Thursday, November 01, 2007

When the Church truly and definitely concern with spiritual matters

A couple of days ago, the Catholic Church beatified 498 Catholics murdered between 1934, 1936-1939 in the course of the Spanish Civil War. This event would not be so controversial if the whole amount of people beatified would not have belonged to one side, the Francoist one . It is curious. All these 498 persons have in common that they were murdered by Republican forces that at that time were the democratic and legitimated government in Spain. Franco imposed his rule against the will of the majority of the people in Spain, but the Catholic Church approved that. During the first years of the dictatorship, cardinal Isidro Goma said that the military coup launched by Franco was " una cruzada cristiana" ( (Christian crusader).
Some persons in Spain think that it is time for the Catholic Church to apologize for this horrible historical mistake. Some persons think that the role of the Catholic Church in Spain was the one of a victim and tyrant. According to the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, in Spain there are more than 30,000 persons buried in common graves ( and these are not precisely victims of the Republicans forces). If the beatification process of these 498 persons considered as " martyrs of the twenty century" is non-partisan and political, Why we do not have among these "beatos" any person murdered by the Francoist forces? The official posture of the Catholic Church is because nobody has started the process. Many of these persons have name and surname, their cases have been extensively reported, but some sectors of the Catholic Church remain silent. In this regard, I do not necessarily agree with Lorenzo that the Church should strictly care about spiritual matters, mainly because when they try to do it, there is most of the times a strong ideology behind.

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