For Christ and Catalonia: Catholic Catalanism and Nationalist Revival in Late Francoism

The victory of the Spanish Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War in 1939 also signified the defeat of Catalanism and the new regime prohibited all cultural and political manifestations of Catalan identity. As with the rest of Spanish territory in the immediate post-civil-war period, Catalan society was a traumatized one. Each sector of Catalan society experienced this trauma in its own way. For most of the peasantry and the working class in particular, conditions were especially brutal. For the Catalan Church and Catholic bourgeois, their experience of the Civil War had been marked by terror and assassination from the Republican side. Franco’s victory represented the restoration of bourgeois ‘order’ to a society that had become incomprehensible to them during the period following July 1936. For at least the early years of the dictatorship, the regime could count on the support, whether active or passive, of the Catholic bourgeois and the Church. Most within these sectors initially welcomed the regime after the trauma of the Civil War. The war had represented an unprecedented assault on property, order and religion. Some of the prominent figures of pre-war Catalan Catholicism, including Bishop Vidal i Barraquer and Canon Carles Cardó, believed that ‘salvation’ for the Church would come with Franco. In fact, due to their liberal and Catalanist tendencies, they remained in exile throughout the 1940s. Religion, the (Spanish) Fatherland and loyalty to the Caudillo determined the culture of Catholicism in the 1940s. ² The faithful were urged to ‘rechristianize every aspect of Spanish life’. ³

The close association in the popular mind between the military revolt and the Catholic Church had brought about a final assault on Church power and influence in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. The profundity of this cataclysm for the Church left it reeling, unable to comprehend what had befallen it. As one Catalan theologian asked:

Why did they not burn the Capitanía General [military government]? Why did they not put the university of Barcelona to the torch? Why wasn’t it the Colón hotel? … when people got inside these buildings they didn't think of burning them down. ⁴

After the traumas of the Civil War, the Church devoted itself to its own reconstruction, both spiritually and physically. In Catalonia the Church had more work to do than in any other area of Spain in terms of these twin processes. Of the more than 6000 members of religious orders executed throughout Spain during the Civil War, over one-third had been killed in Catalonia. More than 4000 churches and other religious buildings were destroyed in Catalonia, of which over 220 were destroyed in two days in Barcelona alone. Religious life was almost eradicated and those services that took place did so clandestinely. ⁵ The Bishop of Vic declared in February 1939:

truly pathetic is the picture that presents itself before our eyes … unbaptized children; others spiritually undernourished having been deprived of the bread of the catechism; marriages without blessing; the dead without the sacraments; morality thrown to the ground, with vice enthroned. ⁶

The 1940s, particularly the immediate postwar years, saw enormous programmes of building, re-building and the restoration of churches, with regular calls from the pulpit for financial help in this project. ⁷ The open air and schools were used where there were no religious buildings available or while they awaited the blessing of the bishop of the diocese due to their profanation. ⁸ Proclamations and sermons from the pulpit attempted to revive the faithful, with lessons drawn from the early days of Christianity, where the new cult, due to Roman persecution, was forced to meet clandestinely. ⁹ Church and State joined in the re-building of Catholicism throughout Spain. The urgency of the programme of re-Christianization was made glaringly apparent in a survey conducted for the Catholic lay organization Acción Católica (Catholic Action) in 1941 on religious belief amongst workers aged between 14 and 35 in the dioceses of Barcelona. To the horror of the faithful, it found that not more than 3 per cent of these workers defined themselves as Catholics: ‘That horrifying 97 per cent means that all young people are in terrible danger of disaster … distracted by the cinema, dances, pornography and evil friends’. ¹⁰

If the ‘flock’ was in danger, the position of the ‘shepherds’ was, for the Church, equally traumatic. Thirty per cent of the priests of Catalonia had been killed in the Civil War. The profound consequences of this situation for the Catholic Church is given expression by the following appeal made in the early days of the regime: ‘There is a pressing need … to which few have paid sufficient attention: that is the lack of priests … Leave a people 50 years without priests and they will worship the beasts’. ¹¹ Whatever the personal predilections of Catalan priests and laity towards the regime, what was undeniable was that their ‘salvation’ and that of their religion came at the hands of Franco’s forces. Services of thanksgiving for the ‘liberation’ took place throughout Catalonia. The assault on the Catalan Church had occurred from within Catalonia, yet its restoration came about through the military victory of Franco’s troops. Whilst the Catalan clergy and faithful welcomed their ability to practise their religion again, resentment would grow over time at the nature of the imposition of Spanish National Catholicism and that this spirit did not emanate from the indigenous Catalan tradition. Whilst, in the words of Lannon, ‘Church and state were coterminous’, a Catalan tradition could not re-emerge. ¹² In spite of the Catholic Church’s restoration and privileges, Francoism until 1944 had prioritized the proto-fascist Falange and the Church was confined to a purely religious terrain. With the impending defeat of the Axis powers, this would change, and Catholic influence would rapidly increase. ¹³

