dictatorship, during most of which the Church acted hand in glove with him, ensures that such distinctions are easily lost, especially on the political and media classes beyond the governing Partido Popular (PP) party. The fact that from the time of the Second Vatican Council onwards, the Church slowly, and then increasingly clearly, began to distance itself from Franco to the point where it was the effective sponsor and protector of many political and trade union movements in the decade leading to the death of the dictator in 1975 barely gets a mention nowadays.

Since the brief flowering of the spirit of Pope John XXIII on the Spanish hierarchy in the years between Vatican II and the re-establishment of democracy in 1977, the Church's senior leadership has increasingly been seen as under the sway of groups such as Opus Dei and identified with the economic policies of the neo-Cons as personified by the ruling conservative PP, which is currently presiding over 6 million unemployed.

The decision to hold the beatification ceremony in Tarragona inevitably diminished both the media and the public interest in the event, but protests took place both before and in parallel with the ceremony. In the days before it, the Archbishop of Tarragona, Jaume Pujol Balcells, received protestors who told him they considered the act to be 'wholly political'. The degree of mistrust between secular Spain and the Catholic hierarchy is such that although he responded by insisting that the cruel regime of Franco and church support for it was a separate issue to the earlier murder of almost 7,000 Religious, his comment went virtually unreported.

The most striking feature of the stand-off was the way in which Church spokesmen, when challenged to express remorse for supporting Franco, replied generically, asserting they sought forgiveness for all unspecified mistakes, thereby, to the fury of their interlocutors, apparently avoiding confronting the issue.
Subsequently both the archbishop, as well as the Abbot of Montserrat, Josep Maria Soler, indicated that they would be well disposed to a more public expression of remorse, although the Spanish Episcopal conference in Madrid barely acknowledges the existence of this problem.

Only by building rapidly and concretely on these recent half-promises, but without the mealy-mouthed language used to date, can the Church in Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain hope to begin to recover from the disastrous legacy of its decades-long support for General Franco.

James Scott is a lay Catholic and a former teacher resident in the Archdiocese of Tarragona