José Bergamín

Introduction & translation by Gerardo Muñoz

[Introduction: The essay originally titled “Por nada del mundo. Anarquismo y Catolicismo”, by Spanish poet and essayist José Bergamín, should be read as a wartime reflection on the historical impasse of the Spanish Civil War. First published in the Emmanuel Mounier’s Catholic journal Esprit in the 1937 April issue, the essay in its final version featured in Bergamín’s Mexican exile collection Detrás de la cruz: terrorismo y persecusión religiosa en España (Lucero, 1941). 

While on the surface Bergamín is responding to the struggle between secular political anarchism and traditionalist Spanish Catholicism intertwined at the heart of the civil war, the essay is also highly idiosyncratic in laying out the poet’s theological vision that permeates his entire body of work, and which we can already be found, in nuce, in the fragments and aphorisms of his first book El cohete y la estrella (1923). This 1937 essay, along with his defense of illiteracy in “Decadadencia del analfabetismo” (1933), where Bergamín argues for a living theology of the Spanish people (pueblo) that is neither imperial nor clerical; but rather always an excedent to political theology’s reduction that dominated the long historical narrative of Spanish modernity since the Reconquista. It was thanks to Bergamín’s genius that Catholicism appears connected to a habitual form of life of everyday people, their shared language, symbols, and experiences; and, ultimately the common imagination that grants them access to the world through the mystery of living and dying. In fact, as in “Decadencia” (1933), it is important to highlight the centrality of the term “pueblo”, which although translated as “people”, coincides neither with the “People” of the unity of civil society nor the common historical identity of the Nation. For Bergamín, these determinations, in fact, were corrupted notions of pueblo. The pueblo is always the event that remains from the abstraction of political theology, and always pueblo minoría, a ‘minor people’ that dwells in the house of God within and beyond the mundane. This is why Bergamín would claim in the text that the pueblo is always ancilla mundi. In this light, Bergamín thought that political anarchism incapable of a revelation to the divine, and an imperial Church in charge of the administration of the “nothingness”, were two poles of the same vectorial force of modern nihilism. That was his corruptio optimi pessima with clear echoes of Fridugisus' De nihilo et tenebris. 

Bergamín’s theological position emerges as a third way to exit this historical poverty of relating to the theos. As Giorgio Agamben observes in a 1973 entry of Quaderni (Quodlibet, I, 2024, 46-47), for Bergamín the divine should be understood as the corporeal cohabitation of a demon and an angel that expresses appearance of life, and thus the sensible and poetic mediation with the world of forms. In this sense, Bergamín’s theology differs fundamentally from the rational and canonical traditions, fostering the sensorial path of dramatic beauty. This goes to the kernel of the 1937 essay: the rise of the new Totalizing State (historical Fascism), was a corrupting form of theos insofar as it aimed at regulating the “nothingness” against the possibility of appearance and truth. But the word of God lingers in the time of wreckage and devastation in its impatient drift towards anger in the world, which is still very much our own. Ultimately, Bergamín was convinced that the pueblo's mute voice, resurfacing from the depths of pain, refuses the abysmal fall into the tribulations of radical evil complacent with the survival of ‘this world’.]

Still vivid in my memory, on the fringes of adolescence, almost childhood, is that corner of Pueyo's bookstore in Madrid, which had fallen into ruin ("closed for demolition") many years ago. Among those ruins, prophetic of what we would find today passing by the same place, those of the old romantic lair of our early intellectual anarchism now acquire in my memory a profound resonance.

