I only write letters to the editors of publications very rarely, but the Catholic Herald was decent enough to publish a missive I sent defending Franco as the lead Letter to the Editor in this week’s edition. Readers of the Times Literary Supplement will recall seeing a brief note from me on the subject of Wodehouse & banking published in that weekly’s letters page a few months ago.

Franco came to the defence of a Church threatened with extinction

30 January 2009

From Mr Andrew Cusack

SIR – David Barrett (Letter, January 23) is certainly right that atrocities were committed by both sides in the Spanish Civil War, but is wrong to deny the Church’s debt to Franco. Mr Barrett claims that the presence of Communists in local government in France is proof that they were no threat to civilisation, but he must certainly recognise a vast difference between being in control of rubbish collection and street naming and being in control of the entire vast apparatus of a nation.

According to Mr Barrett, Franco “was an ally of Hitler and Mussolini” but while these two leaders did give the Nationalist forces tremendous aid and support during the Civil War, they received very little in return for their trouble. At the end of the traumatic struggle, Franco held a Te Deum at the Church of St Barbara in Madrid, giving thanks to God for the victory. He laid his sword upon the altar and vowed never to take it up again unless Spain was threatened with invasion. Thus Franco refused to declare war on France and Britain (the two countries whose arms embargo against him during the Civil War in fact forced him to accept Hitler and Mussolini’s help) because the two powers obviously bore no warlike intent against neutral Spain. Mr Barrett rightly asks: “How was an actual Fascist dictatorship any better than a possible Communist dictatorship?”

To begin, Franco’s dictatorship was not actually Fascist, but rather of an authoritarian reactionary sentiment. Franco only ever attended a single national mass meeting of the Falange and many of the proper Spanish Fascists (such as the Fuerza Nueva) thought very poorly of Franco’s regime.

Secondly, the Communist dictatorship was not merely possible, but very real. The areas of Spain which fell under Communist control were places of brutal repression, not only of the Catholics who rightly opposed Communist power, but even of the Communists’ fellow travellers: the anarchists, Marxists, Trotskyites and other Leftists. Under the Communists 12 per cent of Spain’s clergy were martyred – the Diocese of Barbastro alone lost 85 per cent of its priests. Over 20,000 churches and chapels were damaged or destroyed, and in Barcelona every single Catholic altar was desecrated. Compare this with the quite broad freedom (and patronage) the Church enjoyed under Franco – one archbishop repeatedly attacked him from the pulpit with no interference.

Given the choice between the total physical destruction of the Church in Spain and a dictatorial regime in which the Church’s freedom was guaranteed, I am sure we must join with Mr Dytor in admitting that “we all owe Franco a huge debt of gratitude”.

Yours faithfully,
Andrew Cusack
University of Stellenbosch,
South Africa

Found in an old Spanish magazine printed towards the end of the Civil War.

Category: Franco

An Architecture of Continuity: Luis Moya Blanco’s Universidad Laboral de Gijón

In 1944, an undersecretary of Francoist Spain’s Ministry of Labour visited the city of Gijón to attend the funerals of a group of miners killed in a mine collapse. After the solemn rites took place, Turiño Carlos Pinilla met with a group of locals filled with concern for the offspring of the dead workers. All they asked of the bureaucrat was an orphanage; what they ended up with ten years later was a magnificent palace of charity, almost a city unto itself and the largest building in Spain: the Universidad Laboral de Gijón.

An example of Catholic social teaching (which upholds the essential dignity of work and the working man), the “labor university” was founded as a secondary-level institution to teach vocational and technical skills to the children of Spain’s working class. At over 2,900,000 sq. ft. of space, it is more than double the size of the great Royal Monastery and Palace of El Escorial built by Phillip II in the sixteenth century, and was accompanied by over 380 acres of farmland.

The goal was to accommodate 1,000 students (eventually doubling) from the age of 12 to 16, with residences, school facilities, industrial workshops, working farmland, athletic facilities, and sporting fields. The educational aspect and leadership of the Laboral was entrusted to the Jesuits, while the Poor Clares also had a convent on the premises, performing various household tasks and caring for the girls as their particular charism.

Construction began in 1946, while much of the rest of Europe was recovering from the horrors of the Second World War. Francisco Franco, meanwhile, had vowed at the end of Spain’s tragic Civil War (1936-1939) to never again take up his sword unless Spain herself was attacked, and the country was spared the further horrors of the global conflict.

The Universidad Laboral de Gijón was the first of the handful of “labor universities” founded during Franco’s rule, and some of the brightest minds in Spain were involved in its creation. The gardens, created to train students in landscaping, were designed by Javier de Winthuyssen, the National Inspector of Parks and Artistic Gardens while the farms where students would learn the skills of agriculture were orchestrated by Gabino Figar, Spain’s leading agronomist. The building itself featured sculpture by Manuel Alvarez Laviada and Florentino Trapero, mosaics by Santiago Padrós, and murals by the painter Joaquin Valverde.

