Waging peace in the Spanish Civil Wars : the relief efforts of the British Quaker mission

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was contemporaneously perceived in much of Europe (and indeed as far afield as South Africa and Australia) as a crisis for Western civilisation generally. The Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco sought successfully to restore the Roman Catholic Church to the privileged status it had enjoyed prior to being disestablished by the Second Republic in 1931. On the other hand, European – especially British – Protestants generally favoured the Republican side, not least because its continuation would guarantee the future of the evangelical presence which had been established in Spain. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, were attempting to establish a spiritual centre in the country when the war broke out, necessitating a fundamental change of emphasis to familiar forms of relief work. Though officially neutral, these pacifist Christians clearly sympathised with calls for maintaining denominational pluralism rather than the return of exclusive Catholic domination of Spanish religious life.