Religion: Pagans in Spain

Seville’s hard-shelled Cardinal Segura, who has repeatedly attacked such freedom of worship as is granted to Spain’s 20,000-odd Protestants, is equally persistent in his opposition to Caudillo Franco’s Fascist party, the Falange. His reason: he believes that both Protestants and Falangists are a threat to Roman Catholicism. The latest bulletin of his archdiocese, out last week, contained a letter forbidding seminarians to attend the Falange’s summer youth camps. The atmosphere there, said the cardinal, “is full of perils for the formation of the conscience of a future priest.”

A few days before, Cardinal Segura sent his flock a pastoral letter deploring the semi-religious ceremonies which the Falange conducts in each Spanish town around the “Cross of the Fallen,” ubiquitous local memorials to Spain’s civil war dead. These invariably end with local Falange leaders crying out: “Those fallen for God and Spain?”—and with the crowds answering: “Present!”*

Wrote the cardinal: “Naziism, an arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, distinguished itself for its errors in the cult of the dead . . . Now Divine Providence has eliminated the roots of evil with the annihilation of Naziism, yet some countries—including our own—still preserve practices of Nazi origin, such as the cult of the dead, without discrimination of religious belief, or … the cult of the Cross of the Fallen, before which cold political homage is rendered . . . The cause has gone, but we go on breathing a pagan, Nazi atmosphere.”

*A similar custom is still observed in the French army. La Tour d’Auvergne was a grenadier captain of such legendary courage that his superiors gave him the title of “First Grenadier of France.” Ever since his death in battle, at Oberhausen in 1800, his name has been called at formal musters of his old regiment. Each time, a noncommissioned officer steps up to answer: “Dead on the field of honor.”