Disputing the Public Sphere : Anticlerical Violence , Conflict and the Sacred Heart of Jesus , April 1931 – July 1936

In the months after July 1936, acts of anticlerical violence and iconoclasm underscored attempts to reconfigure radically social relations and the physical landscape in many parts of Republican Spain. Taking the destruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as its analytical focus, this text examines the connection between the grassroots battle waged by anticlerical workers against the Catholic Church’s public presence during the peacetime Republican years, and the severity and forms of the war’s anticlerical


Introduction
A friend of mine watched a man demolishing an image on the wall of a priest's house; above it was an inscription which he could not reach.It read: 'Now He shall reign.'He shook his mallet at it and said: 'So you think; but wait until I get a long ladder, and then we'll see.' -John LanGdon davies. 1 At the beginning of August 1936, militiamen and women from across the province of Madrid assassinated the Sacred Heart of Jesus.The twenty eight metre tall statue, which stood imposingly on the Hill of Los Ángeles in Getafe, was destroyed over eight days using gimlets, drills, and eventually huge quantities of dynamite.During the iconoclastic dismantling process, 'Jesus' was 'executed by firing squad' on several occasions. 2Two weeks earlier in Almeria, militiamen had reduced their Sacred Heart to rubble using shot holes, drills and firecrackers. 3All across Republican Spain, in towns like Monteagudo (Murcia) and Aranjuez (Madrid), these towering stone figures were obliterated from the landscape. 4hese episodes formed part of the wave of grassroots anticlerical violence unleashed in the zone of Spain which remained under the authority of the Republican Government following the military coup of 17-18 July 1936.During the first few months of the conflict, anticlerical workers set about wiping Catholicism from the public sphere, burning and destroying religious objects and parish archives.Mock processions using religious ornaments were frequent, as were the exhumation and exhibition of religious remains. 5Gutted churches, emptied of Catholic symbols and religious meaning, were transformed into political headquarters, schools, cinemas, popular kitchens, barracks and hospitals. 6Religious symbols were 'desacralised' and imbued with proletarian meaning; vestments became militiamen's uniforms and wooden saints were burned to cook food. 7As is also well-known, this violence did not only target inanimate objects, but also religious personnel, resulting in the deaths of thousands of priests 8 .
The immediate catalyst for this was the collapse of the Republican State provoked by a coup which divided the country.In most of urban Spain, the military rebels were defeated by loyal members of the security forces and the military and by workers armed by the Government.With the Republican forces of law and order dislocated, de facto power passed to these armed workers; weapons moved to the centre of public space.This drastic change in the structure of political opportunities provoked an atomisation of power on the Republican home front.Rural and urban workers, whose daily lives had been marked by the draconian public order practices of the Restoration Monarchy (1874-1923) and the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923-1930), now found themselves in a radically new context which legitimised their own violent acts as a means of exacting change and eliminating enemies. 9raditional readings of this popular anticlerical explosion -including accounts which are politically sympathetic to the Republic -have portrayed the acts as the aberrant work of 'uncontrollable' criminals. 10This interpretation ignores the ways in which anticlerical violence at the beginning of the conflict constituted an attempt to affect an irreversible change in power relations in the public sphere, underlying efforts to construct a new society in many parts of Republican Spain.It also disconnects the violence from the forms of anticlericalism which were already emerging before the coup.This text will argue that anticlerical violence and iconoclasm at the beginning of the Civil War can only be understood in intimate connection with the battle to secularise public space underway during the peacetime Republican years.From April 1931 onwards, the mass democracy inaugurated by the Second Republic developed as a struggle between mass mobilised Catholicism on one hand, and a secularising Republic supported by (but also in constant tension with) anticlerical workers' constituencies on the other.Many workers' expectations were raised enormously by the new regime's secularising intentions, only to be frustrated by the slowness and ineffectiveness of reform -something which was to a large degree the result of a simultaneous Catholic mass mobilisation.
Large numbers of anticlerical workers, faced with Catholicism's ever-increasing public presence, positioned themselves at the vanguard of the secularisation of the street, carrying out grassroots anticlerical collective acts with the aim of shifting the balance of power in the public sphere away from these Catholic forces.Five years of struggle and frustration would generate an intensification of anticlerical sentiment among Spanish rural and urban workers, and an increased determination to secularise society from the bottom up.This paper will take as its analytical focus the battle to erase the Sacred Heart of Jesus -Spain's symbol par excellence of the Church's long-9 LEDESMA, José Luis: "Qué violencia para qué retaguardia o la República en guerra de 1936", en Ayer 76: Retaguardia y Cultura de Guerra, 1936-1939 (2010) standing, obdurate and reactionary claims upon public space -to demonstrate that the struggle for ownership of the public sphere which occurred from 1931 is a key factor in explaining both the severity and the forms of the Civil War's anticlerical violence.