Not far away, then, were the romantic shadows of Mateo Morral, Soledad Villafranca, Francisco Ferrer, old man Nakens. Still vivid shadows, when I searched among the books of the almost dying Pueyo, barely noticed by those scrutinizing little eyes, hidden behind his enormous nose, for new "earthly nourishment" for my first spiritual restlessness; and that meant hunger for freedom, for truth, for justice, the successor to a crisis of faith, a youthful religious tribulation. Readings of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Herzen… And shortly before, Léon Bloy’s The Desperate Man (1887). Separately, there was Dostoevsky. Suddenly, the crack of a whip, across my eyes, across my face; a cry: "Anarchist dogs!" Very much like "Jewish dogs” or "Christian dogs." A sudden blush colors my face. It is both shame and pain. Nietzsche. A professed Christianity, alongside an unconfessable anarchism, feel simultaneously scourged. Nietzsche's fulminating reading was like lightning and thunder. A passing storm? Spring rain? How long has it been since we've had a moment! Beethovenian storms in a glass of water! Wrecked whirlwind of my life! How painful! Miniscule and intimate mental earthquake! Babelic failure of crystal glass! Ten years searching for what a poet (Juan Ramón Jimenez) called ‘the terrible middle age’ of youth! Too many readings. And a piece of ice on my burning, feverish forehead: Ibsen's Brand; "a flower in such frozen fire”, as Calderón had said. The finger of this northern poetry presses upon my open wounded heart, and then the intense fever. "Haven't you heard that God is dead?" Nietzsche hurled and stabbed at me like a dart with his anguish. But beneath the smoke of Ibsen's fire, the living ember still throbbed, palpitating like the latent and patent human testimony of blood: "God is charity." Later, Kierkegaard, and then Unamuno. Anarchist dogs like Christian dogs—might they not be the same dogs with different collars?

Many years later, two young Spanish officers, loyal to their word and their integrity; to their friendship and determination; to their human goodwill and their conduct, died together in Jaca, shot almost without cause by the agonizing ghost of the monarchical state - that somber and mendacious Bourbon restoration (fallen among the rubble: "closed for demolition"). They died fraternally. This single baptism of blood of the nascent or reborn Spanish Republic intertwined two innocent enthusiasms: that of the young anarchist Fermín Galán and that of the young Catholic García Hernández. The anarchist and the Catholic, together, gave their blood for the same cause—almost without cause? Literally for the same thing.. Because "only one thing matters," says the Gospel. What thing, what cause could have united, or reunited, these two young Spaniards until death? Could it have brought the anarchist and the Catholic together, like two dogs around the same wolf? Or, perhaps, like two dogs for the same moon?

The political coexistence of the State and the Church during the Bourbon Restoration had mutually corrupted both institutions, in their temporal exercise, and their administrative public development. If it is true, as José Ortega y Gasset accurately declared in his "Delenda est monarchia," that the Restoration had maintained its existence by flattering all national vices, it is no less true that the Catholic Church in Spain, an anarchizing collaborator of that State, had fomented and expanded this vicious flattery, this national corruption, taking it to its own extreme limits, already the boundaries of human religious unrest. If the State had been prostituted, the Church, the ecclesiastical organization of the Spanish Church, had been desecrated. Almost the entire "priestly order" was subsumed in clericalism: ecclesiastical disorder. Like the public order of the State, disorder is necessarily established in injustice. Therefore, those men, those youth who, like mine, suffered the bitter religious unrest and spiritual anguish, only found in the appearance and the trappings of a Church corrupted by local customs, aesthetic and moral reasons for living repugnance.

That all-absorbing clericalism, begun with the decline of the House of Austria, already denounced by Antonio Pérez in his Norte de Príncipes as a deadly disease for Spaniards that reached its maximum degree of corrupting and corrupting effectiveness at the beginning of our century through that mutual coexistence I point out between State and Church, equally positivist or positivized, equally anti-popular and, consequently, anti-religious. We do not know who served whom, or whom both served, in that mutual, reciprocal public coexistence of vicious corruption. We perhaps know of it too well. The Church, insofar as not properly separated, was corrupted by the State through sharing and promoting the vicious corruption of its principles. But what did this Church mean? What did this State mean? The most absolute and totalizing absence of moral and spiritual authority; the most extensive and full-blown anarchic public activity. The poet Maragall aptly called that State "the shadow and lie of Spain"; that mystified Church could, in parallel, be called "the shadow and lie of Christ."

