Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain, July 1936

Abstract

In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.

A ‘Gigantic Struggle Between Believers and Those Without God’? Catholicism in the Spanish Second Republic, 1931–1939

“…Thomas, Faith and the Fury , p. 139–141. For the rationality of these actions, see Bruce Lincoln, ‘Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain, July 1936’, Comparative Studies in Society and History , 27(2), , pp. 231–260.…”