Sure, maybe you missed the post where I invited the mods to close this thread.
I’ve merged Evil Captor’s thread with the original thread on this subject. Post 52 was Evil Captor’s OP.
There’s something I had specifically made a point not to mention, but what the heck, in honor of Evil Captor…
During the Civil War, about 70,000 children were evacuated to countries which had offered them refuge. The countries which received most children were France, the USSR, the UK and Belgium, with smaller groups going to Switzerland, Holland, the Scandinavian countries and Mexico. Most of those children were reunited with their families after the war: either their parents were able to join them, or the children to come back. But los niños de Rusia were not. About 2900 children, the immense majority of them from the current Autonomous Regions of Asturias, Cantabria and Euskadi, never met their relatives again until they were themselves grandparents. In Asturias, the Republican signs were Communism (mainly Unionist) and Anarchism; in Euskadi, it was Nationalism.
One of the entities which was behind those evacuations was, repeat after me
the Catholic Church, which in Euskadi was still as strong as it ever had been, and not much less in Cantabria or even Asturias.
What, the RCC sent kids to Russia, to become little good communists? Well, yeah. Not alone, mind you: despite what some people would like to draw whenever a member of the cloth turns out to have been involved in anything, they didn’t go to people’s houses and grab the children from their parents’ hands, wielding a crucifix and a vial of holy water (which would leave few hands for the grabbing itself) nor were they acting alone. But, first, they would have sent those kids to anywhere which was willing to welcome them so long as it wasn’t Hell, and second, in Euskadi the amount of churches burned and people “in the religion trade” murdered was much smaller than in those places were Anarchists and specially Communists dominated; the old structures were still in place, and convents and parish churches had buildings and resources specifically designed to house and move large amounts of people.
What some of you fail to grasp about the involvement of the Catholic Church in the child-stealing, and some of you refuse to admit (I’m looking at you, Fury, because YOU do not have an excuse for ignorance of Spain’s history), is how much the Catholic Church was embedded into the life of la Católica España until pretty much yesterday.
The RCC was involved with the rise and protection of ETA.
The RCC was involved with the rise of Cooperativism.
The RCC was involved with the evacuation of refugees, and with the return of evacuees.
The RCC was involved with the modernization of Spain.
The RCC was immovilist and retrograde.
The RCC was involved with the rise of Socialism and Communism in Spain.
The RCC was Republican.
The RCC was Carlista, Nationalist, leftist, rightist, centrist, Federalist.
The RCC was involved in the Courts of Cadiz, and in calling the Thousand Sons of Saint Louis; the RCC took up arms against the French, against the mainland, against Madrid.
The RCC was involved in anything and everything you care to pick, if by “the RCC” you mean “any priest, nun, novice or seminar student”, because it was so large a part of the country.
For the last 200 years give or take (the next year celebrates the 200-anniversary of our first Constitution: March 19, 1812), anticlericals have been complaining about “the grip of the Church”. Diverse anticlerical governments expelled the Jesuits (a popular scapegoat here for several hundred years, although nowadays it seems to be mostly with foreign writers who haven’t gotten the memo that now it’s “Opus Dei” who’s supposed to be into the grey emminence business), forbade priests and nuns from teaching without having the human resources to replace them (for buildings, just take over the schools formerly manned by the clothed), and utterly failed to do much more than screw things up.
“Anarchists” with money, such as the Chao family (yes, as in “Manu”), founded slum schools manned by secular teachers; governments timidly reinforced the secular University system. The “” are because many of them called themselves other names; the point is, they were individualists who believed in doing things yourself rather than in organizing a large structure before you start doing. Note that there is a gap in between “primary school” and “university”: guess who were the only ones teaching at that level - you got it! The main builder of Trade Schools in Spain wasn’t the Unions, it was the Order of Sales; the Jesuits were founded by half a dozen University students and have been linked to education at all levels ever since; between the Sacred Heart, the Annes and the Company of Our Lady, the probability that an educated woman would have attended a school owned, managed and manned by nuns approached 100% (having private tutors was seen as blasé, once these schools were around).