The intensity of repression lessened in the late 1940s, partly because most of its aims had been attained, and the regime abandoned the overt symbolism of fascism. Permission for small-scale publishing in Catalan had already been granted in the early 1940s, though significantly only on religious subjects. The first publication in Catalan was that by Monsignor Camil Geis in August 1942, which was an ecclesiastical work entitled Rosa Mística. In November 1943, the complete works of the renowned Catholic figure Jacint Verdaguer were published. A trickle of works would be published in the 1940s, though neither their distribution nor their readership was large. It is in this period of the mid-1940s that the Catalan Church’s opportunity to oversee and direct the reconstruction of Catalan nationalism is to be found. Many previously existing organizations of Catholic Catalanism had been abolished, and the years following were devoted to their re-creation, though often in a different guise. The Catalan Church shared the state’s goal of re-Christianizing the population, considered particularly urgent in Catalonia because secularization was so advanced. The urban proletariat was not just secular but fervently anti-religious. The restored position of the Catalan Church gave it a new opportunity to engage with the populace, and attempt an ideological reconfiguration of Catalanism.

The Catalan Church was in a uniquely advantageous position, as an entity which had great autonomy in a totalitarian society. In the Francoist press law of April 1938, prior censorship of all publications was made obligatory. There were a few exemptions, however, and these were the publications of the Catholic Church. To the Spanish Church was given the privilege of self-censorship, and each archbishopric promoted its own ‘regional’ publications. For the Catalan Church, its icons had been those who had written on morality, theology and religion in Catalan. The first wave of Catalanization in the Church occurred through the restoration of figures such as Verdaguer and the Bishop of Vic, as well as the Catholic author Torras i Bages. As the population was still overwhelmingly Catalan speaking the imposition of religious services in Spanish preoccupied the Catalan Church because it threatened to alienate those elements of Catalan society that had remained loyal to it. The Catalan Church could not afford to lose the support of the Catalan-speaking peasantry and middle class. The monastery of Montserrat, located in the province of Barcelona, would lead the Catholic sectors that wanted re-Christianization to be undertaken in the spirit of Catalan Church traditions. The historic figures of Catalan Catholicism were revived during the course of the 1940s. The year 1945 was celebrated as the centenary of Verdaguer, and 100,000 copies of his works were sold during the year. As the youth wing of Acción Católica put it, the poetry of Verdaguer ‘unites all in the love of God’. ¹⁴ In 1946 it was the turn of Torras i Bages and 1948 was celebrated as the year of Balmes, the nineteenth-century Catholic intellectual. ¹⁵ This phase is to be viewed in the context of the revivalism and re-construction that was a product of the religious spiritual fervour of these years. As a pastoral letter from the Bishop of Barcelona in 1947 noted, in that year alone 113 churches had been constructed and 13 others were still undergoing construction. ¹⁶

From early in the Franco dictatorship it became clear that the only way that Catalanism could be expressed would be through the Church. Bearing in mind the context of 1940s Francoism, the Catalan language thus made a reappearance from within the Catalan Church, which had the monopoly of its legally permitted usage until the 1960s. The religious use of the Catalan language would be used as a launch-pad for a pre-political programme of a Catholic revival of cultural Catalanism. The binary re-formulation of Catholicism and Catalanism would reach its culmination during the decade of the 1950s. The Catholic Church had made as yet no breach with the regime, and it was during this decade that the Church achieved an enormous consolidation of its power and influence – a period that has been described as ‘the years of euphoria’ in both the Spanish Catholic Church and its European counterparts. ¹⁷ The 1950s represent a period of Catholic cultural and moral hegemony, but these years indicated that the project of re-Christianization had failed. The almost non-existence of empirical sociology in Spain in the 1950s prevented the failures of this re-Catholicization of the population from being apparent to both Church and State. It would not be until the early 1960s that the Church would be faced with crises in both numbers of the faithful, and, at the end of that decade, the reversal of priestly vocations.