Public Space, the Sacred Heart and Anticlerical mentalities before 1931
By April 1931, statues and plaques dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus had already become a clear object of hatred for many rural and urban workers.In May 1919, in the aftermath of war and revolution across Europe and in the wake of the challenge to traditional social power that it signified, King Alfonso XIII had consecrated the country to the Sacred Heart, unveiling the colossal statue on the Hill of Los Ángeles, the geographical centre of Spain.The act was an elaborate public reaffirmation of the alliance between the Church and the Restoration Monarchy regime.It was also a symbol of the Church's ferocious rejection of pluralism and its conviction that the only viable Spanish national identity was a Catholic one.By the early twentieth century, the cult had become a symbol of reparation for damage caused to the Church by liberal secularising reforms.Acts of mass devotion dedicated to it were an integral component of the clergy's implacable crusade against the threat to its position posed by the burgeoning forces of liberalism, republicanism and leftwing political organisations.The consecration, attended by representatives of the Army and Civil Guard, was a bid to maintain social order by invoking divine backing for a regime increasingly besieged by working class political protest.In the years after 1919, town councils across Spain scrambled to erect their own Sacred Hearts.The inscription carved into the statues' bases insistently and gratingly reminded anticlerical workers of the 'Great Promise' made by Jesus to the Jesuit Bernardo de Hoyos in 1733: 'I will reign in Spain' 11. 11 The full wording of this 'promise', of crucial importance within the shared Catholic imaginary of the period as it concerned the conception of the nation was: 'I will reign in Spain, and with more veneration than in other places.'Boletín Oficial del Obispado de Madrid-Alcalá (BOOM), Núm.Spanish workers experienced this absolutism, ideological intolerance and Churchthrone alliance on a daily level in many different ways.By the time 'Jesus' took his place on the Hill of Los Ángeles in May 1919, many urban and rural workers were alienated entirely from the Church.In Spain's rural south, religion was rejected fiercely by the starving day labourers who worked on sprawling great estates owned by large landowners, enduring inhuman working conditions and seasonal unemployment.The Church's presence was negligible in the 'deep south', but workers only needed to take a cursory glance at who attended mass every Sunday to see all of the social sectors which oppressed them assembled in one place: the landowner who treated them as sub-human, the cacique who intimidated them into voting for the political parties of the Restoration Monarchy's corrupt turno system, and the Civil Guard who beat them for gathering acorns or firewood from estate land.Betrayed by a Church which had abandoned the poor, rural southern day labourers joined the burgeoning anarchist movement in staggering numbers.12Spanish anarchism, with its egalitarian ideal, millenarian rhetoric and Christian interpretive framework, becameat least to a certain degree -a kind of 'substitute religion' for many of its followers. 13he anarchist perception of the Church as the 'antichrist' contrasted sharply with Catholicism's meaning among the smallholding peasantry of central and northern Spain.These small rural communities were closely bound -both spiritually and economically -to a Church which represented salvation and succour.While Catholic agricultural credit unions provided practical financial assistance, religious ritual marked the rhythm of daily life, defining and strengthening the community. 14or the rural and urban poor, the clergy's betrayal was also evident in the sumptuous wealth which the Church paraded endlessly before their eyes.Grandiose religious monuments like statues to the Sacred Heart, towering cathedrals and convents, and intensely dramatic public processions in which the riches of religious communities were carried through the streets must have seemed offensive to workers locked in a daily struggle to feed themselves and their families.Escape from the Church's physical presence was virtually impossible.Catholic funeral processions, endless streets named after religious figures and the 'multiple ringing of the bells of multiple bell towers' overwhelmed non-Catholic workers. 15 reforms of the mid-nineteenth century (which had banned the male religious orders and sold their property).Under the institutional protection of the Restoration Monarchy, Catholicism's public presence became ever more pronounced.As previously proscribed orders were reconsolidated, and new ones were founded, convents, ever more monasteries and religious schools were constructed.Public displays of religious faith became increasingly common.For many anticlerical workers, the city streets seemed to reek of incense and piety. 16his emotional rejection of the Church's public hegemony was also linked to revulsion generated by the 'Catholic compass' which marked the private life processes of every citizen.Before 1931, divorce was illegal and civil marriage ceremonies were frequently blocked by priests.Non-religious zones of segregated cemeteries were indecorous and neglected by the same authorities that often prevented civil funeral processions from passing through the streets.This meant that through Catholic baptism, canonical marriage, last rites and funeral ceremonies, the Church enjoyed an inescapable monopoly upon life and death.The monopoly came at a price: the Church's sale of baptisms, marriages, holy communions and blessings effectively 'turned the altar into a bank' in the eyes of many workers. 17Many men also resented the confessional, which they saw as a tool to interfere in their conjugal relations and spy upon their political activities. 18or many industrial workers, increasingly politicised and politically organised under the Socialist and anarchist trade unions (the UGT and the CNT), the Church's unshakable alliance with the rich and powerful was demonstrated by more than just its conspicuous wealth.Firstly, the Church was unashamedly linked to draconian public order practices of the Restoration Monarchy and of the subsequent Primo de Rivera dictatorship.In a potent reminder of the alliance between sabre and cross, workers subjected to arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention and torture by the Civil Guard saw 16  these same agents of state-sanctioned repression parading proudly through the streets next to the priest during Holy Week or Corpus Christi. 