Claretian Martyrs of the Spanish Civil War

Selections from The Last Crusade: Spain: 1936 © 1996 by Warren Carroll

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August

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In Aragon during August, Buenaventura Durruti, the anarchist firebrand who had led the storming of the Ataranzas barracks in Barcelona, was telling the world what he intended to do to his country and his people. He said to Canadian reporter Pierre van Paassen: “We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.” Later in the month, after boasting that he would soon lead a victorious attack on Zaragoza, he said to Russian journalist Mikhail Koltsov: “We shall subordinate ourselves neither to Madrid nor Barcelona, neither to Azaña nor Companys…. We shall show you, Bolsheviks, how to make a revolution.”

Durruti could hardly have failed to hear the story, quickly spread all over Spain, of how on August 3 Republican aircraft had dropped three bombs on the shrine of Our Lady of Pilar in Zaragoza, one of the most revered in the whole country, but not one of them exploded; while one, striking a street in front of the church, left the mark of a cross in the pavement. On August 8 Durruti returned with his column to the small city of Barbastro in Republican-controlled Aragon to announce his intention to eliminate “dangerous persons,” among them the Bishop of Barbastro, Florencio Asensio. When Durruti spoke thus, everyone knew he meant it. That night Bishop Asensio finished a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and said to his fellow prisoners: “My sons, I wish to give my last benediction, and afterward, Our Lord Jesus, | will celebrate my last supper with you.” At three o'clock in the morning he was taken from prison saying, “What a beautiful night this is for me! I go to the house of the Lord!” He was shot at Kilometer 3 on the road from Barbastro to Sariñena and left for dead. He lived for two hours upon a pile of corpses, then delivered up his soul. Afterwards his body was mutilated.

That same day the 78-year-old Bishop of Segorbe, Miguel Serra Sucarrate, was shot; the day before, the Bishop of Cuenca, Cruz Laplana Laguna, was killed at Kilometer 5 on the road from Cuenca to Villar de Olalla, saying triumphantly to his murderers:

Do you not believe in Heaven? Heaven is, my sons! Do you not believe in Hell? Hell is, my sons! … You can kill me: my body I leave behind, but my soul will rise to Heaven…. I pardon you and in Heaven I will pray for you.

Four days earlier, on August 5, Bishop Silvio Huix of Lerida, after saying Mass for his fellow Prisoners earlier in the day, was taken to a cemetery for killing with 22 laymen. He asked to be the last of the group shot, so that he might give absolution to each of the others before they were struck down. A week later, on August 12, auxiliary Bishop Manuel Borrás of Tarragona was executed beside a highway, his body mutilated and then partially burned with gasoline. And on that day the Bishop of Jaén in Andalusia, Manuel Basulto Jiménez, was taken from a prison train going to Madrid by a mob at a railway station on the way and killed at Vallecas with 200 other prisoners including his sister Teresa, who begged for her brother’s life until she was cut down by a hideous freckled militia-woman named Josefa Coso. Bishop Basulto Jiménez died on his knees, asking God to forgive his sins and his assassins.

Within a single week, six Spanish bishops had been martyred. Nothing like it had been seen since the ancient Roman persecution of Diocletian. Even the massacres of September 1792 in the French Revolution took the lives of only two bishops.

On August 10 the Vatican pointed out that the Spanish Republican government had made no real effort to stop the killing of priests and religious in Spain or the destruction of churches there, nor had it offered any public expression of regret for these atrocities nor condemned their perpetrators.

In the prison at Barbastro an entire community of Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, known as Claretians for their founder, the 19th-century Spanish saint Antonio Maria Claret, awaited Durruti’s decision on their fate. The community included nine priests, twelve lay brothers and 39 seminarians. They had been seized on July 20, the day of the fall of the Ataranzas barracks in Barcelona, when the anarchists and militant Socialists gained full control of Catalonia and some adjoining parts of Aragon including Barbastro. The prison was a small old building without sanitary facilities, severely overcowded, with only 16 to 20 square yards per prisoner. Twenty-one of the Claretians were confined in a small unfurnished cell ventilated only by a window twelve by six inches, in the oppressive heat of a Spanish summer. Every day some came to taunt them and their fellow prisoners and call for their killing soon.