There was no Catholic voice among us that proclaimed in time the "Delenda est Eclessia", indispensable and unavoidable, the liberation of the true Church of Christ from this terrible deadly corruption of its public administration of our lifetime. The predominant dominance of the Compañía de Jesús, far from preventing so many evils, contributed powerfully to increasing them; placing itself at the service of those capitalist forces, secular oppressors of the Spanish people; cultivating its position of economic preponderance for the immediate positive benefit of an opportunistic order; placing itself at the level, in short, at the lowest level of ignorance and religious indifference of the wealthy bourgeoisie. All other religious orders, each in their own way, collaborated in this scandalous trade. Above all, in the industrial and commercial exploitation of so-called religious education, which truly never existed: it was always secular education taught by religious leaders. This was anarchistic (anarquizante) and remunerative collaboration with the State. Unpopular and even anti-popular. The separation of Church and people in our Spain was a fact of much deeper gravity and significance than the formal separation of Church and State, declared at the still imminent advent of the Spanish Democratic Republic.

The Church and the people in separation, which is a worse anarchy? That of a people who want to be free, rightly free, independent, true? Or that of a subservient Church, which wants or must enslave itself to the powers of this world in order to try to subjugate and enslave? And to what end? To the law of Christ? Is this how one attempts to impose divine law? Is it out of love, and out of Christian love, that one takes up arms? Is it out of charity that one wages war, destroying entire villages, with the elderly, women, children, and the sick; murdering defenseless workers; persecuting and executing them, after having persecuted them, with the most refined and horrific cruelty? "You will triumph," the true voice of the Christian Miguel de Unamuno, already on the brink of death, told them. "You will triumph, but you will not convince." And what is the mission of the Christian Church: is it to conquer or to convince? The apostolate or destruction? Death or life? Peace or war?

It is useless for them to try to hide from us lies that the popular sense of the spiritual and divine authority of the Church. That authority is neither legitimate nor even effective when it is confused, to be imposed tyrannically by force; and with force alone, which is in turn illegitimate and anarchistic. It is useless for them to try to throw before the open eyes of our faith the dense accusatory clouds of the burned churches in Spain. The churches, the temples burned on our soil, offer their most evident accusatory testimony when they turn against those very people who desecrated them by using them as arsenals of murderous weapons, after having turned them into the anti-popular instrument of their political propaganda. The depopulated and unpopular Church in Spain, to whom did it owe its demise?

Not far from that romantic corner of the old Pueyo bookstore, of which not even the rubble remains, rises, in my memory, another ruin; that is, a more recent rubble. I will quote here the same words with which, from Madrid in October 1936, I explained to the editor of Esprit, my friend Emmanuel Mounnier, something about the fire at a Madrid church: that of San Luis, to which I now refer, on Calle de la Montera; not far, recalling as I recall from memory, from that romantic cradle or refuge of intimate incipient anarchisms.

»I knew that church very well. I visited it frequently because it was one of the most typical and characteristic places of this Spanish Catholic local custom, so evidently anti-Christian; which in a successive degeneration of beautiful popular aesthetic superstitions, through the cult of some images, little by little, in Madrid, Toledo, Granada, Seville, as well as in so many places of old accustomed religious tradition of the Catholics, to become a lamentable commercial speculation, superstitiously immoral, anti-aesthetic, without even saving any old flavor of the noble aspect of the tradition. In the Church of San Luis, an image was venerated, dating back to the seventeenth century, I believe, formerly known as the Christ of Faith (Cristo de la Fe). I say formerly because, for some years now—twenty or thirty, since I first met it—its superstitious worshippers called it the Christ of Money (Cristo del dinero). Why? Because praying to it with this request for money, naturally handing it a modest amount as a pledge, as testimony of such a desire, was, according to its believers (?), to obtain almost guaranteed wealth. With this in mind, tickets of the National Lottery were sold at the door of that church, which were then carefully touched by their buyers at the feet of Christ, so that they would fall. And in this superstitious ritual, the women of restless lifestyles, nearby residents of that neighborhood, coincided with the expectant Christian mothers who also came to the church to pray to another well-known image, this one with a beautiful superstitious title: the Virgin of Good Birth and Good Milk (Virgen del buen parte y de la buena leche), for the possibility of obtaining both for their upcoming pregnancy. Naturally, they also added another request: money, with or without a lottery ticket. In addition to all this, the parish priest of this church, apparently did not have his accounts very clear with the Diocese regarding the famous monetary return on the no less famous Christ. And it seems that this income wasn't very meager, despite the fact that the parish priest (at whose home numerous jewels from that church were later found) had set up a small business renting out garage space behind the church; behind the church - I mean, but in the same building, where there was usually, therefore, some gasoline, which undoubtedly contributed to the event of the fire. A well-known Madrid dancer named Chelito, famous for the obscenity of her repertoire, exhibited herself in a rudimentary street theater very close to the church, kept her car in one of those garages for a long time. It has also been said that the parish priest ran some other small business in the same building as the church, such as having an office to sell milk. I don't know if it was in connection with the cult of the image of the Virgin of the Good Milk. And what do I know! But it goes to show the wealthy Spanish performance of petitioning to Christ.