19urthermore, in a situation where the Church monopolised Spain's education system, charitable schools run by the religious orders instilled workers' children with the spiritual values which reinforced the Church-backed monarchical order: obedience to authority and the acceptance of social inequality.In order to benefit from Catholic charity, workers were required by priests to prove their religiosity and acceptance of these values.The clergy also staged charitable initiatives at election time to coerce workers into voting for rightist candidates.This was a deeply humiliating experience which generated a profound wellspring of anticlerical feeling. 20Many urban workers saw the Church not just as an ally of the elites, but also as an exploitative employer.Anger was provoked by the unregulated working conditions which prevailed in educational and charitable centres, where those who attended them were used as cheap labour.Simultaneously, the productive activities of religious communities who sold goods made in convents at low prices and who did not pay taxes damaged workers economically, provoking fierce accusations of 'unfair competition'. 21inally, workers experienced the Church's pertinacious opposition to political pluralism in increasingly forceful attempts by Catholic trade unions to drive a wedge in the organised labour movement.For workers affiliated to the UGT and the CNT, these unions -strongly linked to employers and engaged in continual strikebreaking -constituted the ultimate clerical treachery. 22From the turn of the century onwards, politically organised workers collided regularly in the street with Catholic forces bent upon defending the Church's ideological hegemony.Faced with parliamentary debate over religious reform and the growth of populist Republican parties, the Church authorities formed a network of Catholic propagandistic organisations and lay associations that began to sow the seeds of an evangelical 'crusade' against progressive political forces.The efforts of organised Catholicism to increment Catholicism's public presence sparked a wave of anticlerical demonstrations aimed at challenging the Church's cultural, social and political hegemony by shifting the balance of power in the public sphere away from Catholic forces.In June and July 1899, a campaign by the ecclesiastical authorities and some conservative political sectors to place plaques Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence...

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2011, vol.33, 49-69 dedicated to the Sacred Heart on public buildings -a symbol which was by then strongly associated with all types of militant Catholicism and with 'reparation' for secular offences -was opposed by various municipal authorities.As Catholic manifestations of support for the politicised plaques were met head on with popular anticlerical demonstrations, the symbols of Catholicism and leftwing politics did battle in the street across Spain.This anticlerical collective action, carried out by recently politicised workers who furiously opposed the political, cultural and social power of the Church, became a hallmark of the first decade of the twentieth century.The joint experience of this mobilisation, which mixed traditional repertoires of collective action like the stoning and burning of churches or assaults upon convents with modern ones like political meetings, petitions and demonstrations, was in itself crucial in the forging of anticlerical mentalities.The struggle, waged against Catholic groups who also mobilised using a combination of newer, political forms of collective action and elements of the Church's traditional mobilisation repertoire (masses of reparation, processions and pilgrimages), foreshadowed -albeit on a much smaller scale -the Catholic and anticlerical mobilisation of the Republic.23

The Second Republic: Expectation and Confrontation
On 14 April 1931, a group of men -caught up in the popular jubilation which greeted the proclamation of the Second Republic -attempted to scale the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Getafe in order to adorn it with a Phrygian hat and a Republican banner. 24For many already anticlerical workers, the sudden disappearance of the monarchy and the coming to power of a Republican-Socialist provisional Government with secularising ambitions generated enormous excitement and expectation regarding religious reform.Yet this jocular attempt to superimpose the symbols of the new logic of the time upon such a colossal icon of Catholic hegemony could not conceal the vast cultural, social, economic and political power which the Church wielded at the dawn of the Republic.Republican reformers faced an immensely difficult task.Seeing the Church as the main obstacle to Spain's modernisation, they sought to oust it from its privileged position at the 'sacred centre' of society. 25Breaking the institution's cultural power to diffuse the rites, conceptions and symbols which defined society was as important as limiting its enormous economic power and political influence.Radical and far reaching secularisation measures -most crucially in the educational sphere -would be the only means of eliminating the 'Catholic quality' of citizenship in order to craft a joint Republican national cultural identity. 26et from April 1931 onwards, an ever widening gulf developed between the secularising efforts of the Republican authorities and the battle for secularisation which increasingly politicised and ever more anticlerical workers fought on the street.From the outset, popular collective action ran far ahead of the Government's plans.For Republican politicians and anticlerical workers alike, the continued presence of symbols to the Sacred Heart was an inadmissible reminder of the Church's status as a pillar of the now defunct monarchical order and of its opposition to progressive politics.The symbols were also linked to the reactionary and widely resented Jesuit order, which would be dissolved by the Government in 1932.Without waiting for government action, workers took measures to expunge the Sacred Heart from the public sphere.In Purchil (Granada) local men affiliated to the UGT greeted the Republic's proclamation by attempting to rip plaques dedicated to cult from the walls and front doors of their neighbours' houses. 