St. Francisco Franco
Posted by Charles II on October 18, 2011
Katya Adler, BBC (via Eschaton):
Lawyers believe that up to 300,000 babies were taken.
The practice of removing children from parents deemed “undesirable” and placing them with “approved” families, began in the 1930s under the dictator General Francisco Franco.
At that time, the motivation may have been ideological. But years later, it seemed to change – babies began to be taken from parents considered morally – or economically – deficient. It became a money-spinner, too.
The scandal is closely linked to the Catholic Church, which under Franco assumed a prominent role in Spain’s social services including hospitals, schools and children’s homes.
Nuns and priests compiled waiting lists of would-be adoptive parents, while doctors were said to have lied to mothers about the fate of their children.
The name of one doctor, Dr Eduardo Vela, has come up in a number of victim investigations.
Dr Vela is confronted with the allegations
In 1981, Civil Registry sources indicate that 70% of births at Dr Vela’s San Ramon clinic in Madrid were registered as “mother unknown”
…
A Spanish magazine published photographs of a dead baby kept in a freezer at the San Ramon clinic, supposedly to show mothers that their child had died.
I can’t imagine a hell bad enough for causing 300,000 mothers and fathers to grieve, to turn 300,000 children into fosterlings, and for using the name of Jesus Christ to do it–for profit.
10 Responses to “St. Francisco Franco”
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Flee said
Evil, organized religion is pure evil.
Charles II said
Not so, Flee.
The problem is that religion is used by the wealthy for political purposes. There was some repression of the Church by the Spanish Republic, and a number of mezzanine (i.e., not exactly first-rate) saints were beatified by the Church in response. But the Church, representing at that time wealth and power, allied itself with Franco and with the fascist regimes rising throughout Europe. That’s where this all began. The Church did not really move in a progressive direction until the 1960s, and that was short-lived.
But the Church can do remarkable things. It preserved learning and knowledge during the fall of the Roman Empire, for example. It has been the home to radical movements for equality, especially female equality, since the New Testament with some minor exceptions says clearly that we are all equal. And so on.
As Jesus said, Money is the enemy of everything good. Money creates the illusion that we are in control, that we have impunity. The whole point of the Bible is that we aren’t in control, that we have to trust that the nature of the universe is fundamentally good and, especially, that we must do good: care for the alien and the poor and the orphan, tell the truth, abstain from violence…
It’s not the organization that corrupts religion. It’s the money, and the people wielding the power of money.
Stormcrow said
It preserved literacy among the heirarchy, because this was indispensable when religious tradition was principally transmitted by the written word.
The impact of this wasn’t unmixed. It concentrated religious authority to a degree that even the Romans couldn’t anticipate.
Consider the office of Pontifex Maximus, that last survival of the old cursus honoram. It was an elective office 2000 years ago, too. But the elections were at large, not limited to the College of Cardinals.
But the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic polities further east were far more responsible for the preservation of learning and knowledge than Europe’s largely ignorant priesthoods ever were.
And it didn’t start returning to a slowly recovering Europe until sustained contact with the Middle East started bringing it back.
Mostly written in Arabic.
Do you have any idea of just how much basic English technical vocabulary consists of loanwords from Arabic?
It’s proximity to power and amplification of power.
And that befell Christianity when Constantine made it the new Roman state cult in 312 AD.
The corruption of Christianity was immediate and permanent – not even the Protestant Reformation changed that.
Charles II said
Stormcrow says, “But the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic polities further east were far more responsible for the preservation of learning and knowledge than Europe’s largely ignorant priesthoods ever were.”
While this is true, it’s independent of the fact that the western Church also preserved knowledge. Nor was the western church at fault for the decline of knowledge; the eastern church simply didn’t suffer the same military setbacks. And of course, the Byzantines were also Christian. No surprise: Constantine founded Constaninople. The Islamic state had its flowering age when it valued learning and knowledge, and it had its setbacks when it was beset from outside. None of these have to do with the worthiness of one religion over another.