»There were, in those days, minor riots in Madrid, provoked by the young fascists of the Spanish Phalanx. A few youths entered the almost-empty San Luis church that afternoon, precisely at that hour. Apparently, no one in the church was able to warn them in time to prevent the crime. And the church burned in a few hours: the time it took its arsonists to set it alight. Two or three chapels burned that afternoon in Madrid in the same way. Who set them on fire? Politically, this became an intense public scandal; as a result, no less than a few ministers had to resign. The ruling classes clutched their heads in horror. The ruling class! But the question lingered in the air, amidst the last flares, amidst puffs of smoke, fading away. The question barely retained its ardor amid the embers: Who was burning churches in Spain? What hand was holding the torches?

»A few days after this, I met a young Catholic priest on the street whom I greatly esteem. I spoke to him about those burnings; I expressed my doubts about their murky origins, stemming from provocative maneuvers. He replied, with a profound understanding of Spanish reality: "Don't worry about finding out: it's all the same; for me, the hand that set fire to the Church of San Luis was that of providential design; it was the hand of God."

"God writes straight with crooked lines." This old Spanish proverb, which Saint Teresa liked to quote, explains and justifies, in our view, many things. It would supernaturally explain and justify the Church's international politics. It would also explain and justify, in principle, that the Church of Christ in time, in this world, can apparently be linked in this way to what is called international relations.

But we must decipher in those crooked lines of history, the straight line of the divine. (God seems like an anarchist. And in a literary comedy by Chesterton, we find it symbolized twofold: God is both the leader of the anarchists and, at the same time, of the police. The supreme anarchistic paradox.)

But let us return to our essential question: the separation of the Christian Church and the people; or the peoples of God. (The peoples always belong to God, even if they don't believe it or want it; and their evil shepherds don't know it, and even condemn them for it, with this culpable, criminal ignorance.) Is the separation of the temporal Church and the people something exclusively characteristically Spanish in our time, or is the tragic, fiery, and bloody, but clear, terribly clear and true way in which the fact of this separation has now dramatically posed its question to us Spaniards simply Spanish?

Is this not the time, when Spanish ecclesiastical authorities take up arms—in fact and in law (?)—for love of Christ, to impose their law against an entire, whole, and true people; is this not the time for Christian conscience to clearly consider, in the light of that fire and that blood, what the limits of authoritarian anarchism or anarchizing authority are, that is, what the true boundaries of the authority and respectability of those ecclesiastical hierarchies are?

When Italy's foreign policy appears so cynically linked, seemingly inseparably, with the Italian representations of the Vatican in all countries of the world, isn't it time for the Christian conscience of every man, in every country, to clearly consider how and to what extent his spiritual obedience to the authority of the Church cannot be converted, manipulated by skillful fingers, treacherous instrument of his faith at the service of a pagan State that is an enemy of Christianity, and a barbaric destroyer of peoples in its diabolical and tyrannical ambition to dominate?

Where is anarchism? Is it in a handful of undisciplined men, in the people, or in public institutions transformed into rebel forces of unjust oppression, destruction, and death? Isn't there a yearning for universal, statist, totalizing, imperialist, Caesarian anarchism, which coincides with a clerically corrupt, anarchistic and anarchizing Catholicism?