27On 11 May 1931, the burning of religious buildings in Madrid corresponded to the same popular anxiety concerning the Church's links with monarchist political forces and impatience to find an immediate solution to the 'religious question'. 28In Granada, the day after Madrid disturbances, a crowd of demonstrators forced its way into the church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Gran Vía with the flag of the Socialist Casa del Pueblo held aloft.People removed religious objects, burning them on a bonfire in the street.The adjoining Jesuit residence was sacked by workers who flung religious books, papers and garments from the windows. 29hese grassroots attempts to tackle the Church in the public sphere, which took place before the Government had announced any secularising measures (and a full eight months before the secularising constitution was approved), demonstrate that the coming of the new regime raised huge and unrealistic expectations that the Republic would be able rapidly to shift power relations in the public sphere.In the following months, secularising legislation that directly affected peoples' daily experience of the Church had an even deeper impact.With the removal of crucifixes from state schoolrooms, the prohibition of the religious orders from teaching, the creation of secular Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence...

Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea
2011, vol.33, 49-69 cemeteries, and the legalisation of divorce and civil marriage, anticlerical workers saw the Church's hegemony in the private and public spheres finally contestedand their own freedom of action increased thereby. 30Yet in the years that followed, this popular excitement ended time and time again in bitter frustration regarding the Church's undiminished public presence.As anticlerical workers became increasingly determined to resolve the problem on the street, jovial hats and banners gave way to mass demonstrations, stones, flames and firecrackers.In order to understand this evolution, two crucial and utterly interconnected factors must be taken into account: the vertiginous leftwing politicisation of Spanish workers and the mass political mobilisation of Catholics from April 1931 onwards.
Although the unionisation and politicisation of both urban and rural workers had been underway in Spain since the nineteenth century, with the coming of the Republic, workers could organise politically and take industrial action openly for the first time.In the case of the Socialist organisation, they were also represented in government.Belonging to the UGT, which now ran the nationwide system of labour arbitration boards (the Jurados Mixtos) was now viewed as necessary in many places to obtain work. 31In this radically new political context, the ranks of workers' unions and political parties expanded vastly and rapidly in correspondence with people's expectations of the opportunities which the new regime could offer them.Young people also mobilised massively, many joining Republican, Socialist and Communist youth movements.
These newly mobilised workers were influenced by a political discourse which contained anticlerical ideas as a key tenet.Although the Socialist Party officially shunned anticlericalism as a bourgeois phenomenon which distracted workers from confronting the repressive capitalist order, its press nevertheless condemned the Church for its obscurantism and indoctrination of young minds.The anarchist CNT, whose political ideology dictated its absolute opposition to the bourgeois state represented by the Republic, was vociferously and unrelentingly anticlerical.The Socialist and anarchist press undoubtedly influenced union activists, but the most important way in which this politicisation contributed to the amplification and radicalisation of anticlerical mentalities was through association and socialisation.The anarchist Ateneos and Socialist Casas del Pueblo provided centres where workers shared their perceptions of the world, learning to identify themselves and each other in terms of common beliefs and shared perceptions.Anticlerical identity, which encompassed a wealth of different political ideologies, overlapping and melding with other collective identities, was an agglutinating element of the collective working class ideologies forged by association within communities. 32imultaneously, the Church began to use the new political framework to its advantage, mobilising its supporters politically against the Republic's secularising measures.During the spring and summer of 1931, the Ecclesiastical hierarchy started to develop a highly politicised discourse which portrayed the Church as a victim of persecution by a regime which had committed the 'extremely grave error' of 'confronting an authority which cannot renounce its divine mandate'.Bishops and priests urged Catholics to mobilise politically in defence of 'the rights of the Church'. 33hose who answered the call were drawn from central and northern Spain's Catholic peasantry and provincial middle classes, and also from urban middling sectors and the newly radicalised Catholic Youth; they were united by an acute fear of change and the loss of a 'traditional' way of life based around religion.They lent their services to the already existent network of press organs, propagandistic organisations and associations of lay Catholics (the most important of which was Acción Católica) in unprecedented numbers. 34s Catholic groups began to use religious ritual for overtly political purposes, they were met head on in the street by anticlerical sabotage or counterdemonstration.The parallel mobilisation of these two 'blocs', and the conflictive dynamic into which they became locked, generated a struggle to control public spaces which underlay the making of mass democracy in Spain.Yet the anticlerical offensive was far more than a mere reaction to Catholic mobilisation (just as Catholic mobilisation was more than just a mere reaction to anticlerical mobilisation).It was simultaneously a grassroots attempt to implement the secularising reform which the Government seemed incapable of orchestrating (a fundamental reason for this incapacity being, of course, Catholic mobilisation).An examination of three key areas of Republican reform which spilled over into public battles -the 'republicanisation' of the landscape, the rites of passage and education -will reveal what Republican legislators attempted to do, why they failed in the eyes of many anticlerical workers, and how these sectors imposed their own grassroots solutions.