The architect, however was Luis Moya Blanco. Born in Madrid in 1904, Moya came from an architectural family. His father (and namesake), Luis Moya Idígoras, was the most prominent road engineer in Spain while his uncle was the head of the School of Architecture in Madrid. Before the Universidad Laboral, Moya was best known for his work on the Museo de America, the museum exhibiting Spain’s artistic and archaeological treasures from the New World, situated on the Avenue of the Catholic Monarchs in Madrid.

Part of the plan of the Universidad Laboral was to act as a miniature ideal city, and the building asserts its independence by facing away from the city of Gijón. Passing through the massive entrance gate, the visitor first encounters the Corinthian Court, a massive atrium lined with ten Corinthian columns 34 ft. tall. Originally open to the heavens, the top of the courtyard was recently given a glass roof.

Through the Corinthian Court, one proceeds into the great central courtyard of the Laboral and is immediately drawn to the church at the center, with the 385-ft. tower behind it, and flanked by the theatre (on the right) and the entrance to the school wing (on the left).

Reflecting the concept of the ideal city, the Church is at the very center and heart of the Laboral. The church is elliptical in shape, but retains the traditional linear liturgical arrangement inside, like all the churches designed by Moya. In the main portal of the Church, above the lintel over the entrance, is a statue of Our Lady of Covadonga, patroness of the Asturias.

The main portal is itself flanked by four columns, two on either side, which are topped by statues of saints: St. Joseph, St. Ignatius, St. Peter, and St. Paul. Atop the portal is St. James the Apostle on horseback, with two angels worshipping a Cross. Originally, this was a specially crafted version of the Cruz de la Victoria, a particular symbol of the Asturias which appears on the principality’s flag, but this precious work of art has since been removed and replaced with a more simple metal version. Circling the church are statues of St. John of the Cross, St. John Bosco, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Melchor de Quiros, St. Clare, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. Laurence, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Dominic Guzman, St. Francis, St. Joseph Calasanctius, St. Eulalia, King St. Ferdinand III of Castile, St. Isidore the Laborer, and St. Toribio de Liébana.

The interior of the church features inlaid marble floors and specially-constructed pews (one of the necessary drawbacks of elliptical churches) made of embero wood imported from Spanish (now Equatorial) Guinea.

The original high altar was removed during the 1970s, but strangely it seems the baldacchino was never completed.

A thin altar rail divided the sanctuary from the nave.

The workshops where students were taught industrial skills.

Classrooms all had a crucifix and a picture of Spain’s caudillo.

Franco was present at the official opening of the Universidad Laboral in 1955.

Major construction finished a year later, though one portion of the complex (above left) remains unfinished.

The theatre of the Laboral was the first air-conditioned theatre in all of Europe.

Above the façade of the theatre rests a sculpture of the Spanish coat of arms under Franco. The yoke and arrows (el yugo y las flechas) were the symbols of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs who united Spain as one kingdom. These symbols were included in the coat of arms of Spain from 1492 to 1504 and then from 1938 to 1981. The Falange, the official (yet still somewhat marginalized) political party of the Franco regime, used a stylized yoke-and-arrows as their official emblem.

The Poor Clares doing the laundry in the lower part of their convent. The circular convent (below) was located towards the rear of the Laboral, and featured an open loggia looking out over the nuns’ garden.

Teachers at the café bar.

The Universidad Laboral’s cows pose to have their picture taken.

Unfortunately, with the death of Franco and the subsequent transformation of the Spanish state, all the Universidad Laborals began to suffer from neglect. The Jesuits handed over control of the Gijón school to the faculty in 1978. Originally funded by the trade unions, they became part of the state-run National Institute for Integrated Education in the 1980s. Shortly afterwards, the Poor Clares were kicked out of their convent. As Luis Moya’s great palace of learning deteriorated, enrollment fell and the Universidad Laboral de Gijón moved to a separate, much smaller campus where it continues today as an “institute of secondary education”.

In 2001, the regional government of the Asturias took charge of the building and its massive grounds. The greater part of the school’s farms were turned into a public golf course. The Laboral itself has been reinvented as a “City of Culture”, its massive complex housing a variety of enterprises. The classrooms now house a campus of the University of Oviedo, where students of business, tourism, and public administration are now taught, as well as the Higher School of Performing Arts. Technological innovations are explored at the Science Park Technology Gijón, while the German multinational ThyssenKrupp has its Spanish headquarters and research & development labs in the Laboral. A hospital is located in the building, and a five-star hotel is due to open in April 2009.

