Okay, so after watching The Good Fight and meeting with the directors, I am attempting to catch up on my blogs from the production materials. I decided to explore a folder concerning the Catholics and Protestants during the war. In the preface of the "Open Letters", the author describes how the Spanish Catholics published a pastoral letter in which they told their side of the Spanish Civil War and their reasoning for siding with not only Franco but also Fascism. In response to this, 150 Protestants drafted a letter, criticizing the Spanish Church. Here are important excerpts from the letter written by the Protestants:
* "Its apparent unwillingness to recognize the social and economic evils that have sickened SPain for generations is disquieting to those who feel that there can be no stability in the peninsula until these evils are eliminated..."
*Yet we cannot help being disturbed by the fact that no leaders of the Catholic Church in America have raised their voices n repudiation of the position taken by the Spanish hierarchy."
*"The Church never fails to teach submission and obedience as due to the constituted power, even those who hold and represent that power use it in abuse of the Church..."
*"It us sacrilege...to shoot, as at Badajoz, hundreds of men to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption."
Here, the Protestants attack the validity of the Catholics and likewise the positions and actions which they have taken during the war.
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I read these letters too, and I'm glad to see that you took an interest in them. I was impressed by the thoroughness of the Protestant critique and how well its arguments were crafted with sound logic. The Catholic letter, in contrast, was rife with vagueness and logical fallacies. It is incredible to see the Catholic church, as late as the 1930s, failing to acknowledge the separation of church and state as something worth defending universally. I would have thought that by the 20th century Catholic political doctrine would have evolved (in response to the Protestant Reformation!) to the point where it acknowledged the secularity of constitutional governments. So much for that thought...
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