Con la Tercera España

Why did Pope Pius XI take 58 days to pronounce on the Spanish Civil War? Why was the Holy See not involved in mediation initiatives to achieve peace? What role did violence against the clergy and the position of the republican government play in the Vatican's attitude? Were there hawks and doves among Spanish Catholics during the Civil War? Were Catholics able to avoid that war? Throughout the Civil War a minority of Spaniards adopted a critical attitude towards both sides. To this Third Spain belonged some Catholics who did not share the Catholicism of the crusade of the vast majority of the Spanish bishops. Authorized circles of world Catholicism supported that Third Spain and pledged to achieve a negotiated solution to the conflict. His initiatives obsessed Franco and Cardinal Gomá since, although they also denounced religious persecution on the Republican side, they showed world public opinion that the interpretation of the Spanish conflict as "Crusade" was false. From London, one of the main protagonists of these campaigns was the anti-fascist priest Luigi Sturzo, founder of the Christian Democrat Italian People's Party, whom Mussolini, according to the Vatican, forced to go into exile. No one like Sturzo fought to disassociate the Catholic Church from the rebel side and negotiate an armistice that would open the doors to a peace of reconciliation. Sturzo, the Holy See, Cardinal Gomá and European Catholic pacifism are the protagonists of this book, which, on the basis of vast and novel documentation, represents an interpretative change in the conflict. A revealing book on the role of a sector of Catholicism that never wanted war and did everything possible to achieve a peace without winners or losers