Some of the earliest attempts to break from the confines of Spanish National Catholicism and re-integrate into the mainstream of European Catholicism occurred in Catalonia. By the end of the 1950s an important part of the Church had made substantial progress in its project of religious Catalanization. At the same time, the growing engagement of the Church with questions of national identity would begin the slow erosion of the deeply-rooted Catalan anti-clerical tradition. As the Catalan Communist Party, the PSUC, noted in 1955, ‘the Church … has been the first legal entity that has tried to capitalize on the national sentiment of the people’. ¹⁸ The significance of these comments for the regime are to be found in the problems inherent in disciplining the Church. In the following year, 1952, the bi-annual celebration of world Catholicism, the International Eucharist Congress, was to take place in Barcelona. ¹⁹ The fact that this Congress was to take place on Spanish soil was seen as a triumph for the regime, and as one further element in the ‘normalization’ of the regime internationally. To make matters more complicated for the regime’s attempts at controlling the Catalanization of the Church, the closing act of the Congress was to take place at Montserrat. ²⁰

The Franco regime received a great boost through the completion of the Concordat signed with the Vatican in 1953. The Concordat ‘confirmed the confessional nature of the state and of the Spanish “nation”, and gave the Church a decisive influence in the regulation of civil life’. ²¹ The Concordat institutionalized the position and privileges of the Church and cemented its right to avoid prior censorship of its own publications. The agreement also maintained the Church’s position as moral arbiter of the nation and enshrined its right to view films before screening and its role in censorship of other areas of ‘morality’. In 1955, Serra d’Or was launched as a publication of the choir of Montserrat. Initially it was published in Spanish and Catalan, but by 1957, apart from the occasional article, it was written completely in Catalan. The religious-led Catalanization was noted in an article by Anselm Albareda, who remarked that in 1956 there were 10,000 women in Catalonia who bore the name Montserrat, ‘which was unknown in previous centuries’. ²² The existence of Catalan language classes through Church groups was publicized. As was noted: ‘Recently and quietly, and growing every day, Montserrat has begun again its editorial task, which dried up in a most violent way in 1936’. ²³

Until the 1960s, many of the movements of Catalan Catholicism were narrow in scope and membership, but the revival of escoltisme (the Catholic boy-scout movement) was the greatest contributor to a pre-mass mobilization of the population. Through the scouts, large numbers of Catalan youth were given the opportunity to study the Catalan language, and were introduced to Catalan history and culture. The Catalan scouts closely followed the prescription of Lord Baden-Powell’s scout movement, which he had founded in England as a paramilitary formation at the height of the British Empire. The initial emergence of the scouting movement was a response to a belief in the physical ‘failings’ of British manhood in the Boer War. ²⁴

Although the existence of scout-type movements can be discerned in Catalonia in the period post-1913, the emergence of a Catalanist escolta movement in the 1950s had its origins in developments from the 1920s. This movement incorporated elements of the indigenous early twentieth-century excursionista (hiking) tradition. As Marfany has noted, ‘going on excursions was to undertake Catalanism … and going on excursions meant going to “the land” and that land was Catalonia’. ²⁵ Batista i Roca published the Manual d’Excursionisme in 1927, and in the following year made public his scouting manifesto, ‘if we have been successful in ordering the anarchy that there has been in our language … why do we not also try and succeed in putting in order that chaotic attitude that exists in the Catalan young of today’. ²⁶ The importance of scouting lay in its social and socializing function within Catalan society. Scouting embodied an ethical dimension. ²⁷ The Catalan movement sought to combine Catholic morality with a cautious patriotism, a combination that could be made more easily in the ‘purer’ conditions of the countryside.