Get to the 20th century, and we have Anarchists, Socialists and Communists going the “rape them, kill them and hang them from the belltower while we burn the place down” route. Often, the people involved in the actual attacks weren’t in it for ideological reasons, they were what would nowadays be called “hooligans”, only using politics rather than sports as an excuse. Meanwhile, the government of Dictator Primo de Rivera builds Normal Schools (schools for teachers) and rural non-religious schools at an unprecedented rate, but when the Second Republic once more bans nuns and priests from teaching there simply aren’t enough teachers: there are regions where the ban means closing down every single school.
The government which broke the RCC’s grip was Franco’s. He put into place that non-religious infrastructure of social services (schools, high schools, universities, hospitals) which first reinforced and later has been replacing religious ones.
Today, my nephews go to “a nun’s school” where not a single teacher is a nun; it’s owned by a religious order of nuns, it offers Religion and History of Religion among its optional subjects, and also an optional weekly Mass, but not a single teacher is a nun (there are two priests, from two different orders). Today, if the government forbade nuns and priests from teaching there would be bitching, but it wouldn’t send thousands of children, teenagers and university students into the streets. Today. Seventy-five years ago, about the only thing you could do in Spain without involving a (ex-)priest, (ex-)nun, (ex-)seminarist, (ex-)novice was burn churches… oh wait…
Well thank you, that was an excellent and detailed history of the RCC’s involvement in Spain and a great job of ignorance-fighting, whether or not you really meant to honor my by writing it, I feel honored in having inspired it.
However, doesn’t really change the facts on the ground, does it? Your argument is that the RCC was involved in baby stealing because it was involved in everything in Spain until quite recently. It sounds like it had an almost quasi-governmental role there. But still … it was involved. And it’s kind of all of a pattern with the other things I cited in my post: the Catholic Church worldwide has been involved in a number of horrific abuses of children.
Now, historically, the Catholic Church in many places has been the ONLY refuge for the poor and the downtrodden. It’s done a great deal of good along with its great deal of evil. On the one hand, it has been a consistent voice against economic inequality. On the other hand, it has done a lot of looking the other way in lands where poor people are treated like slaves.
But on top of this, it’s a net oppressor of women. Its opposition to abortion and most most most of all, to birth control, means it’s a huge wet mass of stink hanging over the human race. So I’m not willing to let the RCC’s evils slide, even if I do recognize its good acts. We’d all be so much better off if the RCC disbanded tomorrow. Really, we would.
Yup, good ole’ Generalisimo Paco was certainly responsible for downgrading the RCC’s power in Spain – :rolleyes:
Too bad the fucker’s not quite dead yet.
Sure is lucky Franco managed to defend the Spanish Church against those nasty unwashed Republicans, isn’t it?
Just seems to me a little odd that this thread hasn’t heard from those rightwingers who usually can’t help but rush to Franco’s defense.
Franco has defenders on the SDMB?
Indeed. But of course they aren’t defending Franco really, just sad it was necessary to back a fascist to oppose the greater evil of a democratically elected left of center government. That and jerking off over the cute uniforms and boots.
Yeah, but let me put it this way… “newsflash: the Southern Baptist Church involved in Jim Crow!”
I haven’t seen a single person here calling for investigation of the role of CPS, or hospitals, or civil registries. Only the RCC. It’s as if you guys think “the RCC” is, first, not comprised of individuals, second, operates in a vacuum and third, was the main culprit and instigator of both the withchunts of the war plus later cases of child-stealing not linked to political reasons.
Too late to edit: the RCC was involved institutionally in the witchhunts and that isn’t exactly breaking news; the other cases appear to be non-institutional and involved priests and nuns more at the beginning (when there were so many nurses that were nuns, and so much of “CPS” was Church structures, that the involvement was necessary) than later on, once secular structures and people took over.
Still, I’m sure I’m not the only person in this thread wondering whether it’s a good idea to allow Catholics to raise children. The poor things should be removed and placed in decent homes.
No, Cadillacs definitely should not be permitted to raise children. The very idea! Think of all the toxic fluids dripping from the engine. Definitely not good for children.