The convent from which the Poor Clares were expelled has been turned into a television studio for RTPA, the regional broadcaster for the Principality of the Asturias.

At least partly in keeping with the original idea, a vocational training center remains at the Laboral’s industrial workshop, with 900 students enrolled.

Deconsecrated, the church that once housed Christ at the center of the Universidad Laboral now serves primarily as a performance venue.

While the departure from its original purpose is to be lamented, at least Moya’s beautiful structure is now being maintained and appreciated after years of neglect. During the interwar period, architects plumbed the depths of modernism with interesting results, but after the war they abandoned the safety of the surface and were submerged into those depths. The results were almost entirely catastrophic. Luis Moya, and a number of the other Spanish architects favored under the Franco regime, present a convincing counterargument.

The Universidad Laboral presents us with an architecture that is a continuation of history, rather than a rejection of history. Its components exhibit a classical symmetry but, like the human body itself, are arranged in a somewhat asymmetrical but nonetheless orderly form. It is the largest building in Spain but is broken up into smaller portions to prevent it from overburdening the inhabitants. It exhibits a natural hierarchy of forms, with the Church at its very heart. The Laboral is proof that there is another way of doing things: that one can be at once modern and traditional. That is a lesson that certainly needs to be understood by architects, but surely also by the rest of society as well.

POOR, PITIABLE SPAIN. So rich in saints in Heaven, but, to the outside observer, so poor in saints on Earth. There were days, of course, when Spain was governed by saints and holy men and women, but today Spain is ruled by the wayward, the foolish, and perhaps even the downright evil. Error is proclaimed truth, wrong is called right, and evil hailed as good.

Of course, these things that happen today have happened in the past as well, and even within living memory — less than a eighty years ago. It is announced from Rome that, with the approval of the Holy Father, two more groups of Spanish martyrs for the Christian faith are to beatified, and that, owing to the number of souls, the beatification will be held in the Eternal City itself. The mass beatification will be held this October on the Feast of Christ the Universal King. The feast is significant for these martyrs on a number of levels, namely that it was proclaimed by Pope Pius XI, during whose pontificate these martyrs sacrified their earthly lives, and that “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” or “Long Live/Hail Christ the King!” was their motto. One group is composed of those martyred during the leftist Asturias rebellion of 1934, and the second group is composed of martyrs killed in 1936 and 1937 during the Civil War. Each case has been the subject of deliberative study first in Spain and then in Rome for decades before beatification is approved.

In total, 498 names will be added in October to the list of those already beatified or canonized. Among those 498 names are a number from the many killed in the massacres of Paracuellos de Jarama. Coincidentally, Gerald Warner recently touched upon this place of death in a Scotland on Sunday column on the occasion of Edinburgh University revoking the honorary degree bestowed upon Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. In the column, Gerald discussed various honorary degrees which had been bestowed upon monsters, tyrants, and evil men, and finished his column with a case from Spain.

“That pilot,” Gerald concluded his column, “deserved an honorary degree”.

There is a good website which lists many of the Catholic martyrs of the Spanish Civil War; it starts here and carries on for sixty pages. The list also contains photographs or images of the individual martyrs when it has been possible to obtain them. Look at these photographs, see the faces of these holy men and women who now intercede for us in Heaven. They are priests and bishops, nuns and brothers, penniless Franciscans and wealthy aristocrats. They are fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, workers, craftsmen, students, nurses, teachers, young and old. In many cases, entire monasteries and convents were killed en masse, their cloisters flowing with blood, and the bodies of the martyrs dumped by the sides of highways, their killers vainly hoping their names would be forgotten and struck from history. But, as has oft been said before, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. We are human, and can only see with our eyes. Who knows what untold and unseen burdens have been lifted from Spain’s shoulders by the intercession of their prayers?

IN CASE YOU were in need of someone to raise a glass to, why not the 14th Duke of Hamilton and his friends? A reader and friend of ours from the fair Dominion of Virginia sent us a link to this program, which is available for listening to until next Monday, about “a famous flying ace, a top racing driver and an aristocrat” who together lent a helping hand to Christian Spain in her hour of need.

Famously, the four Douglas-Hamilton brothers (below) all simultaneously held the rank of Squadron Leader in the RAF. In the BBC program linked to above, one of the living Douglas-Hamiltons relates the tale of when all four brothers individually flew to a certain aerodrome and when the tower radio operator heard “Squadron Leader Douglas-Hamilton requesting permission to land” one time after another, he thought someone was pulling his leg.

Air Commodore Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton and 11th Duke of Brandon, KT, GCVO, AFC, PC, DL, FRCSE, FRGS, also served as Chancellor of the University of St Andrews.