The principal figure in the reconstruction of the Catalan scouting movement in the 1950s was Monsignor Antoni Batlle, for whom scouting afforded great opportunities for the individual: ‘with a rucksack on [one’s] back … learning to make [yourselves] men and to love the word of God’. ²⁸ Batlle had been involved in escoltisme prior to the Civil War and during the late 1940s worked from within Acción Católica to revive it. ²⁹ A Catholic-led reconstruction of Catalan civil society was underway. Those involved in the excursionista movement already totalled some 23,000 by 1960 and the boy scouts had a membership of almost 5000. ³⁰ Both movements would greatly expand in the following years. The most successful of the entities that survived in society were those that exhibited a Catholic cultural and moral component. It continued to be impossible for a secular-based Catalanism to re-emerge. All was confirmation of the slow reconstruction of a public sphere. One Catalanist commented in 1955, ‘I am convinced … of the vitality of Catalanism … in fact I believe that today, Catalanism is … the only living force in Spain’. ³¹ The reconstruction of civil society extended from the boy scouts to the Orfeò Català (Catalan Choral Society) which had a membership of over 3000 in 1957. ³² These societies remained discrete and subterranean, but their existence permitted the vertiginous ascent of Catalanism in the 1960s.

Parallel to the growth of Catalanisation within the Church, there was the first indication that a sector of the Church was also beginning to concern itself with social issues. One of the earliest signs of this came from within the Congregacions Marianes (Marian Congregations) and from a group within Acción Católica who created a progressive Catholic monthly, El Ciervo, in 1951. However, it was not until the late 1950s that El Ciervo’s progressive nature became evident. ³³ This group created the publisher Nova Terra in 1957, which became the centre in Catalonia of the publication of works of progressive Catholicism, principally from France. ³⁴ The turn away from Spanish National Catholicism towards theological inspiration from France and Belgium also occurred amongst the principal writers in Catholic Catalanism who regularly cited figures such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Emmanuel Mounier, Charles Péguy and Jacques Maritain. ³⁵ Firstly, the communitarian ideas appealed strongly to intellectuals who feared that Francoism had achieved the atomization of Catalan society. The second aspect of their appeal lay in the strategies for the re-Christianization of the population. Communitarian inter-classism was a further element in this brand of Catholicism, as a project to transcend the class struggle. It must be recalled that many individuals had experienced, at first hand, the rise of the anarchist movement and the anti-religious discourse of the Republic, as well as the outbreak of a proletarian revolution at the start of the Civil War. A Catalan exile publication based in Venezuela, Solidaritat Catalana, took note of the transformations that were occurring from within the Catalanist sections of the Church. ‘There is a strong tendency on the part of many Catholic sectors to adopt a combative attitude against the regime … we are able to affirm that Montserrat really is the spiritual centre of our homeland’. ³⁶

Members of Catholic groupings undertook the two campaigns that were the turning points in the strategic trajectory of Catholic-led Catalan nationalism. The origins of the first campaign lay in remarks attributed to Luis Galinsoga, editor of the Barcelona daily La Vanguardia Española since 1939, at a Mass he attended in January 1960. The non-Latin sections of the Mass had been spoken in Catalan and after the service Galinsoga went to complain to the priest; in the discussion that ensued Galinsoga declared: ‘Todos los catalanes son una mierda’ (All Catalans are shits). It was of course the public use of Catalan that offended Galinsoga’s sensibilities. After Galinsoga’s remarks became publicized, a campaign for his dismissal began, calling on subscribers and advertisers to boycott the paper. It is estimated that La Vanguardia lost around 14000 subscribers. ³⁷ The financial losses incurred by the paper led finally to the removal of Galinsoga in early February 1960. All newspapers existed in a symbiotic relationship with the State and for the editor of a daily in Franco’s Spain to resign due to a popular boycott was unprecedented. Galinsoga’s departure gave the Catholic Catalanists a renewed confidence and confirmed Catholic prominence in the Catalan revival. ³⁸

The raised level of consciousness and confidence on the part of the Catholic Catalanists culminated in els Fets del Palau (the events of the Music Palace), and this was the scene of the second campaign. The background to these events was Franco’s decision to move the seat of government to Barcelona for a short period. The year 1960 was the centenary of Joan Maragall, the Catalan Catholic poet who had composed El cant de la senyera, a piece in homage to the Catalan national flag. A celebration of Maragall had been authorized to take place at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, though at the last moment the civil governor prohibited the performance of El cant de la senyera. During the event at the Palau, a pre-planned rendition of the song led to the arrest of 16 individuals. A police investigation led to the arrest of Jordi Pujol and a printer, Francesc Pizon, responsible for a leaflet distributed at the time of Franco’s arrival in Barcelona entitled, Us presentem General Franco (We present to you General Franco). ³⁹ The police brutality administered to Pujol and others reverberated amongst the various sectors of Catholic Catalanism, who until this moment had experienced police vigilance but not violence. All of those arrested were ‘respectable’ members of Catalan society, and Pujol had recently been involved in the take-over of a bank. Pujol was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and he came to be seen as a symbol of Catalan nationalism. ⁴⁰ The attack on one of the Abbot of Montserrat’s protégés began his distancing from the regime and led Abbot Escarré to declare, ‘the tortures and detentions constitute the sad epilogue to the time spent by the government in Barcelona’. ⁴¹

