La Iglesia vasca dividida. Cuestión religiosa y nacionalismo a la luz de la nueva documentación vaticana

Abstract

The article is about the division of the Catholic Church and Catholicism during the Spanish Civil War in the Basque Country. Starting from the existing historiography and the new documents from the Madrid's Nunziatura Apostolica Archives kept in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the article presents, contextualizes and comments the main events of the topic, adding new details and showing less-known sides: for example the deep divisions inside the different religious orders, where there were episodes of treason and delation. In the conclusions the article gives some considerations about the different actors of Basque Catholicism during the War, underlining how the attitude and the active role of ecclesiastic hierarchy influenced the outcome of the War and how divisions and conflicts inside Basque Catholicism were born from different ways of thinking about the relations between religion and politics and not from political problems.