Certainly knowledge was valued in the Christian church as part of propagating the religion. But that is not the story of why the church preserved knowledge. It preserved Plato and Aristotle, for example, because of respect for venerable ideas. It didn’t focus on technical issues, because the Christian search is not in pursuit of a practical sort of knowledge.
I don’t think you mean the sentence, “It [the Church] concentrated religious authority to a degree that even the Romans couldn’t anticipate.” Roman emperors, after all, presented themselves as gods. One can’t get more concentrated than that.
As for the corruption of the Church, no human institution long endures without being corrupted. Our Congress is only a little over two centuries old, and it has already had three major eras of corruption (Gilded Age, 1920s, the age of Gingrich). I’m surprised that George Bush didn’t march a horse into the Senate and declare it to be a member. His crowd would surely have gone along.
Phoenix Woman said
Hell, they were apparently doing that in Montana as recently as the 1950s. One of my acquaintances has a childhood friend whose father found out, round about age fifty, that the younger brother he and the rest of the family had been led to believe was stillborn was in fact taken by the nuns running the hospital and placed with a “good Catholic family”. Why? a) The boy’s birth family were Mormons, and the Catholics were waging all-out war against them at the time (mid-20th-century; this is well before they joined forces to fight against gays); and b) because they could.
And sometimes they didn’t bother with pretending the kidnap victim was a stillbirth — they’d just go ahead and take the child:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Mortara
Charles II said
I always learn new things.
Stormcrow said
Look into the basis of that practice, and you’ll find it didn’t work quite the way your sentence suggests.
Julius Caesar was deified specifically by the populace at large. Particularly by the very lowest classes of that society, the paupers of the “head count” and the slaves.
Not only did Rome’s power brokers have nothing to do with this, but it wasn’t much to the liking of the Senate! Which was controlled, immediately after Caesar’s assassination, by the factions the assassins themselves belonged to. Among other things, it amounted to a very public denunciation.
But there wasn’t anything they could do about it. Even given the enormous power differential between the First Class and the “capita censi”!
It had nothing to do with the later power struggle, that would elevate Octavius to an apex of political power that the structure of the by-now dead Republic could never have supported. Although he was very definitely its principal beneficiary.
Vespasian rather famously refused to permit his deification. But he ruefully admitted on his deathbed that like it or not, he was about to be overruled.
Charles II said
You’re picking the better sort of dictators that Rome endured to make your point, Stormcrow. The Church has had some good popes, as well.
Stormcrow said
But the point I was reaching for has nothing to do with the character of any specific dictator or emperor, good or bad.
I’m afraid I wasn’t being very clear.
My point is that the entire popular cosmology of Rome at that time, along with nearly all of her neighbors, was sharply different from ours. And that popular cosmology shaped both beliefs and the concept of “acceptable” behavior, right across the political spectrum, from slave to autocrat.
The concept of what a “god” could be, was clearly much more mundane than ours.
They didn’t see any unbridgeable gaps between extremely revered humans and deities. And their gods were parts of a larger cosmos, rather than creators of it.
Hell, you go a thousand miles or so north of Rome, and the people living there just over a single millenium ago believed in gods that could be permanently injured or even killed outright.
Whereas we think such a conception is ludicrous and insane upon its face, whether we’re Christians or atheists.
Charles II said
I would agree with that formulation about the Roman conception of gods, Stormcrow, but would differ on the Christian conception. The whole point of the crucifixion is that Christ died… and yet death had no final claim on Him. He–fully human as well as fully divine–was showing the rest of us that death has no final claim on any human being, so we should devote our lives to doing what is right.
The theology is complicated, and has been perverted in many ways, but a careful reading shows that both the gospels and epistles teach that we are equivalent to cells in the body of Christ. As long as we are with the program–namely to be compassionate with one another, to tell the truth, and exist in respectful community– we fully partake of divinity. If we want to act like little cancers, we can, but the body will not accept us.