It is clear that in the late 1950s there was a growing tension between the State and Church in Catalonia, compounded by the economic problems experienced in the transition from autarchy to economic liberalization. The growing engagement of the Church with both Catalanism and the social question led the head of the Falange in Barcelona, Colonel Clavero, to declare, ‘we will have to shoot those Catalan priests that the “Reds” did not kill’. ⁴² Though the decade would later reveal a crisis in the Church, threatened by the advance of secularization, it also appeared that the long Catalan tradition of anti-clericalism was at an end. As Cruz has noted, anti-clericalism had ceased to be a part of anti-Francoism by the late 1960s. ⁴³ The end of this deeply-rooted anti-clericalism in the case of Catalonia was facilitated by two factors: firstly, the Catholic role in the revival of the nationalist movement; secondly, the emergence of social engagement in a sector of the Church. The social Catholics believed that it was vital to respond to the profound societal questions created by the mass immigration to Catalonia. As Nous Horitzons, the theoretical journal of the Catalan Communists noted: ‘Catalonia … the region of maximum working-class concentration has always attracted the attention of the Church’, though ‘the results [over the past 20 years] have not been particularly brilliant’. ⁴⁴ The pastoral work of the social Catholics was invariably conducted in Spanish, as the generally poor social conditions and low educational levels of the newly arrived were not conducive to linguistic Catalanization. The decline in anti-clericalism and anti-Church feeling was also made possible through the strongest single element in the opposition to the Franco regime, the Communists. The Communists of the PSUC began to see the Church as a potential ally in the new strategy of creating a broad-based opposition to the dictatorship: ‘progressive Catholics [deserve] our support’. ⁴⁵ Thus the alliance between sectors of the Church and communism that became possible throughout Spain first emerged in Catalonia. ⁴⁶

Legal changes in the State, brought about as a result of the market liberalization of the Spanish economy, made the foundation of private corporations easier. Òmnium Cultural was authorized in July 1961, its aim being the promotion and support of all areas of Catalan language and culture. ⁴⁷ Òmnium became, during the course of the 1960s, a broad-based organization of the Catalan cultural community. ⁴⁸ It was founded by bourgeois Catalans, who included industrialists, bankers and lawyers, and brought together individuals who had supported both sides in the Civil War. ⁴⁹ Though Òmnium was not created as a Catholic organization, Catalanist Catholics had a disproportionate role in the organization. Over half of the Consultative Committee of Òmnium Cultural were Catholics, two of whom were also members of religious orders. ⁵⁰ Over the period of the existence of Òmnium, Catholic influence ensured that those aspects of Catalanism most imbued with historic Catholicism, from the national folkloric dance, the sardana, to the traditions of excursionisisme were prioritized, and the publications of Òmnium continued the cultural Catholicization of Catalanism of the 1950s. Serra d’Or became the public forum of Catalanism. As a reflection of the growth of regime concern at Serra d’Or, as early as December 1960 the Spanish Ministry of Information and Tourism compiled a study of it. This report noted that with Serra d’Or, ‘it is clearly the case that the magazine is not religious … taking advantage of Catholic feeling, it is acting with ends that appear to be political’. The report further added that ‘the Catalanist tendency of almost all is evident’. ⁵¹

A contributory factor to the Catalanization of the Church were the developments in Rome in the 1960s. The world Catholic Church was itself coming to terms with the profound social, cultural and religious changes of the twentieth century as the period of the Second Vatican Council testified. The initiator of the liberalization, Pope John XXIII, had declared in 1960 that ‘a fundamental cause of unrest in our day is the systematic oppression of the cultural and linguistic characteristics of national minorities’, a statement frequently repeated by the Catholic nationalists. Montserrat’s delegate to Vatican II, Adalbert Maria Franquesa Garrons,

showed great satisfaction at the proposal of Paul VI to name the Virgin Mary as Mother of the Church. Like all of the monks of Montserrat, he is a Catalanist, convinced that this region can do more for Catholicism if it is done through Catalanism. ⁵²

