Throughout the centuries Spain has done more than any nation to fight the Long Defeat and, in her heroism, has shown us many fleeting glimpses of the Final Victory.
The poet Roy Campbell declared that Spain was “a country to which I owe everything as having saved my soul.”[i] Received into the Catholic Church in 1935, in Altea, a small town in Alicante, only a year before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Campbell’s reception into the Church would be a baptism of fire. The parish priest who received him into the Church would be murdered by communist militiamen and the Carmelite monks whom Campbell and his wife had befriended in Toledo would also be shot in cold blood. Not surprisingly, considering the diabolical actions of the communists and anarchists, Campbell was a vociferous supporter of the Nationalist uprising in Spain that would eventually quell the anti-Christian pogrom.
Campbell saw the Spanish Civil War as being a crusade against the forces of evil, a war in which Christians had taken up arms to protect Mother Church from the attacks of Big Brother. In truth, the history of Europe and the world might have been very different if the Christians had not won the war in Spain. If Spain had remained a communist country, it would have been a crucially strategic Soviet outpost in the heart of Western Europe. The iron curtain which fell across central Europe would also have fallen across the Pyrenees. It is possible, therefore, that the Christians of Spain had saved Europe from the infidel in the Civil War as they had saved Europe from the Islamic infidel eight hundred years earlier. This was certainly the view of Hilaire Belloc who declared upon hearing the news of the Nationalist victory in Spain that General Franco was “the man who has saved us all”.[ii]
Today, in an age in which secular fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism are once again on the rise, the example of Christian Spain can serve as a timely and timeless inspiration. From the leadership of the Cid against the Muslims to the leadership of the Generalissimo[iii] against the communists, Spain has been a bastion and fortress of Christendom against her enemies. She also reminds us that the part of the Church in which we find ourselves, the part that is exiled in Time, is the Church Militant, the Church at war with the Prince of worldliness and his legion of disciples. It is in this militant spirit that God has bestowed upon Spain a host of warrior saints who have offered themselves in sacrifice to Christ and His Church, from the legendary vision of St. James the Great who led the Christians in battle during the Reconquista to the holy Martyrs killed by the secular fundamentalists in the Civil War.
In between her crucial role in saving Europe from Islam and communism, Spain was also of pivotal importance to the Counter-Reformation. One cannot think of the glories of the Counter-Reformation without thinking of St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross, or without paying due deference and homage to St. Ignatius Loyola, the warrior saint who founded the Jesuits. In much more recent times, St. Josemaria Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, has bolstered the Church throughout the world, empowering the laity to evangelize the secular culture in their everyday lives.
Today, Spain is once again suffering under the yoke of a resurgent secular fundamentalism. So be it. It has always been thus. The forces of evil always return, like a fungus, to feed on the fallen fabric of the world. As J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, history is the Long Defeat, with only occasional glimpses of Final Victory. Throughout the centuries Spain has done more than any nation to fight the Long Defeat and, in her heroism, has shown us many fleeting glimpses of the Final Victory.
All Christians share in Roy Campbell’s indebtedness to Spain. She is a country to which we owe everything because, through the abundant graces given to her, she has saved the Christian soul of Europe. Viva Cristo Rey!
Republished with gracious permission from the St. Austin Review (July/August 2013).
This essay was first published here in September 2016.
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[i] Quoted in Matthew Hoehn, OSB, ed., Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches 1930-1947, (Newark, NJ: Saint Mary’s Abbey Press, 1947), p. 104.
[ii] The Tablet, 15 July 1939.
[iii] General Franco.
The featured image is “The Capitulation of Granada” (1882) by Francisco Pradilla Ortiz by and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been brightened for clarity.
You will forgive me (I hope) if I do not wax enthusiastic and full of admiration for the home of the Spanish Inquisition. In times past they booted out the Jews and used the loot to fund the expeditions to the New World. The Spaniards attempted genocide on the Aztecs of Mexico. In modern times Spain was the home and hearth of the fascist Franco. What is the basis for admiring Spain again?