Republicanising the Landscape
In order to tackle the extravagant baroque dramaturgy of Catholic public ritual, Republican reformers passed a law stating that authorisation had to be obtained from the Interior Ministry for all Catholic public ceremonies. 35Yet defensive action alone was not enough; the removal of the Church from the 'sacred centre' of society required the construction of a lay Republican 'centre' to supersede the Catholic one.As feast days and saints' days were declared ordinary working days, the Government spearheaded nationwide celebrations of May Day and the anniversary of the Republic's 33  proclamation on 14 April.In another prong of the strategy, religious or monarchical street names were changed by municipal authorities to commemorate the 'new lay saints' of the moment. 36In Aranjuez (Ávila), the Town Council changed the name of the street which housed the town's Sacred Heart of Jesus from calle del Príncipe (Prince Street) to calle García Hernández to commemorate one of the leaders of the failed Republican rising of December 1930 in Jaca.Municipal authorities also made attempts to remove religious statues from public places and erect ones to the Republic's political and cultural icons. 37any anticlerical workers, who had hoped that these measures would finally put an end to their Catholic induced collective claustrophobia, were left disappointed in several respects.Firstly, a mixture of Catholic opposition and Republican caution meant that relatively few religious monuments actually disappeared from the streets during the peacetime Republican years.The stony army of Sacred Hearts remained virtually intact.In Aranjuez (Madrid), Republican town councillors saw their scheme to remove the town's Sacred Heart blocked in various legal channels by the parish priest throughout the entire peacetime Republican period. 38In Bilbao, mass protests from Catholic and Basque Nationalist groups provoked the overturning of the Town Council's decision to dismantle the city's forty metre tall marble and stone giant. 39In a situation where Catholic monuments continued to dominate the national landscape, the relatively few statues erected to Republican 'heroes'-like the statue to Pablo Iglesias constructed in Madrid's Parque del Oeste -remained a minimal presence; a presence which only reached Spain's large cities, leaving the provincial landscape unchanged.
These workers simultaneously faced a tremendously increased Catholic public presence.In the street -and on traditional religious stages and at symbolic centres like monuments, churches and hermitages -Catholic groups, committed to what one Salesian novice referred to as 'burying of the flags of the wicked', used religious ritual to defy Republicanism and secularisation.In a situation where public religious ritual was restricted by law and religious festivals had been removed from the official calendar, processions, holy retreats, festivals and open air masses were instantly imbued with political meaning.As 'processions become demonstrations, pilgrimages become marches, and Sunday sermons become meetings' across the country, the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Getafe, already indelibly linked to 'reparation' for the sufferings of the Church at the hands progressive politicians, became the spiritual and physical centre of Catholic mobilisation. 40Throughout the peacetime Republican years, legions of Catholics flocked to the Hill in 'fervent and mass pil-2011, vol.33, 49-69

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Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence... grimage' to pray for Spain's salvation, encouraged to do so by priests, bishops and lay associations.While Catholic mobilisation was funded by the wealthy social sectors which backed the Church, the Republic -struggling to pay off the debts of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in a period of worldwide economic depression -was unable to stage state sponsored celebrations capable of competing with the Catholic ritual.Republican politicians' reluctance to encourage their supporters to take to the streets further contributed to a situation in which anticlerical workers saw Catholicism's (now acutely political) public presence eclipsing that of the Republic. 41n a local level, people developed various strategies to tackle an ever worsening problem which the Republic seemed incapable of solving.The sabotage of Catholic shows of strength was the most direct tactic.In Huéscar (Granada) in March 1932, a group of local leftists sabotaged a procession to the town's patron saints.Taking advantage of a common custom by which the faithful 'dispute the ownership of the saints', they seized the statues and carried them to the Catholic Agrarian Centre in a mocking procession.In the ensuing disturbances between Catholics and anticlericals, several of the images were damaged.The following year, before the festival of the Sacred Heart in June, the clergy and devotional associations instructed Catholics to adorn their balconies with hangings dedicated to the cult.Across Spain, protesters stoned houses bearing the symbols, pulling down and destroying their banners. 42n cities, towns and villages across Spain, workers also staged political demonstrations and lay counter rituals, both to confront Catholicism in the public sphere and to establish the foundations of a projected secular society.In Cuevas de los Medinas, an extremely poor community of just sixty inhabitants nineteen kilometres from the city of Almería, female inhabitants led a comprehensive anticlerical campaign against the parish priest in the months preceding the February 1936 elections.Threats, 'mini insurrections', demonstrations and 'endless propaganda against religion' rendered him practically unable to celebrate acts of worship and 'carry out the normal functions of the Church'. 43In Pechina, also in Almeria, local leftists developed a tradition of gathering near to the parish church to cook and eat a lamb on Good Friday, publicly Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence...

