The Bishop and The Basques

The Vatican and the Roman Catholic government of Spain confronted one another last week in the country's most ominous church-state clash in more than 40 years. The regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco was seeking to expel the Bishop of Bilbao, Antonio Anoveros Ataun, 64, for statements that sharply opposed government policy. Madrid even hinted that it might break the 1953 concordat that protects Catholicism's legal position as Spain's state religion. In response, churchmen warned that any official--presumably including Premier Carlos Arias Navarro and even the pious Caudillo himself--who moved against the bishop would be automatically excommunicated.

The crisis began with a pastoral letter written by Anoveros. The letter, to be read from the 200 pulpits of his diocese, was no ordinary spiritual admonition. The bishop's diocese lies in the heartland of Spain's embattled Basque minority. The pugnacious Anoveros, half-Basque himself and deeply sympathetic to regional demands for ethnic autonomy, had penned a spirited attack on the government's refusal to allow the free and open use of the Basque language and customs. So strong were the bishop's words that some priests refused to read them, and conservative worshipers stalked angrily out of churches.

"The Basque people, as well as the other peoples of the Spanish state," Anoveros wrote, "have the right to conserve their own identity and to cultivate and develop their spiritual heritage within a sociopolitical system that recognizes their liberty to do so." In the context of Spanish politics, those were daring words indeed. Madrid vividly remembers that Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco's closest colleague and Arias' predecessor as Premier, was killed by Basque bomber-terrorists as he emerged from daily Mass. But Anoveros went on to regret that "sometimes people, or to say it better, their ruling classes, can succumb to the temptation of sacrificing the characteristics and special values of their own country to nothing more than economic development."

Waiting Jet. Reprisal was swift. The bishop was at home brushing his teeth when police telephoned. "Please prepare yourself for a trip within half an hour," he was told. A jet was waiting at Bilbao's airport to fly the bishop and his vicar general to Rome. Before the government could move, the Spanish hierarchy rallied behind Anoveros. In Bilbao, priests, nuns and lay people by the thousands signed petitions and flocked to see him. "He is a good man," said one elderly Basque. "Good men are rare, and he must stay." Pope Paul interrupted a Lenten retreat to oversee discussions on the Spanish crisis. Long-distance conference calls hummed between Rome and Archbishop Luigi Dadaglio, the papal nuncio in Madrid, as Vatican diplomats sought ways to avoid an open rupture with Franco without compromising "the demands of justice."

The church-state dispute was further complicated last week by the execution of a young anarchist, Salvador Puig Antrich, 26, for the murder of a policeman in Barcelona. Puig was a Catalan, a member of Spain's other belligerent minority, and his death was the first political execution in a decade. It touched off protest marches all round the country. Many Spaniards were appalled by the fact that Puig had been killed by garroting.* In protest, Camilo Jose Cela, Spain's best-known contemporary novelist (The Family of Pascual Duarte, Pavilion of Repose), refused to take his seat as new president of the Ateneo, the country's most prestigious organization of thinkers and artists.

At week's end the confrontation between Spain's government and its bishops had shifted from Bilbao to Madrid, where the two sides huddled separately seeking solutions to the imbroglio. The entire Cabinet met and reviewed the situation, and Franco himself spent three hours with government officials at his palace in what spokesmen called "an informal exchange of views." Eight miles away, the 19-member executive committee of the Spanish bishops conferred with Vicente Cardinal Enrique y Tarancon, Archbishop of Madrid. Among the 19 was Anoveros, who seemed scarcely contrite about having provoked the crisis. He had arrived in the capital wearing a Basque beret.

*A technique used in the 1800s in which a prisoner is choked to death and his spine snapped by an iron collar being tightened around his neck.

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