2023-11-11 23:21:25
November is the month of the dead: 39 years ago, the terrorist group GAL (Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups) murdered the leader of Herri Batasuna Santiago Brouard and 23 years ago, its counterpart, the terrorist group ETA, murdered the former socialist minister Ernest Lluch . Seven years ago, in 2016, Fidel Castro died in bed and the protagonists of our history also died in his bed: November 20 will mark 48 years since the death of the dictator Francisco Franco and on the 28th it will be 29 years since the death of the dictator. Cardinal Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, primate of Spain and president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference.
It was a cold morning in 1974, on the eve of spring, when the dictator received the cardinal, at his request. After the protocol greetings, Franco, in an advanced state of senility at the age of 81, being seriously deteriorated by Parkinson’s disease, began to cry when the cardinal primate Vicente Enrique y Tarancón informed him that he would be forced to excommunicate him if he expelled from Spain to Antonio Añoveros, bishop of Bilbao.
On December 20, 1973, two and a half months before this dramatic scene in El Pardo, a commando of the terrorist organization ETA – created in 1958 by expelled members of the PNV youth and within theocratic nationalism – had murdered the Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, president of the government and designated successor of the head of state. And a month before, his successor in office, Carlos Arias Navarro – characterized as Butcher of Malaga by Cuco Cerecedo in his series Figures of the National Holidaypublished in Diario 16, for his role in the ruthless repression that the coup plotters perpetrated in Malaga after their fall in 1937 -, he had read before the Cortes a speech that was called “of the opening” or of the “spirit of February 12” , because it announced a liberalization of the iron structures of the Franco regime, which had introduced a refreshing political air and to which numerous sectors of society – from the newly born democratic press to the progressive clergy – decided to take advantage of its letter in order to act accordingly. , with relative freedom, as if Arias’ words truly constituted the commitment they announced.
Because, in reality, Arias’ speech was nothing more than a delaying maneuver in the face of the ruthless pressures of the United States, exercised by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger himself, before with Carrero and now with the new president appointed by Franco, because they wanted ensure a peaceful and more or less democratic Franco succession. Since the times of the Cold War, the US administrations were imbued with the prejudices of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA) which maintained that “80% of the Spanish population could, without a doubt, be classified as in red”, cheerful appreciation of Commander BH Wyatt, spy in Spain with diplomatic cover, expressed before the Board of Analysts of the OSS on March 31, 1942.
The pastoral care of Añoveros
On February 24, 1974, Bishop Añoveros published the pastoral Christianity, message of salvation for people –written by his vicars and signed by him–, which called for the recognition of the cultural and linguistic identity of the Basque people in a panorama of general freedom in Spain: “The Basque people, like the other peoples of the Spanish State, has the right to preserve its own identity, cultivating and developing its spiritual heritage, without prejudice to a healthy exchange with surrounding peoples, within a socio-political organization that recognizes its just freedom. However, in the current circumstances, the Basque people encounter serious obstacles to being able to enjoy this right. The use of the Basque language, both in education at its different levels and in the media (press, radio and TV), is subject to notorious restrictions. The various cultural manifestations are also subject to discriminate control.” It was a litmus test for Arias’ vaunted opening speech.
The murder of Carrero Blanco continues to be surrounded by a multitude of unknowns yet to be revealed: on the eve of the ETA attack that ended his life, he was visited by Kissinger, to whom he informed that the renewal of the North American bases in Spain would have to go through a defense treaty. mutual, not the mere agreement that had been extended since 1953, and the investigating judge Luis de la Torre Arredondo – from whom the summary was taken to pass it on to the military jurisdiction, and who, after hearing experts in explosives, came to the conclusion that The magnitude of the attack did not respond to the effect of the dynamite that ETA confessed to having used – he said in an interview in Interviú, in 1984, that “he had the increasingly solid conviction that the CIA knew that they were going to kill Carrero, that The CIA was behind it.” The disappearance of the far-right president of the government had the so-called “bunker” of the regime up in arms, which predicted its extinction in a Franco regime without Franco and for which Carrero represented its figurehead and guarantee of continuity of the most immobile Francoist orthodoxy.
Pressured by this “bunker”, Arias, who advocated this controlled opening as a continuing strategy of Francoism, accused Bishop Añoveros of seriously attacking the unity of Spain and ordered his house arrest before his immediate expulsion from Spain.
Antonio Añoveros Ataún (Pamplona, 1909-Bilbao, 1987) had been bishop of Cádiz and Ceuta before being appointed to Bilbao in 1971 and was called the Spanish Helder Cámara – the famous Brazilian bishop of his generation, indigenous and opposed to the military dictatorship – for being an early defender of the rights of Andalusian braceros. Añoveros was part of that Spanish Church that in the 60s and 70s was preparing its own transition from the Francoist national-Catholicism that had provided it with so many benefits for more than three decades and was now becoming aware of the error of its submission to the dictatorship. What was reflected in the joint Assembly of bishops and priests in September 1971 at the Madrid seminary, where the resolution was approved to ask for forgiveness for not having known how to play a conciliatory role after the civil war, later ratified by the XV Plenary Assembly of the Episcopal Conference, December of the same year. The approved text read: “If we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar and his word is no longer among us (Jn., 1, 10). Thus, we humbly acknowledge and ask for forgiveness because we have not always known how to be true ministers of reconciliation within our people, divided by a war between brothers.”
Arias arranged a special plane at Bilbao’s Sondika airport to transport Añoveros to Vatican City, but the bishop announced that he would not leave his diocese if it were not by order of the Holy See and that if he were forced to do so by force , contrary to the provisions of the concordat between Spain and the papacy of 1953, the executors and the higher chain of command, which meant reaching Franco, would automatically incur the penalty of excommunication.
The Arias Government had no choice but to withdraw the expulsion order after the extreme approach that Tarancón made to Franco in his office in El Pardo, which ended with the dictator devastated and bathed in tears. Añoveros continued as head of the Bilbao bishopric until his retirement in 1978.
The Church, from fundamentalism to anti-Francoism
What had happened since those times when Spain recognized the Catholic religion as the true one and the only one that could be practiced in public and when, in fair reciprocity, the Spanish Catholic Church aligned itself as a single bishop behind Franco, better said, at his sides to escort him under the canopy?
“All the cardinals have recognized the legitimacy of our Crusade,” declared Pla i Deniel, the cardinal primate of Spain in March 1946. And the bishop of Córdoba, Albino González y Menéndez-Reigada, described Franco in 1946 as an “envoy of God” against “the enemies of Spain,” which, he taught in his catechism, “were, among others, liberalism, democracy and the Jews.” Three years earlier, the recently consecrated bishops of Almería, Cádiz, Lérida, Palencia, Vitoria, Astorga and Guadix swore allegiance to the State in the Pardo palace, before celebrating their complicity with a meal invited by the Caudillo. Curiously, Pla i Deniel, one of the most pro-Franco bishops in the hierarchy, was the only one not to swear an oath of fidelity to the head of state when he was appointed archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1941 due to an express prohibition by the Vatican.
The few ‘black sheep’ of the clergy during the long post-war period were now such a large flock that they had forced, in August 1968, a “concordatary prison” to be set up in Zamora, only for clerics, inhabited mainly by Basque religious and which represented materially the paradox that meant that in the last years of the Franco regime there were more priests imprisoned in “Catholic Spain” than in all the prisons of Europe, including the communist ones…
Franco’s regime, indissoluble from the Spanish Church, began to dissolve precisely because of this union, after thirty-five years of joint and mutually beneficial trajectory between the “sent of God” and the “Church in danger.”
#day #Franco #cried