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2011, vol.33, 49-69 demonstrating their atheism and transgression of Catholic 'rules' while simultaneously forging an alternative kind of community bond. 44

The rites of passage
The Republic's attempts to disable the 'Catholic compass' which until 1931 had controlled the most intimate life processes of every individual, centred upon the introduction of civil marriage and divorce and the secularisation of the cemeteries. 45nticlerical workers derived a new sense of freedom from these reforms.However, the response of politically mobilised Catholics again saw religious ritual used as a political tool.In the case of the cemeteries, Republican authorities generally succeeded in creating secular municipal cemeteries in localities, so that Catholic and secular cemeteries existed side by side.In Almería, for example, the Republican councillor and future mayor, Antonio Ortiz Estrella, visited the main cemetery shortly after the Republic's proclamation, delivering an impassioned speech proclaiming 'equality among the dead' and calling for the segregating wall to be demolished.His orders were later carried out to the letter in accordance with the January 1932 Law of Cemeteries. 46However, cases where parish cemeteries were expropriated in order to transform them into municipal ones (authorised in certain circumstances under the Law of Cemeteries) were more complicated.Parish priests, backed by their mobilised parishioners and fully informed by the Ecclesiastical authorities of 'the procedure which must be followed against unjust seizures,' challenged expropriations in provincial courts across Spain.They frequently obtained rulings in their favour. 47uneral processions, which required permission from the Interior Ministry, similarly became a means of challenging the Republic's authority. 48After April 1931, there occurred numerous examples of priests refusing to recognise the new legal situation and attempting to impose Catholic rites of passage upon anticlericals and non-Catholics.In December 1932, the President of the Republican Radical Socialist Association of Caparroso (Navarre) protested to the Civil Governor regarding the burial of Laureano Bozal Caballero, a Republican activist 'known in all of Navarre for his lay beliefs.'The telegram alleged that Catholic members of Bozal Caballero's family, in collusion with the local priest, had taken advantage of the absence of a will to give him a Catholic burial -something which was entirely offensive to his fundamental beliefs. 49In May 1932, riots erupted in the town of Villarrubia de Santiago (Toledo) when news spread that a young girl, who had been named three months earlier in a 2011, vol.33, 49-69

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Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence... secular celebration, had been taken to the parish church against her parents' wishes (the Interior Ministry document does not reveal by whom) and baptised.The priest, aware that he had contravened the girl's parents' wishes, presented himself voluntarily at the jail, where he was imprisoned to save him from the crowd that gathered to protest. 50orkers took measures locally to confront the politicisation of the rites of passage.Blocking Catholic funeral processions was one tactic.In October 1932, in Fuente Ovejuna (Córdoba), the despairing Civil Governor communicated to the Interior Ministry that in the village of Cardenchosa, the burial of a Catholic woman who had died three days earlier was being obstructed by villagers who would not tolerate the presence of priests at the funeral, or the public transferral of the body to the cemetery. 51In many places, leftist town councils attempted to reduce the public presence of the Church during funeral processions to a bare minimum.In Pechina (Almeria), burials officiated by priests were officially prohibited by the local authorities from 1932.Funeral corteges could, however, pass hurriedly in front of the church, whereupon the priest emerged to bless the mortal remains 'for the amount of time strictly necessary.' 52Simultaneously, workers transformed the funeral ceremonies of their friends, family members and political comrades into statements of political belief and defiance of mobilised Catholicism.In Perales de Tajuña (Madrid), the parish priest reported that during the Republican period, the town's leftists began to stage funeral processions complete with red flags and political symbols, honouring the dead with the clenched fist salute. 53Funeral processions like this became a prominent feature of the post-February 1936 Popular Front period.For leftwing militants, they were a powerful collective means of affirming the 'revolutionary memory' of comrades who had died in street violence provoked by rightwing groups or at the hands of the security forces 54 .