If free men wish to rise up against the Church as against the State, is it the Church's mission to turn to the State to subdue it? Or to the apostolate to convert it? To the apostolate, to its greatest glory, that of martyrdom? And where the power of the State betrays the people, and the priestly order betrays Christ, disorderly, through war, with hatred, with destructive and murderous violence, blessing their weapons, offering their own scandalous riches to buy them: what is, or where does anarchy begin? And where will it end? It is time for these living questions to be posed clearly to the Christian conscience of men and its peoples. Without being a servant, the mortal interests of this world becomes the only enemy that a Christian apostolate must convincingly conquer. With love, and for love, even unto death; even to the point of giving their lives, but without taking them. For martyrdom, is the highest, truest and purest goal of the Christian religious man in this world.

It is time for the priests of the Church of Christ, from their highest hierarchies, to preach the truths of life and not the lies of death. At all risks and costs. It is time, above all, for the Christian conscience to ask itself, in the face of the painful and magnificent living truth of our bloodied Spain, whether the Church of Christ in Rome can maintain its independence and freedom against the new imperialist Rome; whether the Italian representatives of the Pope in all the countries of the world are representatives of the Pope alone; in a word, whether the Christian Church in Mussolini's Rome can remain Catholic and apostolic. Compatible with our creed; that is, with our faith and hope; with evangelical charity.

There has been a state of anarchism in Spain, a natural consequence of that state anarchism that, since the restoration of the monarchy, was imposed on us Spaniards by the very force of its natural weaknesses. And it was imposed on us intertwined and amalgamated with clerical anarchism: inciting the murky superstitious undercurrents of our Catholic customs (costumbrismo).

State anarchism and everyday anarchism enclosed Spain within a single, vicious, bloody circle. Only the people can break it. Only through the people could the transfusion of life-giving blood be carried out. To the Church as to the State. Many times we have recalled—and also written and published it in Spain—those stupendous words of Saint Catherine of Siena, offering us the image of the Church of Christ, in the world, in time—in her time and in her world—drained, drained, anemic: because her priests, religious, clerics, bishops—the saint tells us with magnificent courage—suck her blood like leeches; they feed on it, they fatten on it; and the Church pales, decays, withers because of the fault of her bad shepherds, materialized drinkers of the blood of Christ. How many times have we evoked in Spain these terrible accusatory words of the heroic saint! The saint wanted to shout out those words reaching everyone's ears. Indeed, they still reach our ears.

An unpopular Church, a depopulated Church, is a dead Church. And also a corrupted one. A dead Church is materially corrupted by clericalism. But let it be understood clearly: whenever I refer to a dead and corrupted, or persecuted, Church, I am referring exclusively to that part of the Church in time, that part of the social organization in the world, susceptible to mortal sin, to moral corruption, or to intense persecution. To the Church as a "body of sin." In no way do I ever refer to the entire Christian Church, visible and invisible, in the fullness of time; to the mystical and divine body of the Church of Christ, to the order of supernatural charity in which I believe, in which I hope, to which I wish to belong; in a word, to the eternal people of the faithful: to the enduring, permanent, revolutionary and popular, spiritual, eternal communion of saints, or to the revelation of Christ.

For nothing in the world does Christ accept the diabolical temptation. That is, because the world, everything in the world and everyone, is nothingness. Nothingness is the real totality of this world. The totality of nothingness is the satanic empire of this world. Christ rejects it. His empire, his kingdom, is not of the world; it is of this world. Because He is the Son of Man: and everything is divine for Him. Because He is the Son of God: and everything is human for Him. The mystery of Jesus has its roots in the denial of this world. The Christian, in his new, mysterious life, rejects the apparently divine nothingness of the world because he accepts the totality, the truly human fullness of his God. For nothing in the world does a Christian accept the diabolical temptation: the empire or dominion of the world.