The greatest effect of Vatican II in Catalonia was the authorization of the Mass in the vernacular, which greatly accelerated the slow Catalanization of those sectors of the Church previously untouched by the use of Catalan in church services. ⁵³ By this time, the extent of the linguistic Catalanization of the Church was, in marked contrast to earlier periods, widespread. ⁵⁴ As Perez Díaz has noted, Vatican II lent its support ‘to processes of change which were already under way’. ⁵⁵

The consequences of Vatican II had profound repercussions for Franco’s regime and pro-regime Catholicism. Catholicism had been a bastion of the regime since 1939 and the pronouncements of the World Catholic Church appeared to be a rejection all of the religious-ideological inheritance of Spanish National Catholicism. Whilst the bishops and authorities would mount a rearguard action against the changes, the lower clergy and lay members of the Church were those most influenced by them. ⁵⁶ Within the Spanish Catholic Church the process of Church–regime distancing began in Catalonia and the Basque Country. This was made more explicit in March 1964, when 430 Catalan priests sent a collective letter to Catalonia’s eight bishops that criticized the submissive role of the Spanish hierarchy, stating that ‘the character that continues to be given to our Civil War creates serious difficulties for our pastoral mission amongst the groups and people that do not think like the “victors”’. ⁵⁷ This process of gradual erosion of Church support for the dictatorship was particularly traumatic for the Franco regime as one of its self-justifications had been its role as the ‘saviour’ of religion from ‘god-less communism’, expressed in the ideology of the ‘crusade’ during the Civil War. ⁵⁸

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Abbot of Montserrat, Aureli Escarré had played a pivotal role in the slow reconstruction of Catalan Church traditions. In November 1963, Abbot Escarré embarked upon a political confrontation with the regime. This action is to be seen in the context of the unravelling of support from those sectors of society that had previously been firm adherents. These sectors would include the Church, the business class and the younger generation within the army. According to Le Monde: ‘Escarré has been the first authority of the Spanish hierarchy, and perhaps the only one, that has stood up and denounced the contradiction, that according to him exists, between the truth of the Gospel and the Spanish regime’. Amongst the remarks Escarré made were the following:

The Spanish regime calls itself Christian, but it does not obey the basic principles of Christianity …

Defending the language is not only a duty, it is a necessity; because when the language is lost, religion also tends to be lost with it. ⁵⁹

Regime outrage at Escarré’s declarations led to constant pressure on the Vatican to replace him, and he finally left Montserrat for exile in Italy in 1965. Escarré’s Le Monde article was widely distributed amongst the opposition and Escarré received a collective letter of support from over 400 Catalan priests. ⁶⁰ The widespread nature of the support given to Escarré is evident in Leftist opposition publications, itself a further indication of the decline of Catalan anti-clericalism. Endavant, the clandestine journal of the Moviment Socialista de Catalunya (Socialist Movement of Catalonia) declared: ‘We salute the noble words of Abbot Escarré, [which are] a guarantee of a better tomorrow for Catalonia and for the peninsula’. ⁶¹

As has been stated earlier, Òmnium Cultural, though imbued with Catholic influence, was not an autonomous organization of the Catalan Church. This fact made it easier for the regime to make Òmnium illegal in December 1963, and was itself a demonstration of the powerful position and privileges of the Church. The prohibition of Òmnium was an indication of the confusion that reigned within the regime over its approach to the incorporation of Catalanism, as the prohibition was removed in 1967. A letter from the Bishop of Seu d'Urgell to Manuel Fraga, a Franco government minister, stated that a group of ‘good Catholics from Barcelona do not want to see their dearly loved language again in the hands of the enemies of our faith and fatherland’. ⁶²