Education
The other chief means by which the Church exercised its hegemony in the private sphere before 1931 was through Catholic education.For reforming politicians like Manuel Azaña, the secularisation of the education system was a 'matter of public health'; the only way to forge a new generation of Republicans educated in the virtues of science and reason and free of the 'obscurantism' of Catholic teaching.For this reason, religious symbols were removed from state schoolrooms in May 1931.In December, the constitution reinforced this symbolic ousting of the Church from the Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence...

Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea
2011, vol.33, 49-69 educational sector by announcing the intention to ban religious orders from teaching 55 .These actions, combined with the Republic's much stated aim of creating a national system of lay primary education (the aspiration being a public school teacher and schoolroom in every village), engendered a shared hope among many workers that their children would be freed from religious teaching based on ideas of subservience and acceptance of inequality.However, the spark ignited by this reform soon mixed with frustration generated by the practical ineffectiveness of the measures.Firstly, the Republic's financial limitations coupled with a shortage of trained personnel meant that secularising legislation was applied patchily and inefficiently.Secondly, the religious orders involved in teaching frequently managed to circumvent the prohibitions, transferring ownership of their schools to lay hands and continuing to teach in civilian clothes.Thirdly, the legislation, combined with the highly emotive issue of the removal of crucifixes from state schoolrooms, hugely fomented Catholic mobilisation.During 1931 and 1932 demonstrations led by Catholic groups demanding the return of the crucifixes and the restoration of Catholic teaching thronged the streets of towns and cities across Spain.They were frequently led by women, who mobilised tremendously across the country during the Republican period under the auspices of the Catholic associational movement. 56In Burgo de Osma (Soria), for example, a group of local women burst into the town hall in January 1932, interrupting a session of the town council to demand the return of the crucifixes to the town's classrooms. 57he legislation also led to a flurry of more practical activity on the part of lay associations.The Cruzados de la Enseñanza (Crusaders of Teaching), for example, was formed in August 1933 to 'take care of the sustaining and the multiplication of Catholic primary schools' in order to 'save Catholic teaching from the deadly blow which its enemies wish to deal out to it.' 58By March 1934, these 'crusaders' controlled 116 primary schools and had opened 37 new ones in the diocese of Madrid-Alcalá alone. 59This combination of Catholic opposition and Republican financial limitations combined with the coming to power of a conservative and counter-reforming Republican government in November 1933 to ensure that the religious orders remained a very strong presence in the educational system throughout the peacetime Republican years.
For anticlerical workers, Catholic presence in education -like the Church's general public presence -actually seemed to be increasing under the Republic.This paradox explains the vehemence of the anticlerical dimension during the revolutionary rising in Asturias in October 1934.The rising was sparked by a perceived 'legal coup' against Republican reform: the entry of Catholic Party (CEDA) ministers to the three most sensitive cabinet posts (Labour; Justice and Agriculture).The CEDA, characterised by the explosive mixture of religious and quasi-fascist rhetoric employed by its leader José María Gil Robles, was fervently supported by the Catholic associational movement.In a European context marked by the gradual crushing of the left by rightwing authoritarian or fascist regimes, the CEDA (along with its youth group, the JAP) was seen by many on the left as a Church-endorsed fascist threat.Many industrial workers, increasingly convinced that their principal enemy was 'Vaticanist fascism', were similarly horrified by the Church's redoubled attempts to sabotage the anarchist and Socialist unions by strikebreaking and the fomenting of yellow unionism. 60uring the Asturian rising, which saw the killing of 34 religious personnel and the destruction of 58 religious buildings, religious personnel still involved in teaching were pursued furiously and eight Brothers of the Christian Doctrine were killed in Turón, where they had run schools where miners' children were taught in the traditional mode to defer to the 'people of order'. 61In May 1936, when rumours that nuns were distributing poisoned sweets to workers' children, sparked multiple attacks upon church property in popular districts of Madrid, the majority of buildings assaulted and set on fire were religious schools.Most of the institutions administered free education to workers' children, and all of them had escaped entirely Republican educational legislation. 62The rhetoric of the crowd during the events demonstrates the extent to which the Republic's bid to create a secular national education system had entered into popular anticlerical mentalities.Outside the school of María Auxiliadora in Cuatro Caminos, a spokesman explained to the director that 'as the Republic needs hygienic, clean places for its schools, the group has come to take possession.' 63

February -July 1936: Radicalisation and Construction
These acts of sabotage and counter mobilisation reveal that the forms of anticlerical collective action -such as the sabotage of religious processions or the destruction of religious property and symbols -remained consistent throughout the Republican years.However, the meanings and goals which its protagonists attached to their actions did not.By the February 1936 elections, anticlerical mentalities had hardened enormously among workers; acts of anticlerical violence were becoming ever more fiercely political.This change was the result of the intense battle which had been underway since 1931 against organised, politicised Catholicism in the public sphere.Now, after over two years of conservative Catholic-backed government, during which reformist labour legislation had been overturned and the Church had been given a free rein to make its physical presence felt in the street, the return to power of a Government with a reforming will generated an 'explosion' of popular expectation.On a local level, people who had endured years of frustration regarding the slowness and ineffectiveness of secularising reform began to pre-empt Government action, taking matters into their own hands on an unprecedented level.