This plenipotentiary world of nothingness, which is called Empire or the totalizing State, is the one that, by totalizing the nothingness, ends up annihilating everything. Its current name is fascism. Two extreme assertions are raised against it to negate it: that of Christianity, in principle; that of the anarchist, in its end. The purpose, the object, or the goal, of the anarchist is the negation of the State; the exact opposite of the fascist State-negation is the anarchist negation of the State. ("Why be and not rather nothing?" asks the metaphysician of anguished and anxious fascism, of German National Socialism: the philosopher of nothingness, Heidegger; and he adds: "Nothingness is not born from negation, but from the negation of nothingness.") But then (here extremes meet), will not fascism and anarchism, so to speak, have the same weight in the void, in its total or totalizing emptiness? Extremes meet in man. The totalizing State, fascism, annihilates man with the complete emptiness of the State. Anarchism annihilates the State with the completeness—empty?—of man. “Vanity of vanities and all vanity.” And “if vanity is taken away from man, what remains?” asks Goethe. Is God left? Or is the State left? Everything or nothing? The State without man or man without the State. In other words, the divinization of the State: “Ugly idol”; or the divinization of man: “Beautiful superstition.” In both cases, by their very contrariety and contradiction, the angel and the beast coincide. For the salvation of this world; which, for the Christian, has no salvation. The final judgment in which the world ends, for the Christian, is the beginning of his revelation: this is his revolution.

Therefore, as a matter of principle, we can say that the Christian will never act on his life, will never give it for anything in the world; that is, he will never, in time, for anything in the temporal world, for nothing in this world. But for God. His truth and his life are Christ, for the Christian. His way and his light. For nothing in the world can he deny this truth, this life, this way. For nothing in the world can he deny his light. His revolutionary revelation of the world. His God-revealing revolution. His “open heaven” is an apocalyptic illumination. His invisible light. Let us not forget that our immortal mystic, our popular Saint Teresa, was for the people, and through the people, an enlightened one. "And only thus, in a lump, and because faith tells us so," she wrote, "do we know that we have a soul." In a lump, our Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stumbled upon the Church in the darkness. (To break their souls?) “We have stumbled upon the Church, Sancho”, Don Quixote exclaims. What dark, invisible church? What is the clear truth? What is a temple like a truth? What kind of soul, in short, all-encompassing of truth; a soul tormented by corruption or persecution, human or divine? Before what discouraged Church, of this world, deprived of worldliness? Don Quixote and Sancho, like Saint Teresa, seem like anarchists at first, when at bottom they are Christians.

The danger of the Catholic Church in this world is the one that Cervantes and Saint Teresa sensed—contemporaries of the Reformation, and certainly not counter-reformists, but revolutionaries; true revolutionaries, of the truth— is that of appearing to be Christian and being anarchist. This is the madness of the Church of Christ in time, as seen in dreams by Saint Dominic: its diabolical acceptance of the whole world, by the whole world, and for the whole world. Of everything that is not and cannot be Christian because it is not a people—because it is not, or because it is nothing; because it is and can only be worldly. For all individuals, instead of all peoples. It is the anarchist and anarchizing Church. A slave to domination. Ancilla Mundi. When the whole world is—or becomes, or calls itself—Catholic, it is because no one is Christian anymore; because man is no longer Christian.

Persecution or corruption, then, becomes the tragic temporal dilemma of the Church of Christ in the world. In this world, in this time. Corruption is the work of death. Corruption denounces death. Persecution, on the contrary, is life. A corrupt Church is a dead Church. But as with everything dead, the worms defend its life. "Their worms do not die," cries the prophet Isaiah. A Church corrupted by clericalism offers abundant mortal food to its worms: they will not perish in this way. Clericalism is the worm-worm of the mortal Church. Between persecution and corruption of the Church of Christ in time, the high hierarchies of the clerical worm-worm will probably always choose the mortal corruption that feeds them; but for the Christian conscience, since Saint Paul, the persecuted persecutor is persecution in life.

