Liberals in Spain

In Spain, Bishop Herrera of Malaga has been viewed by politicians and conservative fellow prelates with disapproval and alarm. But today, tall, balding Bishop Herrera, 62, who runs a new social school for priests, can feel that the tide, with a little pushing from Rome, may be turning at last. This month the Pope gave permission for a project to establish similar social schools all over Spain.

Bishop Herrera only became a priest 8 1/2 years ago. A graduate in law and philosophy of the University of Salamanca, he gave up his law practice in Madrid to devote full time to Catholic activities and was soon recognized as leader of the Catholic party in Spain. In 1935, just a few months before the Civil War began, Angel Herrera decided, at 48, to become a priest.

"Pernicious" School. Ordained in 1940, after a shortened course of studies, Father Herrera was appointed assistant pastor in one of the poorest sections of Santander. Here Don Angel, as his parishioners called him, saw at once how desperately Spain needed a socially conscious clergy. But though he did not fear to tread on this dangerous ground, Don Angel knew too much to rush in. Instead, he formed a small club called the Casa Sacerdotal. Priests came to the club, ostensibly to prepare their Sunday sermons. Actually they discussed world problems in terms of the most advanced Catholic social thinking. The nucleus of this vest-pocket reform movement was a handful of priests.

Though he had done little to attract attention, Angel Herrera is not the kind of man to escape it. In 1947, he was handed one of the toughest church appointments in Spain: he was named bishop of Malaga.

Malaga, where feudal-minded landowners have long held the workers in hungry ignorance, has the lowest percentage (40%) of practicing Catholics in the country. In the uprisings of 1931, 36 Malaga churches were burned; during the Civil War the Malagans killed every priest. It was an ideal place for the new bishop to set up the kind of school he wanted, where priests could study social problems. Such old-line prelates as Seville's Cardinal Segura y Saenz (TIME, March 7) denounced the venture as "pernicious." But in January 1948, with 14 students, Bishop Herrera's school began.

Respect for the Enemy. During their two-year course the priest-students study economics, law (especially labor legislation), Communism, cooperatives, farm problems, history, geography, English, and the social doctrines of the Catholic Church. Each day's work is concluded with study of the Gospel--an antidote to the stiff daily dose of secular thinking.

To the outside visitor, the most interesting class is that on Communism. Beneath a crucifix on the classroom wall hang two poster-size diagrams of the Soviet state organization. With the classics of Communism before them (as well as Cominform publications and books from Moscow), the young priests gather around a big table to discuss, with dialectical zeal, the fine points of Marxism. Explains their instructor, former philosophy professor Canon Don Emilio Benavent:

"Communism is our most powerful enemy. It is the strongest modern expression of a social idea--we must fight it but treat it with respect. We must study it well, deeply, and in all details so as to combat it, not with arms and force which are means of ephemeral victory, but by showing the masses--to whom we promise happiness in heaven while Marx promises happiness in mortal life--that long before Marx, St. Paul taught social justice, and that we can and must now put our theories into practice."

Last fortnight, Bishop Herrera himself gave a dramatic account of the job before his scholar-priests. "One day in Santander," he said, "a Communist woman was sentenced to death. She had declared herself an atheist. On the eve of her execution a nun convinced her she should confess and partake of the Holy Sacrament. Yet later, as she stood before the firing squad, that same woman raised her clenched fist to the sky and cried out: 'Viva Rusia!'

"The nun came to me in tears. 'I was unable to save the soul of that poor creature,' she told me. The sister was wrong. In this woman's death cry there lay only the dramatic and profound aspiration of all Spain's poor for better laws of social justice. She had been taught by false and cunning prophets that happiness would be brought by Russia. The error is not hers--it is ours. It is ours because we are turning away from the poor and from the social teaching of the gospel ... It is our duty to see that in the Spain of tomorrow social justice is called Christian justice . . ."

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