An article yesterday in the Telegraph reports on a Bill presented to the Madrid Parliament proposing a "Law of Historic Memory" to remove all symbols of Franco.
Under the new law the Catholic Church in Spain will lose state aid and financial subsidies if it fails to remove the plaques listing the names of pro-Franco fighters beneath the phrase "Fallen for God and Spain". In many cases, this will mean removing monuments to those brave martyrs who fell because they refused to renounce the Catholic faith in the face of communist persecution.
This is a very significant development. Modern Spain has been able to achieve a certain amount of reconciliation in the post civil war period by respecting the heroes and denouncing the atrocities that form a part of any civil war.
Zapatero's aggressively secularist government is in line with much of the rest of Europe in promoting anti-family policies. However Spain is a particular case in which many priests and religious went to their deaths outside towns and villages, shot by squads of soldiers and buried in unmarked graves. To re-ignite the hatreds of the civil war era is an evil thing indeed.
19 comments:
Why are the left, wherever in the world they are, so hateful?
They hate freedom so much that the laws they promote can only in the end promote division.
In the end this is why the Church should not receive state subsidies.
He who pays the piper calls the tune
or
Render to Caesar what is Caesars etc..
I think people outside Spain often don't realise what a violent anti-Catholic agenda the Zapatero government is pursuing. I am very glad that by and large (with some exceptions, especially in the regions most befallen by the nationalist-seperatist virus), the Spanish Episcopate absolutely rises to that challange and defends the Church in an exemplary manner which several other European Episcopates would do well to emulate.
On Oct. 28, in St. Peter's Square, 498 martyrs of the religious persecution in Spain (1936-1939) will be beatified.
It will be the largest ever group of people to be beatification at the same time.
You may like to know that among the horrors perpetrated by the so called republicans in the Civil War, at Ronda in Andalucia, the entire priesthood of the town, about 12 I think were taken to the famous viaduc road bridge and thrown over to their deaths 200 feet below. I THINK that a large number of the priest and nun martyrs are to be beatified soon and some have already been beatified.
Zaptaero's grandfather was killed under the Franco regime - hence the axe to grind. But I do agree thae man is awful and his government is probably made up 90% of Freemasons.
But what do you expect from separation of church and state? An anti-Catholic regime will always prevail.
Fr. Tim,
with all due respect, if one takes a look at the spanish birth rate, Spain is not facing a secularist future, notwithstanding anything Zapatero could do.
Spain is facing either a muslim future (thru immigration), or no future at all.
And the modern spanish society has not a single weapon in their cultural arsenal to stop this trend.
Javier
Argentina
Steve,
I guess the answer to your question was given long ago by St. Agustine.
(I will translate from spanish, so please, excuse my english): Lord, we were made for you, and our hearts will be restless, until they rest in you.
Well, their hearts will never rest in the Lord. That is why they are restless, and as a consequence of that, full of hate.
Javier
I would say Zapatero's govmt is worse than aggresive secularism. It is totalitarian, like Communism.... and we thought we`d seen the collapse of that in Europe. I would say it is re-emerging.
Omnes sancti Martyres Hispaniae, orate pro nobis.
Steve - they hate freedom because they are afraid of freedom. Because their policies are so bankrupt, vacuous and devoid of love for human dignity they know that they can only maintain power by imposing their will on the people they allegedly represent and govern. Christianity and more specifically the Catholic Church is always seen as the greatest threat to their seat of power because they are afraid of the Truth which sets people truely free!
Last year in Spain I attended some meetings regarding the upcoming beatifications of 1930s martyrs.
The clergy were extremely clear that this was NOTHING to do with scoring points against the socialists, but ALL to do with giving glory to God.
It was very edifying. Given that many of these clergy are obviously passionate about history, it shows monumental goodwill that this was the approach taken not only in theory but very much in practice.
Spain is wonderful beyond words! Praise God for Spain, and God protect them/us.
St Theresa of Avila, pray for us.
St Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
This is a clear attack on the place of the Catholic church and the Catholic story in Spain, it is however part of a wider movement to disconect Europe from its past, case in point the difficulties made by local authorities, reported in the press in recent weeks, over ceremonies in England on Remembrance Sunday (and nearly everyone on an English War memorial was (is) a Christian of one sort or another).
How a country confronts a shameful part of its past is always a difficult issue.
In the UK we have always been of the 'let's move on' school, in modern times at least. But it was not always so - let us not forget the terrible alternating cruelties of Tudor times.
For Spain it is much more difficult, not least beacuse their torments are so much more recent.
I visited the "Valley of the Fallen" and Franco's tomb earlier this year for the first time. It is an extraordinary creation. I also found it very chilling and was very disturbed that the Church continues to operate this monument to a fascist Dictator.
I think I agree that the measures proposed by the Spanish government are unnecessary and likely to stir up old conflicts which, by now, should be dying away.
I would be reassured if, of the 498 proposed beatifications, 249 of them were to be of victims of Franco.
In Spain, feelings about the civil war seem to me to still run high.
I do wonder why the Spanish government seeks to rake over the embers of the past.
Is this what the Spanish people really want ?
Alnwickian, the problem is that "Franco" was not a "fascist" in the ideological sense of the word. He was a dictator, true (but that is not necessarily wrong), but he was a reactionary more than anything. He did great good for Spain, which would have fallen to Stalin had he not stepped up to the plate.
Your wish that Franco's victims be beatified shows that you need to read up on the war. Where did Franco martyr Catholics for being Catholics? His opponents were Socialists, Freemasons, Stalinists, Trotskyites, Anti-clericals, Anarchists, and nationalist rebels (as in Catalonia and the Basque country). What does any of their positions have to do with Christianity? Following your logic, the Church should canonize some Nazis and Communists so that it won't seem so one-sided in honoring the victims of those sides. As hard as it may be for "modern" men to understand, Franco was the better man. Not perfect, but the better man. -- Tobias Petrus
We need to ask for the prayers of St Jose Maria Escriva. He brought Opus Dei to the world and now more than ever Spain needs the prayers of Opus Dei.
Alnwickian shows a confused historical understanding. The vicitms of Franco, and we cannot deny they exist, would NOT have died for the Faith, a characteristic of martyrdom, but were a mixed bag of fanatics and misguided idealists (and not a few English left-wing adventurers and opportunists) who fought for the principles of Communism.
We regret their passing as human souls, but it was not for Christ, and they would not have wished us to say it was.
Alnwickian says ....
'I would be reassured if, of the 498 proposed beatifications, 249 of them were to be of victims of Franco'.
I think you miss the point, my friend. This is NOT about political point scoring of one side over another or some sort of balancing act between two schools of thought, but about acknowledging in a most wonderful supernatural way (Beatification) those Spanish Catholic faithful who were killed for their love of Our Blessed Lord and His Church during that grim period of Spain's civil war.
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