Orwell, Spain and the Catholic reader.

 Orwell (L), photographed as member of the POUM militia forces 

fighting for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War.  

It is no understatement to say that George Orwell's service as a volunteer soldier for the Spanish Republic during the 1936-39 conflict was the clarifying moment of his life:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

[The last eight words are sometimes lopped off of the above quote, an Orwellian edit I will not repeat.]

Such a statement makes reading Orwell's works about the War an absolute necessity if one wants to understand him. These works are his war memoir, Homage to Catalonia (1938) and the pre-Homage notes contained in Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937), Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942), and Notes on Nationalism (1945).

But.

The unpleasant reality facing an observant Catholic reader of Orwell is that he reads as one who has drunk deeply from the wells of English hostility towards "Popery." To be sure, he does not use terms like popery, Romanism or make derisive references such as "hocus-pocus." But he did say things like "stinking Catholics," alas. Orwell was baptised an Anglican and buried--at his direction--according to Anglican rites. He also seems to have periodically attended Anglican services despite being an atheist.

In addition to reflexive Anglican anti-Catholic attitudes, Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker also points to young Eric Blair's sour experiences being educated by Ursuline nuns as a formative moment. 

Even with the above in mind, Orwell's casual--even occasionally celebratory--acceptance of the destruction of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Republic still shocks. 

A January 1937 report presented to the ruling council of the Republic by minister-without-portfolio (and later justice minister) Manuel de Irujo revealed there was not one open Catholic church in Republican-held territory--with the exception of the Basque provinces. 

The convents and abbeys had been emptied as well, and their former occupants usually imprisoned or shot.

At that point, the Republicans controlled at least half of Spain's territory, and the majority of its population and urban areas.

The revolution had snuffed out open worship by Catholics. But that wasn't all: de Irujo reported that Republican security forces made regular sweeps of private homes, removing and destroying religious items and paraphernalia.

As it turned out, de Irujo (himself a Basque) was the only minister who thought religious persecution was a problem, and the report was quietly buried. 

[As an aside, one of the reasons the Basque region fell so quickly to the Nationalists during the latter's 1937 offensive was that Basques as a whole--even the fiercely-separatist ones--were appalled by the violence of the revolution. Many Basques wanted to separate from Spain, but only a minuscule number wanted to separate from the faith. Plus, there were still a significant number of Basques with an attachment to Carlism, and the latter were all-in on the uprising.]

In Homage, the perceptive Orwell was correct when he observed that the Church in places like Catalonia had lost touch with the people. Too often it was in fact the dutiful handmaid/schoolmarm of those with money and power--something we still see in high places today. Indeed, in a visit to a Catalan cemetery, Orwell notes that he saw only one headstone with a religious message. He also archly reports that the secular headstones were larded with cringeworthy praise for the deceased.

So it would be fair to say that there existed a profound disconnect between the majority of Catalans and the faith of their forebears which happened long before the events of 1936.

And yet, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the public extirpation of the Church in the Republic met with Orwell's approval. In Spilling the Spanish Beans, he describes the Church as parasitic and sneeringly dismisses reports of nuns being raped and murdered (the latter indisputably happened). In Homage, he describes with with unstinting admiration the leveling effect of the anarchist revolution in Barcelona, with the erasure of class distinctions and modes of behavior, and describes the dismantling of former churches as part of this sea change.

Later, he states with full approval that there was not a Catholic church open in the Republic (the situation in the Basque provinces does not figure much in his writing) before the summer of 1937, and dismisses the Church on more than one occasion as a "racket." And the killing or exile of priests is another fact he reports without a hint of objection. In fact, one gets an unpleasant whiff of Outer Party members denouncing Eurasia's atrocities even as they celebrate Oceania's.

So...why? Why would a man who genuinely loathed totalitarians regardless of handedness view the Republican Red Terror with, at most, just a shrugging acknowledgment?

1. Orwell dismissed war propaganda as a matter of course.

Part of it can be ascribed to his disdain for pro-Franco reportage in England, which he regarded as propagandistic garbage. To be fair, he would level even more venomous criticism of leftist newspapers. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable aspect of Looking Back is his unstinting attack against the falsification of history by partisanship and propaganda. The seeds of what would become 1984 were beginning to bloom in this essay.

2.  Orwell's perch gave him a limited view of the War.

Another factor is his lack of information about the national scope of Republican atrocities, which was not something trumpeted by the Republic as it sought to influence Western public opinion. It is safe to say that he was not fully up to speed on this, either. His time in Spain was spent on the Aragon front and in Catalonia. Soldiers--even in revolutionary militias--do not get to wander around.

The problem here his view does not alter much after the Civil War ends. He concedes in Looking Back that there were Republican atrocities, and he further indicts both sides for believing and disbelieving atrocities depending on who was doing them:

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish Civil War. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously.

Is there a veiled admission of his own ideological blinders here? Perhaps. But again, one is faced with a silent, yawning void when it comes to sympathy for papist victims of the revolution.

3. "Political Catholicism."

A third factor at play is his candid loathing for what he called "political Catholicism." In his discussion of this phrase in Notes on Nationalism, he attempts to take the late G.K. Chesterton to the woodshed for being an exponent of such. In fact, Orwell goes so far as to equate the "political Catholicism" of Chesterton with Communism:

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G.K. Chesterton. 

Whilst one can find fault with Chesterton's oeuvre--hack work and bad analysis will never be lacking in any writer of prodigious output--it is difficult to see this equation as anything other than the reflex of a man who has a bug about Catholicism. While his formulation theoretically allows for distinguishing between "political" Catholicism and that of a less-objectionable "non-political" sort, I have yet to stumble across Orwell finding something praiseworthy in any form of Catholicism. Even though Orwell states genuine admiration for Chesterton as as a writer of talent and an anti-imperial "little Englander," you will not find any admiration for Chesterton as a Catholic.

Where this inconsistent-but-still believing Catholic comes down in his assessment of Orwell is here: the man simply had a blind spot on the subject. And it was one that operated almost at the level of reflex, to boot. It was not something that he was ever able to remedy, either--quite simply because he was incapable of recognizing it. Perhaps if his small circle of friends and associates had contained a believing Catholic, things might have turned out differently. Or maybe not even then.

Ultimately, I find his case to be salutary. It is a reminder that honest men have their blind spots and can still operate in good faith. Even the most objective and ruthlessly analytical of them can miss things for whatever reason. And from that, we can learn something about ourselves--if we are being honest.