Previously: The Tomb of Francisco Franco | The Caudillo in Action! | Fun With Franco

NO SOONER HAD the Wall Street Journal earned the highest regards from these quarters for their splendid ‘hedcut‘ portrait of the Generalissimo (on the front page, and above the fold, no less!) than their stock immediately plummeted in normal daytime trading on the Cusack Exchange. The best and most admirable feature of the financial-and-more paper is its splendidly broad size, in complete repudiation of the tabloid mentality. It has dignity, refinement, and gravitas. And so it must go. Newsdesigner reports that the Journal will be trimming its broadness to a much narrower, uglier size. The idea is to save newsprint, and thus cut costs, but the result is a disgrace. A sense of proper proportion is sacrificed to the gods of the balance sheet. Hmmm… where have we heard this before? The New York Observer trimmed its size, again without any regard for proportion, and the result was most poor. I bought it once after the changeover and never since.

Narrow broadsheets are not only a contradiction in terms, they are exceptionally irritating to read. The Berliner size of the Guardian, Le Figaro, and other papers is a handy, convenient size, and of a very comely proportion. The normal broadsheet of the Daily Telegraph, the current Wall Street Journal, and the Scotsman in its pre-tabloid days exudes soundness, reliance, and dignity. But ungainly tabloids and these new narrow broadsheets ought to be relegated to the dustbin of dodgy newspaper ideas.

AS THE MONTH of July draws to a close, we’d like to announce the Polish scientist and politician Prof. Maciej Giertych has been anointed our ‘Man of the Month’. Professor Giertych, who holds two degrees from Oxford and his PhD in tree physiology from the University of Toronto, is a Member of the European Parliament and recently took part in that inauspicious body’s debate commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the commencement of the Spanish Civil War, a debate which even the BBC’s Europe editor slated as “one of those debates that seem rather pious and pointless”. While the usual gang of characters spouted their unthinking praise for the tyrannical and genocidal Communist and Anarchist forces, Prof. Giertych had the decency to stand up and set the record straight.

“Thanks to the Spanish Army and Franco the Communist attack on Catholic Spain was thwarted,” Prof. Giertych told the European Parliament. “The presence of such people in European politics as Franco guaranteed the maintenance of traditional values in Europe and we lack such statesmen today. Christian Europe is losing against atheistic socialists today and this has to change.”

“I thought it was necessary to remind listeners in the EU Parliament,” the Professor said later, “that this was not an anti-democratic movement, but a movement that was in defense of certain values that are inherent in the Catholic way of seeing things pertinent to government to run civil society. The uprising was a defense of Catholic Spain, so the civil war in Spain was a conflict between Catholic Spain and communist Spain.” The Professor also used his speech to praise António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal’s Catholic dictator who, like Franco, managed to keep his country free from the devastation of the Second World War. (Salazar was also a very close friend of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, who claimed in his memoirs that if Salazar had lasted a few more years, Rhodesia would still exist today).

Prof. Giertych is a Member of the European Parliament for the League of Polish Families, one of the political parties in Poland’s tripartite coalition government. His son, Roman Giertych, is both Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Education of Poland.

Previously: The Tomb of Francisco Franco | Requiescat in Pace | The Caudillo in Action! | Fun with Franco! | The Reconquest of Madrid

General Eisenhower and General Franco

I attended a little get-together on the East Side back on New Year’s Day and met one of our loyal readers who requested more Francoiana, and thus I make this very rare concession to public opinion. I wonder if this splendid view can’t officially be considered P.O.D. (pious and overly devotional in Catholic blogspeak) until the good man is canonized, which could take centuries, if done at all. At any rate, a bit more reflective than most of our previous Franco appreciations, which have highlighted the Generalissimo’s more humorous side.

Dedicated specifically to our friends at a certain New York law firm.

Previously: Requiescat in Pace | The Caudillo in Action! | Fun With Franco! | The Reconquest of Madrid

Generalissimo FRANCISCO PAULINO HERMENEGILDO TEÓDULO FRANCO y BAHAMONDE SALGADO PARDO DE ANDRADE, Caudillo de España por la gracia de Dios, Jefe del Estado, requiescat in pace.

4 December 1892 — 20 November 1975

I searched through the Franco section of the Cusack archives and found this photograph of the Caudillo with His Imperial Highness the Archduke Otto, the son and heir of Blessed Charles of Austria, as well as being a sometime Member of the European Parliament for Bavaria (until recently). We’ve already seen a photo of Franco with the artist Salvador Dalí who described him as nothing short of a saint.

I apologise for not spacing out more widely our appreciation of the Generalissimo, but I felt obliged to observe the day of his death.

Previously: The Caudillo in Action | Fun with Franco! | The Reconquest of Madrid