SPAIN: Edging Away from Franco

Spain’s aging Generalissimo Franco dressed up recently in his fanciest uniform and medals to pay a visit to his home region of Galicia on the occasion of the annual feast in La Coruña to the Virgin of the Rosary. La Coruña’s clergy had always treated Franco as a favorite son and made much of him; this time Franco sat in the church, unmentioned by the officiating cardinal archbishop. It was an obvious and obviously calculated slight.

The rebuff at La Coruña is the latest in series that apparently began with the accession of Pope John XXIII two years ago. Once the Roman Catholic Church was only too happy to acknowledge its debt to Franco, the defender of the faith in Spain’s bloody civil war. He restored church property and reinstated religious education in the schools. And he held tightly to such ancient ecclesiastical privileges of the Spanish state as its right to nominate bishops. Franco, the little (5 ft. 4 in.) son of a provincial naval paymaster, even insisted on his right to march in church processions under a canopy, an honor Alfonso XIII regally disdained. And in 1954, the Archbishop of Toledo invested Franco with the collar of the Supreme Order of Christ (see cut), the Vatican’s highest decoration.

Anthem Unplayed. So far, the church’s edging away from Franco is visible more in acts of omission than in commission—in the failure of the Bishop of Barcelona to attend the 20th anniversary of the city’s liberation from the Republicans, in the refusal of the abbot to allow the playing of Spain’s national anthem at a ceremonial dinner at the famous Basque monastery of Aránzazu (the abbot said the music was not “religious”), or in Pope John’s own studied neglect to include a single reference to Franco in the papal message dedicating Franco’s beloved Valley of the Fallen mausoleum church (TIME, April 13, 1959) as a basilica. In filling two Spanish sees, Pope John has twice passed over Franco’s original “short list” of suitable episcopal candidates to select Spanish-born bishops from the Vatican’s own staff.

Among Spanish churchmen, the most conspicuous defiance of Franco was the petition addressed by some 350 Basque priests last May to their bishops. Because of the flagrant “contradiction between Catholic doctrine relating to the human person, and the violation of this doctrine by a regime that proclaims its official Catholicism and enjoys the full support of the hierarchy,” said the priests, a rising wall of hostility was choking off their ministry. If the causes of the discontent were ignored, the Basque priests warned, the consequences “can harm the church in our diocese for generations to come.” Neither the pre-censored civil press nor the uncensored church press made a reference to the petition until the Papal Nuncio brushed off the letter as an ill-considered act of “some of our wayward sons.” Spain’s newspapers then rushed to tell their readers that the highly controversial letter, whose existence they never had admitted, had been “rejected.” Last week a second petition was reported collecting signatures among non-Basque priests.

Sword Disengaged. Liberal Catholics speculate that not more than ten of Spain’s 60-odd bishops actively support Franco, but a majority see no alternative to Franco, and do not want an open break. Their aim seems to be, at most, to edge away a little, “to break down”—in the words of another lay appeal—”the identification between the sword and the cross.” The more liberal were pressing the church to stand more boldly for change in Franco’s unhappy Spain, quoting a private proverb of the Spanish peasant: “We Spaniards are always at the back of the priest with a candle—or an ax.”