Spokesmen of the Catholic Church and Catholic periodicals have recently been doing their utmost to counter the widely accepted belief that the Spanish Catholic Church was wealthy and on the side of the, propertied class against the poor. Letters to the Press have been written arguing that the Catholic Church lost its wealth by a series of confiscations during the 19th century, so that long before the rebellion it had become a poor organisation, in no way associated by financial interest with the propertied class. It is claimed, too, that the Catholic priests were poorly paid. The last statement is certainly true, but it has nothing to do with the case, any more than has another very naive claim that the Catholic Church could not be wealthy because its income is largely derived from the pennies of the poor! It all depends on how many poor and how many pennies; and is about as true of the Catholic Church as of Woolworth's, the Coats' cotton combine, and many another great organisation which produces millionaire shareholders “out of the pennies of the poor."
The question is not whether the mass of Spanish clergy were poor, but whether the Catholic organisations and those in control of them were rich and powerful, and tied up with wealth and big business. Opponents of the Church in Spain maintain that, in addition to being the largest landowners, it had big holdings in banking, commercial and industrial concerns, newspapers, tramways, etc. As, however, Catholics may question the reliability of statements from such sources, let us see what some Catholics themselves have to say.
Mr. William Teeling, himself a Catholic, deals with this in his “The Pope in Politics—The Life the Work of Pope Pius XI" (Lovat Dickson, Ltd., London, 1937): —
. . . The [Spanish] State had amortised the Church’s property in 1835, and had guaranteed to pay the Spanish clergy from this income. As a result the country priests were extremely poorly paid (their income often amounted to only one peseta a day), were of a low mental type, and were badly educated. Much more powerful and better off were the Spanish orders, especially the Jesuits, who were very influential with the upper classes, and ran many colleges, and the University of Bilbao.—(Italics ours. Page 137.)
Mr. Teeling's information here relates to the position in 1923 and was based on the observations of a Catholic priest from Great Britain visiting Spain for the first time in that year. His article on the subject was published by the Catholic Tablet in 1923.
Mr. Teeling goes on to point out that the Liberals in Spain wanted to deprive the Catholic Church of some of its privileges, and among other things they "wished for a fresh Concordat with the Church to deal with the wealth of the Orders, and would have made the State independent of the Church. . . ."
In passing, it is interesting, in view of the Catholic denial that they have resisted the development of education, to find Mr. Teeling's Catholic priest reporting in 1923 that “he found the Spaniards keen on home life, but many were too poor even to go to school, for there were hardly any free schools. In Andalusia, 45 per cent. of the people were unable to read. . . . (Page 138.)
Mr. Teeling goes on to say that Pope Pius XI: —
Has, on more than one occasion, spoken to friends of mine about his great worry as to what would happen to the Church in Spain, for he felt it would not reform because it had too much wealth and ease.—(Pages 138-9.)
Another Catholic who substantiates the view that the controllers of the Spanish Church were wealthy is Don Angel Osserio y Gallardo, who is described as the “most authoritative representative of Conservative Catholic opinion in Spain." In a broadcast from Madrid (reported in the Daily Herald, September 19th, 1936) he said:—
The Church must not be confounded with the ecclesiastical degeneracy of bishops, laden with jewels, who drag God into political conflicts and ask His intervention to assure the electoral defeat of the Left.
Another Catholic witness is Senor Semprun Gurrea, a Conservative, who lectured in Philosophy of Law at Madrid University and has for many years contributed to a Spanish Catholic review, Cruz y Raya. An essay by him was published as a 2d. pamphlet by the Labour Publications Dept. (Transport House, S.W.l) under the title, “A Catholic Looks at Spain."
He points out that the searches and investigations of Catholic buildings by the Government after the rebellion: —
Revealed . . . activities which were perhaps licit in themselves, but were far from conforming to the rules, the needs and the mission of a religious life; e.g., the accumulation of treasure and goods, which is difficult to explain in places of prayer and disinterestedness.—(Page 11.)
Again, on the character of the Catholic bishops, he writes: —
Those elected were, with few exceptions, men too immersed in temporal matters, too closely connected with great personages, all the world of the nobility and the greater bourgeoisie which surrounds the high places of power and social life.—(Page 26.)
In fairness to Senor Gurrea (and, indeed, to the other Catholics mentioned) it must be pointed out that, in condemning bishops, he expressly dissociates himself from any attack on the Church as a whole.
With reference to the disclosure of “accumulation of treasure" in ecclesiastical buildings, it may be recalled that, in the early months of the rebellion, search brought to light nearly £500,000 in the Bishop’s Palace at Madrid (Sunday Times, August 25th, 1936), and, according to a report in the Manchester Guardian (August 5th, 1936), a total of 30 million pesetos (nearly £1,000,000) was confiscated in Catalonia alone. Another report was that nearly 100 million pesetos were confiscated from the “Little Sisters of the Poor" in Madrid, in the form of bank notes and shares.
One aspect of the matter seems to have been overlooked by the too zealous spokesmen of the Catholic Church. On the one hand, they assert that the Church had no wealth, while on the other they complain that elements on the Government side looted their property! This gives point to a claim made by the Catalonian Anarchist and Syndicalist organisations, F.A.I. and C.N.T., in their own English organ, Spain (Information Bulletin of the C.N.T. and F.A.I., published by Freedom, London, August, 1936), that they had acquired a fund of over 20 million pesetos “drawn from confiscated property of the Church and Fascists."
The truth of the matter is that the big bosses in the Catholic Church, as in other propertied organisations, share the interests and outlook of the land-owning and big-business class generally. When a rebellion was organised by the army leaders, not for religious but, in the words of the Catholic Tablet, “for economic and class reasons" (Tablet, August 1st, 1936), it was only to be expected that those who dominated the Catholic Church should throw the whole weight and wealth of their organisation on to the side of rebellion and reaction. It is greatly to the credit of many Catholics in Spain that they resisted this attempt to stampede them into support of brutal Fascism under the guise of a fight for religion.
Perhaps some of them have already observed and wondered at the remarkable spectacle of the Pope apparently busy fighting Hitlerism in Germany while encouraging the Hitlerite campaigns for Fascism (and iron ore) in Spain.
Edgar Hardcastle
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