The Church

The Galician Church played a fundamental role in legitimizing the coup and brought its own nuances to the discourse of the “Crusade”. The loudest voice was that of Tomás Muñiz de Pablos, the archbishop of Santiago, who even convinced Pope Pius XI to grant an unusual extension to the 1937 Holy Year. The Church justified its support for the rebels by demonizing the five-year Republican period, even though Galicia not seen any significant episodes of anticlerical violence.

The context of war drove a belligerent orthodoxy directed against any real or perceived threat such as masonry and the evangelical communities in some coastal villages, but also against anyone within the Church who had shown themselves more open to reaching an understanding with the Republican regime, even those which had openly expressed sympathies for Galicianism or had been heavily involved in cultural initiatives such as the Seminar of Galician Studies or the magazine Logos. The extreme example of this intolerance was the murder of priests who held left-wing ideas, like Matías Usero Torrente, a leader of the Socialist Party and the Republican Left in Ferrol, or Lugo Andrés Ares Díaz, parish priest of Lugo who was shot. Among those who had left the priesthood, there was Fernando Arias Rodríguez, who had been a chamberlain to the bishop of Lugo and president of the PSOE in Rábade (Lugo) in 1931.

The Church sealed its identification with the Francoists through countless ritual events of varying scales held in every village. These ranged from Te-Deum masses to give thanks for military victories and funerals for those who “died for God and for Spain” to placing the names of the dead on the facades of parish churches and blessing the banners of military units. The power of parish priests to issue certificates of good conduct which could literally mean the difference between life and death for their parishioners and the solemn ceremonies returning crucifixes to classrooms testified to the recovery of the institutional power of social control that the Church had lost during the Republic.

The war forged a traditionalist discourse in a national-Catholic key and laid the bases for the subsequent decades of collaboration with the Francoist regime. Conflicts with Falangists over youth and women’s organizations pointed to postwar tensions surrounding the consolidation of spheres of power and opposition to the fully Fascist tendencies of a regime that was still defining itself.

GUPC/MCV