At 3:30 in the morning of August 12 four Claretian priests and two deacons were taken from Barbastro prison for execution. They were the first of the martyrs of this community, all of whom were beatified by Pope John Paul I in 1994 [Ed. Felipe de Jesús Munárriz and 50 Companions were beatified on 25 October 1992]. The other Claretians were now being held together in a larger room, formerly used as an auditorium. There that day they wrote their last message, on a chocolate bar wrapper:

August 12, 1936, Barbastro. Six of our companions are now martyrs. Soon we too shall join their ranks, but before we do we want to state that we forgive all who take our lives. We offer our lives for the Christianization of the working-men, for the reign of the Catholic Church, for our beloved Congregation, and for our dear families. This is the last offering of its martyred sons to their Congregation.

Immediately after midnight of the 13th the hour struck for their next martyrdom. The prisoners were assembled on the stage of the former auditorium. Mariano Abad, the gravedigger and a militiaman known for his ferocity, read out the names of twenty Claretians. As each young man’s name was called, he leaped from the stage to the floor; in the words of one of them who escaped death because of his Argentine citizenship, “their faces glowed with an indescribably supernatural air.” They were bound with ropes stained by the blood of earlier martyrs, which they kissed fervently, One of their priests gave them general absolution. As they marched out under guard they began to sing, and continued singing all the way to the killing place, on a nearby highway overlooking a ravine. Most often they sang the hymn of the International Eucharistic Congress which had been held in Madrid:

Let us sing to the Love of loves; Let us sing to the Lord, for God is here! Let us adore Christ the Redeemer; Glory to Christ Jesus! Heaven and earth, bless the Lord We will love You always, God of love!

At the last moment they were offered their lives if they would join the revolutionary militia. Every one of them refused. They knelt on the ground, extending their arms in the form of a cross. In that posture all of them were shot, and buried in their cassocks.

Twenty-one more Claretians had already been told they would die the same death the following night. During the day one of them, Faustino Pérez, managed to smuggle out a letter to his Claretian superiors reporting the martyrdom of 26 of the community already and the forthcoming martyrdom of 21 more, and saying:

We all die praying to God that the blood from our wounds may not be a vengeful blood, but that it may run red and full of life in your veins, to stimulate your growth and development all over the world. Good-bye, dear Congregation! Your sons, the martyrs of Barbastro, salute you from prison and offer you our sorrow and anguish as a holocaust to expiate our faults, our weaknesses, and as a testimony of our faithful, generous and eternal love. The martyrs of tomorrow, the 14th, are mindful of the fact that they die on the eve of the Assumption. What a remembrance that will be! We die for the right to wear the cassock and we die on the very anniversary of the day on which we were clothed in it.

The Martyrs of Barbastro (source)

On that same day, the 13th, in the town of Cervera, 30-year-old Claretian Brother Fernando Saperas was martyred by militia after they had attempted for 15 hours to induce or force him to violate his vow of chastity. On that one day, 104 priests were martyred throughout Spain.

The remaining Claretians at Barbastro were not, for unexplained reasons, killed as scheduled in the early morning hours Of the 14th, but rather at that time on the 15th, the great feast of the Assumption. They too sang all the way to their killing place, especially the Salve Regina. Let us hear, in conclusion, not again from them but from one of their murderers, Verbegal of the Civil Guard, giving Hell‘s own testimony to their constancy:

Those God-damned fools! No one could shut them up! All the way they sang and praised Christ the King. One of them fell dead when we hit him with the butt of a gun, and this is no lie. But the more we hit them, the more they sang and shouted: “Viva Cristo Rey!”