For most of the Franco regime, the Catholic Church was ‘virtually alone in being able to develop its own associations’. ⁶³ The final 10 years of the Franco dictatorship were marked by popular democratization and the reconstitution and a vertiginous expansion of civil society. This reconstitution ranged from a proliferation of sardana clubs and choral societies to new forms such as the neighbourhood associations. The emergence of the student protest movement was another component in this period. These processes within civil society caused a certain marginalization of the Church. This was compounded by a crisis from within. The Church below the hierarchy became clearly divided between those politicized on the left, who developed close relations with the Communist-dominated Comissions Obreres (Workers Commissions) and the more politically conservative Catalanists. Those in the social ‘wing’ of the Church continued to attach great importance to the Catalan language but their charitable work in areas that were usually comprised of Spanish-speaking immigrants made them more cautious about Catalanizing the workers. As the veil was lifted on the reality of Francoism in Catalonia, due to a new period of relative press freedom, it became apparent that the re-Christianization of the Catalan populace, undertaken with varying degrees of intensity since 1939, had failed.

Strikingly, most secular nationalists and leftists did not challenge the Church or its predominance in the continued reconstruction of Catalan cultural life. ⁶⁴ In marked contrast to the period pre-1939, anti-Church and anti-clerical rhetoric was no longer a part of this discourse. Two events of the mid-1960s that demonstrated the changing Church role in Catalonia were the episodes known as the caputxinada and the capellans march of 1966. The caputxinada refers to the meeting of the constituent assembly of the Sindicat Democràtic d'Estudiants (Democratic Students’ Union) held in March 1966 at the residence of the Capuchin monks in Sarrià, Barcelona. This meeting was surrounded by a police cordon and those inside remained there for two days. What was notable, apart from the creation of an independent student union, was the use of a Church centre for this purpose. Following the caputxinada, religious buildings and the monastery of Montserrat became the most likely centres for meetings of a whole series of opposition groups, ranging from students to the communist-led Comissions Obreres.

The event known as the capellans march took place in May 1966, when over a hundred priests marched to a police station in the centre of Barcelona to deliver a protest over police brutality towards a student. Significantly this student was a member of the PSUC. The police harassment of those who participated was a cause of profound shock, which resonated widely throughout the Catholic community. ⁶⁵ That a regime that defined itself as Catholic could show such a lack of reverence towards a group of clerics cemented the idea within the leftist opposition that the Church could become an ally. ⁶⁶ Twenty-two Catalan Catholic groups subscribed to a protest at the irreverence shown by the regime. ⁶⁷ It was clear that the Church–regime alliance was rapidly dissolving in Catalonia.

The nomination of Catalan bishops had been a constant demand of Catholics at earlier periods in the century, but the Francoist monolith silenced this voice throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Its revival was stimulated by the nomination of the non-Catalan Marcelo González Martín as Assistant Archbishop of Barcelona in February 1966. ⁶⁸ The campaign was also stimulated by the changes in Church–State relations brought on by Vatican II. It centred on the view that the regime-approved nomination of the Bishop went against decrees of the Vatican Council which had stated that the Church was to be independent of all State authority. ⁶⁹ For the Vatican, however, Spain remained one of the most important Catholic States and Franco retained his power over the nomination of bishops until his death. For those behind the campaign Volem bisbes catalans (We Want Catalan Bishops), the appointment of González Martín was interpreted as an anti-Catalan stratagem on the part of the regime. The Bishopric of Barcelona was the most important in Catalonia and was the second largest in western Europe. The territory of the Bishopric also included the monastery of Montserrat and all of the linked organisations it had built up. ⁷⁰ In February 1965 an open letter from 33 of Catalonia’s principal Catholic groupings was directed to all of the priests of the Barcelona diocese. The central concern of this letter was the linguistic situation in the city of Barcelona, where at this point 37 per cent of masses were in Catalan. The expansion in the number of masses in Catalan initiated in the 1950s had stalled under the impact of the arrival of large numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants. ⁷¹ Catalonia doubled its population between 1930 and 1970, and much of the new immigration came from areas of Spain with low levels of religiosity. ⁷²

Although the left distanced itself from the Volem bisbes catalans movement, its transformed relationship with Catholicism and its invocation of the Church as a ‘national’ Church was cemented by the death and burial of Aureli Escarré in October 1968, which was held at the monastery of Montserrat. ⁷³ The Franco regime was responsible for a profound shift of alliances within the Catalan political and cultural community. Aureli Escarré in death had become a national representative of Catalonia. Escarré was given a funereal homage that almost amounted to a lying in state. Almost all of the Catalan opposition had some presence at his funeral. This ranged from the Front Nacional de Catalunya to Unió Democràtica and Comissions Obreres. The Front publication, ARA, produced its own supplement on the death of Abbot Escarré. ‘Men such as the Abbot of Catalonia have made possible this gradual raising of the conscience’, on the part of the Catalan people. ⁷⁴ Amongst the opposition, this almost universal recognition of the figure of Escarré can be compared to the Polish anti-regime left’s close association with Cardinal Wyszinki in the 1970s.

