In recounting the various persecutions of the Church in Spain, from the Middle Ages onward, he traces four main causes. The first three are the struggle between Church and King, the struggle between Church and State, and the liberal anticlericalism of the nineteenth century. The last is the ‘development of what is broadly termed Communism, i.e., a number of related but not identical proletarian movements, one common factor of which is disbelief in, and denial of, God’. All church-burning, priest-shooting and anticlerical violence generally are supposed to have their roots in Communism and its Spanish variant, Anarchism, which are inseparable from ‘hatred of God’. It is not, Professor Peers thinks, a question of hostility to a corrupt church, but of ‘a cold, calculated, determined attempt to destroy institutional religion throughout the country’.

Now, it is no use denying that churches have been destroyed all over Government Spain. Various Government partisans, in their efforts to make their cause respectable, have pretended that churches were only demolished when they had been used as fortresses in the street fighting at the beginning of the war. This is merely a lie. Churches were destroyed everywhere, in town and village, and except for a few Protestant churches none were allowed to open and hold services till about August, 1937. It is also useless to deny that both Anarchism and Marxian Socialism are hostile to all religion. But this does not really tell us why the Spanish churches were destroyed. Professor Peers’s Catalonia Infelix2 made it clear that he understands the internal political situation in Government Spain a great deal better than most writers on the Spanish War, and there are two facts bearing on this question which he is probably aware of. One is the fact that during the present war the Russian Government has used its influence in Spain against and not for anticlerical violence and revolutionary extremism generally. The other is that the sacking of churches happened during the early period when the proletariat were in control, and the churches began to re-open and the priests to come out of hiding, when the Caballero Government fell and the middle class was back in the saddle. In other words the anticlerical movement, in its violent form, is a popular movement and a native Spanish movement. It has its roots not in Marx or Bakunin,3 but in the condition of the Spanish people themselves.