On that feast of the Assumption the newspaper Workers‘ Solidarity in Barcelona flaunted an enormous headline DOWN WITH THE CHURCH! Its editorial read:

The Church must disappear forever…. The wretched little Catholic holes no longer exist. The torches of the people have pulverized them. In their place rises a free spirit that has nothing in common with the masochism which incubates in the naves of the cathedrals. But it is necessary to tear up the Church by the roots. For this we must take by force all its goods that rightly belong to the people. Religious orders must be dissolved. Bishops and cardinals must be shot.

But as ever, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. In the words of Stanley Payne, one of the few historians Of the Spanish Civil War not largely or entirely blinded by anti-Catholic prejudice:

It was above all the outbreak of violent mass revolution in the Republican zone, with its church burnings, economic appropriations, and many thousands of murders, that quickly rallied the more conservative half of the Spanish population to the Nationalist cause. Almost equally important was the identification of the revolt with religion, which soon began to convert the revolt into an official crusade and provided its primary cultural, emotional, and spiritual support.

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• Read on Internet Archive and Isidore (pp. 122–123)

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All over Spain the martyrdoms continued; it was in August, rather than in July, that they reached their peak. On August 16 in Ciudad Real department at the center of Spain, six priests and 14 brothers of the Brothers of the Christian Schools were killed at Fuente del Fresno. They marched to their death chanting requiem. Their superior, Rev. Victor Chumillas, adjured them to “raise your eyes to Heaven and recite your last Our Father, for in a few minutes you will be in the Kingdom of Heaven.” At the end he led them in saying with Christ, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” Six days later the Bishop of Ciudad Real, Narciso de Esténaga Echeverria, was shot; his body was later found near a small village eight kilometers from the city of Ciudad Real, but no details of his martyrdom are known. In the entire persecution 106 priests of this small diocese were martyred, which was almost all of them.

On August 18 fifteen priests and religious were killed near the village of Valdealgoria in the province of Teruel of the diocese of Zaragoza. Like so many of the other martyrs, they pardoned their killers and died shouting “Viva Cristo Rey!” Another exceptionally large-scale martyrdom, comparable to that at Lérida on the 20th, took place August 31 at Málaga in the far south, where 60 priests and religious including Enrique Vidaurreta, rector of the Málaga seminary, were taken from prison and killed. On August 28, as on the 9th, two bishops were martyred in a single day: Diego Ventaja Milan, Bishop of Almeria in southeastern Spain, and Manuel Medina, Bishop of Guadix near Granada. Their bodies were burned.

However many supporters of the Republic in and out of Spain might try to hide from themselves and others the full magnitude of the horror unleashed there particularly during the month of August, or feebly to justify it as a reaction against “fascism” and excessive Church power in the past, Pope Pius XI understood exactly what was happening. The Church, as so often before in her long history, was under maximum attack from Satan. Within the borders of the Republic her enemies rode high, unchallenged, No earthly, material means remained to defend her, only the sublime courage of the martyrs. The rally of the martyrs had presaged the end of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, especially the glorious parade of the sixteen blessed Carmelite sisters of Compiégne to the guillotine in July 1794, singing on their way like the Claretian martyrs of Barbastro. In Spain in 1936 there was a still greater rally of the martyrs, befitting the magnitude of the assault upon Christ and His Church which the actual firing on statues of Christ so clearly betokened.

On August 22 Pope Pius XI granted special permission for the celebration of Mass in secret in Republican Spain, without altar or sacred signs or vessels, with a chalice of glass or pottery, in view of the persecution, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, in a letter to the general of the Missionaries of the Immaculate Heart of Mary conveying this special permission, assured them that the Pope’s heart was with his afflicted sons, who were writing with their blood a glorious new page in the 2,000 year history of Christian martyrdom. He told Cardinal Pacelli to tell them that he shared in spirit their agony and their sacrifice. God was with them, and the Vicar of Christ would never forget them.

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