By the late 1960s, with the increase in the studies of the social and cultural composition of Catalan society, it became clear that this society could not be termed Catholic. Secularization, evident throughout western Europe in this period, was compounded in Catalonia by a high rate of urbanization. The disproportionate weight of greater Barcelona in the demographic structure of modern Catalonia, where the city held two-thirds of the population acted as an important agent in this process. Of course similar trends were underway elsewhere in Europe and Catalonia was not the only society experiencing a ‘crisis of Catholicism’. ⁷⁵ The 1960s produced varied social changes which had their impact on Catalan nationalism. The young were also the most secularised part of the population, and Barcelona in particular maintained its reputation as, if no longer an anti-clerical city, then one that was non-clerical. This secularization reflected the failures of both Spanish and Catalan National Catholicism in their projects of re-Christianization. Church attendance had continued its decline to the point that in Barcelona in 1970 only 6 per cent attended Sunday service. This decline also occurred in rural areas, though at a slower rate. This was also a crisis for the Church in terms of its place and role in society. ⁷⁶ It was a critical time for the Catalan Church, but its problems were shared by its counterparts in other countries, as the Catholic Church throughout western Europe was marked by ‘the crisis of faith’ which saw large numbers leaving the priesthood. ⁷⁷ Fierro Bardaji has argued that the economic transformation of the 1960s gave the regime a new legitimacy based on the success of its strategy of economic prosperity and that ‘towards the end of the 1960s the Spanish State began to be able to do without the ideological legitimization of the Catholic religion’. ⁷⁸

The Franco regime was responsible for a profound shift of alliances within the Catalan political and cultural community. Between 1939 and 1976, over 1200 books on religious subjects were published in the Catalan language, and until the mid-1940s these were the only books published in Catalan. ⁷⁹ The first wave of post-war Catalan literature also shared the mores of Catholicism, and can be said to have been imbued with a cultural relationship to religion. The religious conflict in Catalonia between Spanish National Catholicism and Catalan Catholicism was both nationalist in origin and a conflict between modern and traditional interpretations of the Catholic religion. The overwhelming majority of the Catalan Church, passively or actively, supported Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This was, no doubt, a rational response on the part of the Church after the killing of over 2000 members of religious orders and the large-scale sacking of churches and convents that took place between 1936 and 1937. Until the 1960s, the Catalan Church’s relationship to the Franco regime was ambivalent. In the words of the first president of the restored Catalan autonomous government, Josep Tarradellas, Montserrat ‘is the only monastery in Catalonia and Spain, that has in its cloister a monument to the glory of Franco’s army and its battles during the Civil War’. ⁸⁰

In the discourse of both the Spanish Right and that of Catalan Catholicism, the moral decline of the nation, whether Spain or Catalonia, could only be addressed by religious revival. Re-Christianization remained central to both projects and the conflict was over the means to achieve this end. This clash, modernization or conservatism, had existed in western European Christianity since the late nineteenth century. Catalonia’s urban majority made the choice of a modern, liberal Catholicism inevitable. By 1975, through the emergence of social Catholicism and the Catalanism of the Church, historic anti-clericalism was at an end. Significantly when anti-clericalism appeared as a subject in Serra d’Or, the type discussed was the anti-clericalism of the (Spanish) Right. ⁸¹ But Catalan society was not re-Christianized during the course of the Franco regime. A study published at the end of the regime warned the Church of the dangers of attempting to maintain an ideological hegemony, and called on it to recognize the plurality of Catalan society. ⁸² The decline of Mass attendance would continue into the transition and beyond, and Catalan society was described as one with almost no religiosity in the late 1980s. ⁸³ However, the Catalan Church, in marked contrast to previous eras, has attained for itself a new consensual position in national life. The moreneta (Black Madonna) of the monastery of Montserrat today holds an iconic status in Catalan culture, and politicians from left and right make periodic pilgrimages to the monastery. The Church’s involvement with the nationalist revival under Franco enabled this transformation.