Spanish bishops are preparing what is being described as the largest-scale one-day beatification ceremony in the history of the Catholic Church.The ceremony, scheduled for October 28 in the Vatican, will beatify 498 Catholics who were killed by anti-clerical leftists before and during Spain's 1936-39 Civil War.
Leftist media claim it is not a coincidence that the beatifications will follow the preliminary approbation of a law condemning the repressive policies of General Francisco Franco, whose uprising sparked the war.
Franco then ruled for 36 years as dictator, largely with the backing of Spain's Catholic Church.
The church denies any link between the law and the massive ceremony, which will take place in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI on Saint Peter's Square.
The church has, however, been unable to convince critics accusing it of using the beatifications to push its conservative view of the Civil War and the Franco era.
Spain's Catholic hierarchy never heeded calls to apologize for supporting Franco, whose rise was a precursor of that of fascism in Europe, and who ruled the country with an iron fist until his death in 1975.
The church helped to justify Franco's rebellion against the legal, leftist republican government by presenting it as a crusade, 10 theologians representing alternative views said in a 1999 document.
Anti-clericalism had been a feature of leftist and liberal thinking in Spain, and Franco's "national-Catholicism" helped the church counter such currents, though some priests especially in the Catalan and Basque regions distanced themselves from the general.
The so-called Law of Historic Memory proposed by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government is the first major attempt to rectify injustices committed by Franco.
The law aims at rehabilitating the memory of tens of thousands of Franco's forgotten victims through measures such as declaring their summary executions illegitimate, or exhuming their remains from mass graves.
All the main parties endorse the law except for the conservative People's Party (PP), which has some historic links with Francoism.
In the most recent move, the parties agreed that the law would order the removal of all the remaining symbols paying tribute to the Franco regime in Spain.
Numerous churches displaying slabs honouring "those killed by the Marxist revolution" or "those who fell for Spain and God" will have to eliminate them, or they will lose millions of euros in subsidies for their preservation or restoration.
The law was "unnecessary at this time," Episcopalian Conference vice-president Antonio Canizares said this week. The church has also backed the PP's view that the law "reopens old wounds."
"Who is going to return to us the temples, art works, images, paintings" destroyed by anti-clericals during the Civil War, Jorge Lopez Teulon, one of the priests who have been preparing the beatifications, said in an interview with a right-wing publication.
The ceremony at the Vatican will beatify priests, nuns, monks, deacons, a seminarian and a few secular Catholics who were killed in what the church describes as "the biggest religious persecution in Spain's history."
Later on, the bishops intend to seek the beatification of hundreds more people killed just before and after the war.
Thousands of church representatives were killed by leftists, who burned churches and sacked monasteries.
The new law will include a condemnation of those killings at the request of the conservative Catalan party CiU.
Yet, as critics of the church point out, thousands of people were killed in an equally unjustified manner by Francoists for being communists, anarchists or homosexuals. The killings continued even after Franco won the war.
The bishops intend to bring at least 20,000 Spanish believers to the Vatican in what critics see as an attempt to display Catholic unity against the Law of Historic Memory.
Church spokesman Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, however, said the ceremony had nothing to do with the law.
The church's agenda did not depend on government policies, and many of the beatifications had been in preparation for decades, Martinez Camino stressed.
The beatifications did not seek to divide Spaniards, but represented reconciliation, because the martyrs had "forgiven those who killed them," Catalan bishop Joan-Enric Vives said.
The government has tried to avoid a conflict with the church, promising to send a high-level delegation to the ceremony.
Benedict XVI is expected to be present, though he personally does not celebrate beatification, but only canonization masses, which constitute the final step on a person's road to sainthood. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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