Generalissimo Franco and the Vatican

These are the arms of General Franco's Spain. The Fascist-looking eagle has a halo which sanctifies him as St. John. The royal trappings on this coat of arms are due to Franco's Succession Law. This declared that Spain was a monarchy (albeit without a king) and that Franco was a "regent", (rather than a "dictator"). This let Franco retain regal symbols like the crown — and also claim a crucial concordat privilege.

In 1941 Franco tried to reinstate the abrogated Concordat of 1851. He was hoping to assume the royal right to select bishops which was confirmed in this agreement. These patronage rights (patronato) would have allowed Franco to nominate a list of three candidates for a vacant see, leaving the pope to make the final decision.

At first Pius XII (“Hitler’s pope”) demurred. He replied that the 1851 Concordat was void due to its cancellation by the Second Republic. Further, he said, Franco was not a monarch, and the rights of a royal patron rested with the "Most Catholic Kings" of Spain.

However, a more plausible reason for the papal reticence was that the Vatican avoids wartime concordats. The Pope didn’t want to offer Franco the diplomatic success of a restoration, preferring to wait and make a permanent pact with him afterwards, when and if his regime survived the war.

 In the meantime, to increase Church influence, the Pope let Franco have a modus vivendi, which would remain in force until a future concordat could be concluded. This provisional Convention of June 1941 gave Franco a more limited version of the royal prerogative. He chose six candidates for a vacant see, the pope, if he approved, whittled it down to three, and then the Generalissimo made the final, face-saving choice.

And the payoff for the Vatican? The 1941 Convention took over the first four articles of the 1851 Concordat, the ones that gave the Church a religious monopoly, as well as control of education and the press.

Finally, in 1953, when it was clear that this Fascist dictator was going to survive, Franco got a permanent agreement with the Vatican. Franco's concordat gave state funding to the Church and legally enforced Church teaching. In return, the Vatican granted him the "royal patronage" (patronato real). This was the ancient privilege of Spanish kings to name bishops and veto appointments down to the level of the parish priest. This concession by the Vatican increased the control of a dictator who admitted cheerfully: "Our regime is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections". [1]

When Franco reached his eighties, however, the Vatican employed its usual tactic: the Church began to distance itself from the aging dictator and reposition itself for the advent of democracy. In the name of church-state separation the Vatican tried without success to get Franco to give up the right of patronage over bishops, the traditional prerogative of Spanish kings.

At the Episcopal Conference convened in 1973, the bishops demanded the separation of church and state, and they called for a revision of the 1953 Concordat. Subsequent negotiations for such a revision broke down because Franco refused to relinquish the power to veto Vatican appointments. Until his death, Franco never understood the opposition of the church. No other Spanish ruler had enacted measures so favourable to the church as Franco, and he complained bitterly about what he considered to be its ingratitude. [2]

Notes

1. Source thus far: Zachary Wareham, “The Cold War and the Spanish Concordat of 1953” [Chapter II, M.A. Thesis, University of New Brunswick, Canada], Last modified 24 November 2005. Pp. 10-12.
http://www.unbf.ca/arts/History/documents/ZacharyWarehamChap.pdf
2.  Jo Ann Browning Seeley, "Roman Catholic Church and Politics", Spain, Library of Congress Country Studies,1988, Chapter 4,/ Politics / Political interest groups / Roman Catholic Church. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/estoc.html