The letter from the Spanish bishops “to the entire world”, a support for the Coup of July 18 and a justification of their war crimes

The Collective Letter from the Spanish Episcopate to the bishops of the entire world on the occasion of the war in Spaindated July 1, 1937, and published on August 10 by the Conference of Metropolitans – the predecessor of the Episcopal Conference – was part of the tradition that began on January 1, 1870, when the Spanish bishops participating in the First Vatican Council addressed the Congress of Deputies that emerged from the Glorious Revolution of 1868 to oppose the Provisional Government’s bill on making civil marriage obligatory. Since then, it has been one of the ways in which the ecclesiastical hierarchy has intervened in political life.

Once the Second Republic was proclaimed, the collective pronouncements of the bishops followed one another: the first was issued on May 15, 1931 as Collective Declaration of the Most Reverend Metropolitan Prelatesthe heads of the archdioceses. With it, the archbishops avoided the pressures of the cardinal primate, Pedro Segura, who intended to turn his furious pro-monarchy and anti-republican pastoral of May 2 into a unanimous declaration of the Spanish episcopate, On the duties of Catholics in the present timein which he assumed the persecution of the Church –which for some authors contributed to its outbreak–, warned of its right to defend itself and urged Catholics to political union, a claim that was opposed by several bishops, dissatisfied with Segura’s extremism. This was followed by another, on August 15, also drafted by Segura –”A collective declaration of a single man,” criticized the dissenting archbishops–, in which he attacked the draft Constitution that was being studied in the commission of the Congress of Deputies; he rejected “as an anti-Christian, absurd and dissolving principle, that the State is the only source and origin of all rights”; he affirmed that “impiety inoculated the germs of This plague of secularism, whose fruits we are seeing”, warned of “the seriousness of the current religious situation in our country” and called for political action to preserve “the inviolable rule of maintaining the rights of the Church intact.”