Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33 (3) (1998)
Over the last decade, only a few scholars have dared to look into the question of anticlerical vandalism during the Spanish Civil War specifically, and what could be termed "scientific normality". Unfortunately, their seminal works have apparently had neither followers nor conspicuous dissenters. <...>
Accepted figures for the numbers of priests and clerics killed in the loyalist zone during the Spanish Civil War would hardly be believable, were they not the result of painstaking research conducted by Antonio Montero in the late 1950s. According to this research, 6832 members of the Catholic clergy were massacred, including 13 bishops, 4172 diocesan priests and seminarists, 2364 monks and friars and 283 nuns. Statistics are even more distressing for individual dioceses - for instance, in Barbastro 88 persent of the secular clergy were slaughtered, 66 percent in Lerida, 62 percent in Tortosa, 44 percent in Segorbe, about half of the priests in Malaga, Minorca and Toledo, 40 percent in Ciudad Real and Iniza, a third in Almeria, Cordoba, Jaen, Madrid-Alcala, Tarragona, Valencia and Vic, and between a fourth and a fifth in Barcelona, Cuenca, Gerona, Teruel and Urgel. <...>
<...> although the atrocities began immediately after the military coup, they did not last as long as the war itself. <...> In Barcelona, the slaughter of the clergy would have started on 19 July in the early morning and very soon reached its peak (197 victims in July and 223 in August); then it would have begun to decline, very gradually, until December 1936 (146 deaths in September, 121 in October, 91 in November and 52 in December) and more rapidly from then to May 1937 (9 deaths in January, 10 in February, 28 in March, 6 in April and 5 in May). From May 1937, massice killing operations against the clergy could be considered to be practically over <...> For the whole of loyalist Spain, it has been estimated that around 50 percent of the murders of priests and clerics were committed during the first month and a half of the war.