For the Christian conscience, everything generated in time is corrupted in time. The Church of Christ in the world, in time, destined to disappear in time and with this world—and even before it, according to apocalyptic prophecy—is corrupted in history by those life-giving and mortal roots that imprison it in history; by time that passes, or by times that pass, that are fleeting. Bad times, or bad times, we Catholic believers in the world are passing through! For what times were not bad? Where can we find, with them or for them—if not against them—affirmation and ratification of our hope, of our faith? Surely not in the words of this world, in the words of this time; of our passing time. “The form of the world passes”. “And only love will remain”: the divine word. Our hope, our faith, which is by hearing, according to Saint Paul, is like hearing in the word of God and is, like hearing, by the word of God. Our ear, open to faith as to an invisible supernatural light, because it first blinded our eyes, heard, like the apostle, the divine word of love: "Why do you persecute me?"

When that anger, that popular Spanish rage, which determined in our history the meaning and reason of our thought, rises again, with a dull, heartfelt clamor of a secret sea, does it rise up, overflowing in a furious onslaught, seemingly rising against the temporal Church of Christ? Is it not the terrible, accusatory beauty—as I said before—of our burned temples? A baroque, exhaustive expression of that thought, immortalized in worldly time, by Saint Teresa, Lope, Quevedo, Calderón; the temporal, human language of our angry Spanish people. That anger in the world, or for the world, in time or by time; that creative anger in the course of the very times of our religious thought, our popular language, which is its human expression, for it is divine (vox populi, vox Dei); that same angry impatience, revealing and revolutionary of our being, of our blood, will it now rise up again, enraged, against its very being? Will the word that was once prayer become blasphemy? "My people, my people, why do you persecute me? What have I done to you?" our Catholic Church sings for Christ in her liturgy.

When, in his agonizing solitude, the Christian contemplates, before the desperate world (a world called to despair as it is called to disappear), his own innermost being, torn bloodily, he must turn his ears, closing his eyes to the blood, toward that very voice, the bloody popular voice, which, even in blasphemy or through blasphemy, because it is a divine voice, cries out to heaven. And the Christian feels that voice in the beating of his own blood, in human communion with the innocent blood of his people.

Enemies of the Spanish people, soldiers who were traitors to their state and nation, sacrilegious clerics and bishops, shed this innocent blood. The angry protest of that blood rose with such force against its murderers that, so violently raised, it seemed, against heaven, to rise against God himself. It seemed anarchist, and it was Christian. “My people, my people. Why do you persecute me?” cried the divine voice of love, which is the voice of the Just One. And that anger, rightly, broke like bloody foam against the ghostly keel of a Church, a vessel drunk on this world, seeking to overcome the revolutionary and revealing the disastrous tempest of history.

According to some, an anarchist segment of the Spanish people, enraged, sensing the deepest danger to their being, that of their freedom and independence in the throes of mortal agony, cried out in their own blood, which, shed innocently, like Christ's, was liberating from all blood through the word. And did they blaspheme? Did they deny like the apostle? And upon colliding with the Holy Name of God, did they drag down, like a fall, all those who had unjustly provoked it? Those who, worse than blasphemy, had sacrilegiously placed the name of God, their holy name, in the void of death, in that world of death? Those who had betrayed their God through perjury? Those who had bloodily taken the name of God in vain? Tragically in vain. Because human vanity, when it delves so mortally into time, is always tragic: a mask of the world, of death; mask of crime; in short, deicide. The mask of Satan.

The evil shepherds who first abandoned, betrayed, and then persecuted—with futile ideological pretexts, with deadly lies—the Spanish people, all the peoples of Spain, all those peoples of God, today have their hands stained with their blood. And it is those same sacrilegious hands, placed on the Holy Victim, that, in consecrating Him, unwittingly redeem that innocent popular blood, because they unite it with that of their God in the Sacrifice. A sublime mystery of our faith and our hope. A consolation for all Catholic believers, who have chosen to remain faithful to the peace of Christ: to the commandment of his love; to the order of his charity. Now, for us, it is that blood, redemptive and redeeming, as it fulfills, beyond this time and this world (beyond death),, in the awaited fullness of time, the divine word. The word of freedom and justice; of life and hope. The word of God, which through blood, so unjustly shed, cries out with the mute voice of that same shed popular blood.

First published in the French Catholic personalist journal Esprit in the 1937 April issue