Spain’s Roman Catholic Church said it is planning a new beatification ceremony for around 500 “martyrs” who were killed because of their religion during the 1936-39 civil war.“We hope to be able to organise the beatification of around 500 other martyrs, but we have not decided when or where,” a spokesman for the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Antonio Martinez Camino, said on Thursday.
The announcement came almost a year after Pope Benedict XVI staged the Vatican’s largest ever beatification ceremony, involving 498 victims of religious persecution during the civil war. Beatification is the last formal step before possible sainthood.
The Vatican regularly beatifies civil war victims, angering many on the left in Spain who argue the Church should apologize for supporting General Francisco Franco’s 1936 insurgency against the democratically elected left-wing Republican government and the repression that followed the war.
The “martyrs” mentioned by the Catholic Church are mostly clerics who were killed in diverse circumstances during the war. But historians believe that several thousand priests, monks and nuns died at the hands of the Spanish republic’s mainly leftwing defenders, among whom anti-Church sentiment was strong.
The Catholic Church was one of pillars of the Franco regime, which lasted until his death in 1975.
Historians have estimated that about 500,000 people from both sides were killed in the civil war.
After Franco’s victory, an estimated 50,000 Republicans were executed by Nationalist forces.
The beatification announcement came on same day as Spain’s leading judge, Baltasar Garzon, said he plans to investigate the disappearances of tens of thousands of people during the war and Franco’s ensuing dictatorship.
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(Source: TPO)