As leftwing town councils began to govern, power relations on a local level were turned upside down and anticlerical collective action accelerated. 64On one hand, popular anticlerical attempts to 'reconquer' the public space during the Popular Front period were a clear reaction to the by now embedded association between clericalism and what many workers interpreted as the 'fascism' of the CEDA.In Portelárbol de la Sierra (Soria), local people entered the town's hermitage in June 1936, burning the images within it and writing 'Death to Gil Robles!Down with the clergy!' on its blackened walls. 65Between February and July 1936, anticlerical violence arose as a clear response to fear of a fascist takeover; churches were frequently burned in Spain's cities following provocation by the Falange (the Spanish fascist party, towards which the CEDA youth militants of JAP were now gravitating in huge numbers). 66In Valladolid, leftwing unions called a general strike in June 1936 to coincide with the festival of the Sacred Heart. 67By 1936, Valladolid was an important nucleus of fascist mobilisation.It was also the 'chosen city' of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a centre of militant Catholicism. 68Leftwing militants, who convoked the work stoppage as a protest over growing Falangist violence in the city, evidently saw the two issues as being tightly intertwined.In May 1936, during the fiery days of the poisoned sweets, crowd members remonstrated against the 'fascist clerical swine' 69 .
Most importantly, however, acts like these constituted a constructive attempt to tackle the still unsolved problem of the Church's public presence.The apparent aim of the crowd during the case of the poisoned sweets was the seizure of religious institutions and their conversion into 'clean and hygienic' secular schools. 70The objective of repossessing Catholic spaces and converting them into institutions which would serve the workers rarely came to fruition in the spring of 1936 because anticlerical protagonists were still for the most part limited by the Republican State's control of the forces of coercion.However, it was during the post February 1936 period of new reform-oriented Republican government that the first glimpses emerged of anticlerical violence being used as a tool in the making of a projected 'new society'.In March, the Bishop of Cartagena reported to the Papal Nuncio that those who carried out acts of anticlerical violence in his diocese: 'Now have the tactic of taking all of the religious items to the plaza or the road...they burn them in a bonfire leaving the building for other uses which they think appropriate.' 71In Arévalo (Ávila), the parish church was 'opened violently' and occupied by men affiliated to the Casa del Pueblo in March 1936. 72In Rozas del Puerto Real (Madrid), local men seized the rectory in April, hanging a huge red flag from it and declaring that it was the new Casa del Pueblo. 73uring the spring of 1936, the practice of burning a town's parish archive and its property registers along with its religious buildings also made its first widespread appearance.From Cehegín in Murcia, Elche in Alicante, Yecla in Cartagena -and a multitude of other towns and villages across Spain -priests reported to bishops that records of property ownership and Catholic-regulated births, deaths and marriages had been reduced to ashes by local people. 74This burning was a highly symbolic and public attempt to break with the 'cramping bonds of the past' and create a new society free of repression and tyranny -a repression and tyranny legitimised and propped up by the clergy.After 17-18 July 1936, the radical fragmentation of power across the Republican zone allowed the protagonists of anticlerical violence to contemplate the complete obliteration of the Church from the public sphere and the construction of new world which 'rejoiced in the overthrow of the old' in a way which had never been possible before. 75reased rather than diminished -especially in the field of education.In July 1936, these frustrated anticlericals were finally able to take matters into their own hands.With the structure of political opportunities working in their favour, and their bitter public battle against organised, politicised Catholicism fresh in their memories, they used iconoclastic destruction as a constructive force.Religious buildings, instead of being razed to the ground, became cornerstones of a new society under construction: hospitals, political centres, libraries and -most notably -secular schools.Across the Republican zone, people put into practice the measures that the Republic had failed to achieve legally, transforming churches into national primary schools and workers' universities.In Tetuán de las Victorias (Madrid), the school of the Hermanas de la Doctrina Cristiana, which had been attacked in May 1936 by crowds demanding secular education, was stripped of religious imagery and turned into a secular school. 82As these anticlerical protagonists -suddenly positioned at the forefront of their own social revolution -gave religious objects and buildings new meanings, using them for educational, cultural and logistical ends, they were constructing the secular society which they had fought for on the street for five years, and which the Republic had been unable to give them.
This 'popular claustrophobia' increased in correspondence with the Church's buoyant recovery from the liberal Disputing the Public Sphere: Anticlerical Violence...