Not to try and defend Franco but the people he was fighting against were objectively way worse. They damaged or destroyed almost half of all cathedrals and churches in Spain. They would shove rosary beads down priests ears and crosses down people’s throats. The amount of carnage was almost beyond comprehension and when the even worse communists ended up taking over, they sent all of Spain’s gold to Stalin.
Franco was certainly no saint but considering the monsters he fought against and the fact that he stayed neutral during WW2, I think we can cut him a little slack.
Good essay, Mr. Pearce. Thank you.
Robert Kolker,
You don’t appear to have actually responded to the essay.
And Franco was not a fascist. Even George Orwell points out this was an incorrect label for most of the nationalists. Franco was an evil man, but his victory was better than the triumph of communists and anarchists.
Franco was certainly not a fascist, but can anyone tell me where Orwell says this? As I recall Orwell uses the term in its Leftist sense of anyone with an ideological opposition to communism, at one point reeling of a list of names representing wildly dissimilar backgrounds and viewpoints, then (hilariously) asking rhetorically what kind of movement Fascism could possibly be to bring all these people together. (Answer: they all have “something to lose” under a communist government). I would dispute the statement that Franco was an evil man, but that dispute would involve two separate and monumentally confused discussions: one on the Nationalist atrocities and Franco’s participation, and another on the state of Franco’s soul, neither of which I can debate confidently.
The Spaniards did not attempt genocide on the Aztecs of Mexico. This can be verified by comparing the number of Indians living in Mexico to the number of Indians in that bastion of tolerance, the United States. As for the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews, these are also confused issues; on the balance of things both were probably bad, but both were responses to urgent pressures. The Spaniards could have done better but they could also have done much worse. Anyway they have always been fighting (in the highest sense of the word) and probably always will be, and deserve some sort of salute for that.
Viva España!
Spain is a beautiful land given to extremism is thought, emotion and politics.. As a Sephardia, my relationship to Spanish culture is by necessity complex. In Spain, extremism of the Communist persuasion begets Franco’s extremism of the nationalist right. If his opponents have come to power, their rule wouldn’t have been kinder and might have been more brutal than his. And during WWII, he did open the borders of Spain to Jews. We are denied the satisfaction of simplicity here.
Certainly a different and more sobering perspective than “For Whom the Bell Tolls”.
“Y así, puede decirse que la misión histórica de los pueblos hispánicos consiste en enseñar a todos los hombres de la tierra que, si quieren, pueden salvarse, y que su elevación no depende sino de su fe y su voluntad.” — Ramiro de Maeztu y Whitney (1875-1936)
English translation courtesy of the Internet: “And so, it can be said that the historical mission of the Hispanic peoples consists in teaching all the men of the earth that, if they want to, they can save themselves, and that their elevation depends only on their faith and their will.”
De Maeztu, Ramiro. “El sentido del hombre en los pueblos hispanos.” (1979): 7-25.
As his forces gained ground during the Civil War, they executed tens of thousands of Spaniards suspected of loyalty to the other side. Even after winning the war, Franco continued this campaign, murdering and imprisoning thousands more.. Not saying communism is good or secularism is Good but no Franco was evil. So was the inquisition evil. So no As an evangelical Christian I am not impressed with Spain and never have been.
“Throughout the centuries Spain has done more than any nation to fight the Long Defeat…”
In the past, yes (including the much maligned Inquisition – Mr. Kolker and his ilk would do well to read de Maistre’s “Letters on the Spanish Inquisition,” and more recent works by Henry Kamen debunking so many myths and slanders) . But they appear to have thrown in the towel now, given the radical Woke Leftism that prevails in Spain. The Spain of Franco (great man that he was, he failed to build a lasting movement that could long survive his demise) is dead, and even the great man himself has not been allowed to rest in peace, his very tomb having been erased by the current regime (much as the present US regime continually spits upon and destroys monuments to great Confederates and attempts to erase them from American history, though they are as much a part of American history as the Union that Lincoln and his ilk tried to deify).
We may weep for the loss of Spanish greatness, as we do that of Western Culture as a whole…but we can’t expect modern Spain to be some great force of Resistance to the current degeneracy and decline prevailing in the West. Sadly, there is no longer any future worth anything in the West in this world…