Editor’s Note: Bishop Emeritus Fabian Bruskewitz wrote a series of columns on the history of anarchy in 2004. The final piece, “The Black Flag – III” was published Oct. 22, 2004.
Virulent
The ideology of anarchism, of course, is erroneous, mainly because of its atheism along with its denial of original sin and of that sin’s lasting effects in all human beings, but also because of its illogical view that all laws and institutions which serve the common good are obstacles rather than necessary conditions for the full development of human liberty and the realization of social justice.
About 70 years ago anarchism escaped from its usual lodging place in the halls of academe and the twisted minds of some professors, and for a period of time it had a huge, active, negative impact on a segment of the Catholic Church, showing its deep and virulent hatred of Christianity in general and of the Catholic Religion in particular. This was during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. For about 40 years previous to that war, anarchism started making converts in Spain, especially in the region of Catalonia and its principal city, Barcelona, where anarchists modified their dogmas in order to found and lead large and powerful labor unions. In 1931 the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union, called the CNT, numbered more than 600,000 members. The crushing poverty of many people, widespread social injustice resulting in some measure from the selfishness and indifference of many of the rich, the migration of people from farms to the cities looking for work, with accompanying social disintegration, the enthusiasm and energy of anarchist ideologues, the lukewarm practice of their religion by many Catholics, and similar circumstances gave rise to the success of the anarchists’ recruiting efforts.
The War
The Spanish Civil War was fought between the Nationalists (who were basically the army, various Monarchists, and the conservative political parties and groups), and the Loyalists (who were an amalgam of Communists, Socialists, Freemasons, Liberals, Catalan and Basque separatists, and Trotskyites). The anarchists were a big part of that Loyalist coalition from the beginning. Even before the war began, the Loyalists, especially the anarchists, were heavily involved in dynamiting and burning down Catholic Churches and church buildings and in murdering priests, seminarians, nuns, and their family members.
Once that civil war got underway, the Spanish anti-Catholic terror, which Pope Pius XI called “truly demonic,” knew no bounds in the territories controlled by the Loyalists. Before they lost the war to the Nationalists, the Loyalists, with the anarchists in the lead, murdered 15 Catholic Bishops, 4,184 diocesan priests, 2,365 religious order priests, and 283 nuns and religious women. They pillaged and destroyed more than 20,000 Catholic churches and chapels out of the 42,000 that existed in Spain at that time. The media in the USA, mostly liberal and anti-Catholic then as now, treated all this basically with either indifference or glee.
Leaders
Francisco Ascaso and Buena-ventura Durruti, the two most significant anarchist leaders in the Spanish Civil War, were fierce killers, cruelly murdering countless innocent people and everyone they suspected of having any Catholic sympathy, of being family members or friends of the clergy, or belonging to any Catholic fraternal organizations or societies. Durruti told a Canadian journalist about his anarchistic nihilism. “We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history, but we carry a new world in our hearts.” The anarchist newspaper in Barcelona wrote: “Down with the Church. The Church must disappear forever. It is necessary to tear up the Church by the roots. For this we must take away all the goods of the Church. All Cardinals and Bishops must be shot.”
Because the Communists were better organized, disciplined, and more ideologically coherent than other groups in the Loyalist coalition, because Stalin sent military advisors and Russian secret police to help them take over (variously called the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the NKGB, the MGB, the KGB), and because Stalin sent in thousands of Communists and fellow travellers from all over world to fight with the Loyalists in the infamous “International Brigades,” the Communist Party soon infiltrated and established control over the entire Loyalist establishment. They then sent the whole Spanish gold supply to Moscow and set out to destroy, under Stalin’s orders, both the Trotskyites and the anarchists, their erstwhile comrades, whom they came to regard as their evil left-wing enemies, in a civil war within the civil war. Durruti himself was shot dead by one of his own men. The details about this event are murky to this day. It might have involved a “sleeper-cell” Communist who infiltrated the anarchist forces as an “agent provocateur,” or it could have been done by a homosexual seeking revenge, because Durruti, who at first allowed homosexual anarchist battalions to be formed, later, because the homosexuals spread so much disease and disorder among his troops, did not object when they were machine-gunned to death by the Communist General Enrique Lister.
Back To Sleep
Except for small groups of modem anarchists waving their black flags and trying to cause violence and disorder during certain international meetings, anarchists are largely ignored because of their apparent eccentricity and insignificant numbers, and anarchism itself as a movement, political philosophy, and anti-religious ideology has largely reverted at the present time to the realm of theoretical discussion in academic circles and to benign neglect and ignorance by the generality of mankind. Perhaps it will remain so, but those who know its history can be forgiven if they entertain some doubts about that. It is said that “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
Our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, has already canonized and beatified more than 200 Catholics who were martyred by the anarchists and their Loyalist partners in the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps, although anarchists deny the reality of original sin and its effects, their views are sometimes persuasive precisely because some of the remnants of that sin lurk always in human hearts. Lucifer is always present to whisper the lie, “If you eat that fruit, you will be like God” (Genesis 2:5). The persistence of moral and physical evil and the wonders of human technology make it a temptation for humans to forget that Jesus, God’s incarnate Son, is the only Savior of the human race. “Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we can be saved” (Acts of the Apostles 4:12).
