(ANALYSIS) When on July 18, 1936, the Spanish army rose up against the Republic, thus starting the civil war, the coup plotters proclaimed to be waging a “crusade” against the enemies of the nation and religion. Historians find it controversial to define Francisco Franco's 40-year dictatorship as fascist, and instead have termed it as “national Catholicism” to define the essence of his regime.

The Catholic Church was one of the social and ideological pillars of Francoism from the moment of the coup, as evidenced by the ‘Collective letter of all Spanish bishops’, made public July 1, 1937 to support a movement that “has strengthened the sense of homeland” and “has guaranteed order in the territory.” The same regime that was born out of a “crusade” with the purpose of shielding the power and traditional privileges of the church, ended up creating a prison to imprison priests critical of power. Neither Enver Hoxha's Albania nor Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania went to that extreme.

The creation of the concordat prison in Zamora is the story of how part of the church and the Spanish faithful distanced themselves from Franco’s dictatorship. The 1969 National Clergy Survey revealed that 47% of young priests sympathized with socialism, and only 10% supported the regime. In those years, things happened that were unthinkable only a short time before: During Christmas 1973, an ultra right-wing group called the Warriors of Christ the King set fire to a church in a working-class neighborhood of Madrid because it served as a refuge for persecuted trade unionists.

The prison was active between 1968 and 1976, and during this period around a 100 members of the clergy passed through its cells. The origins of these priests and the reasons for their imprisonment are indicative of the conflicts in Spanish society in the final years of the dictatorship. 

A large number of the imprisoned priests came from the Basque Country, where the church was historically sympathetic to separatism and the promotion of the local language and culture, strongly repressed by Francoism. According to Guy Hermet, 96 of the 120 priests imprisoned or prosecuted between 1973 and 1975 came from the Basque Country. Many other priests ended up in prison in Zamora because of their support for the workers' and trade union struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s, which were very numerous at a time of rural exodus and incipient developmentalism.

Juan Mari Arregui, a former Basque priest, escaped from knowing the inside of the Zamora concordat prison by going into exile in France. He was an active participant in anti-Franco movements of the time and a great critic of what he called “the complicity of the ecclesiastical hierarchy with the dictatorship. For this reason, in the summer of 1968, several dozen religious occupied the seminary of Derio and the bishopric of Bilbao.” From exile and in hiding, Arregui became involved in the support networks for imprisoned priests, who ended up behind bars for “denouncing repression and torture in sermons, attending the May 1st march, collaborating with strikers or giving parish premises for political meetings.”

“The prisoners in Zamora were isolated and we tried to send them books and newspapers to keep them informed,” Arregui recalled. “We also collaborated in an escape attempt that failed at the last moment; and in the 1973 riot. In addition, the food inside the prison was scarce and of poor quality, and we gave them some food and even alcohol, which helped them get through the winter cold.”  

The former Basque priest and renowned poet Xabier Amuriza suffered the hunger and cold of the Zamora prison.

“In this darkness we live half dead,” read one of the verses he wrote during the almost seven years he spent in the Zamora concordat prison. “Many of us ended up imprisoned for giving shelter and protection to the movements that opposed the dictatorship’, recalls Amuriza. A clear example is the Bandas strike, the longest labour conflict during Franco's regime: ‘Strikers who were fleeing from the police were hiding in my priest's house, and they also met there and we helped them with collections.”

Amuriza was first sentenced to serve 30 days in Zamora for refusing to pay a fine for taking part in a mass in memory of Txabi Etxebarrieta, the first ETA member to die in a confrontation with the police. A year later, he and four other priests began a hunger strike in the Bilbao bishopric.

“We were convicted of military rebellion,” he explained, “and I got ten years in prison.”

That second stay, which lasted almost until the prison was closed with the arrival of democracy with Franco’s death in 1975, was difficult.

“In such a long sentence it seems that time doesn’t pass. Isolation has a great influence, and we had no contact with other prisoners,” Amuriza said.

However, Amuriza has fond memories of his fellow inmates: “We were a very close-knit group. There was a mining priest sentenced for taking part in strikes, and several from the industrial belt of Madrid who supported clandestine movements and trade unions, like the jesuit García Salve.”

García Salve, who died in 2016, wrote about his time in Zamora prison: “Meetings, strikes, assemblies. Police raid on the convent and the prison in Zamora.  The only Concordat Prison of Humanity was in Zamora. Eternal blemish, indelible stain on the Spanish Church. A lot of cells and a lot of cold.”

It should not be forgotten that this rebellion of some sectors of the Catholic Church took place in parallel with the Second Vatican Council and the consequent opening of the church to contemporary problems. For Arregui, John XXIII was “fundamental for the rank and file of the church to support the movements of resistance to Francoism. The Second Vatican Council was an ideological basis that had a notable influence on our movement.”

Amuriza, however, downplayed Vatican II’s influence.

“It was undoubtedly a revulsive and had its social and ideological importance, but in the end it was the conservative part of the church that was still in charge,” Amuriza said. “I never believed that the church could be changed from within.”

Both left the church in those years: Arregi on his return from exile; Amuriza on his release from prison. Their testimonies, collected in the documentary “La cárcel de los curas,” are also part of the lawsuit against the crimes of Franco's dictatorship.

Bernardo Alvarez-Villar is a freelance political journalist based in Spain.