The Spanish Civil War was one of the most passionate ideological conflicts of the modern era. At its heart lay what many contemporaries understood to be the final and most decisive struggle between traditional Catholicism and liberal secularism. Religion became the central dividing line of the conflict, shaping loyalties, hatreds, and interpretations of the war itself.
The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy is the first full-length, comprehensive study devoted entirely to the religious dimension of the Spanish conflict. Drawing on memoirs, eyewitness accounts, the religious press of the period, and an extensive body of secondary scholarship, José M. Sánchez offers a measured and objective examination of the events, attitudes, and consequences of the war. In doing so, he challenges and corrects many of the myths that have grown up around the subject.
Particularly striking is Sánchez’s account of the wave of anticlerical violence that swept Republican-controlled areas, in which nearly 7,000 clerics were killed, thousands of churches were burned or destroyed, countless lay Catholics were assassinated, and the cultural fabric of Spanish Catholicism was subjected to an unprecedented campaign of destruction. He also examines the clergy’s pastoral and ideological support for Franco’s Nationalist cause as a response to this violence, situating that support within its historical and moral context.
The study devotes special attention to the Basques, an intensely Catholic people who nonetheless aligned themselves politically with the anticlerical Republican side. Sánchez further explores Vatican policy toward both factions and analyzes the theological and moral debates surrounding the justice of the war as they unfolded in journals and newspapers in Spain and abroad. He concludes by tracing the impact of these controversies on Catholics in France, England, and the United States, and by assessing the lasting effects of the war on the religious consciousness of Spain, the Church, and the Western world.
About the Author
José M. Sánchez is Professor Emeritus of History at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Anticlericalism: A Brief History and Reform and Reaction, and is widely recognized for his scholarship on Church–state relations and modern European religious history.
