Wojciech Opioła: Polish catholic Press on Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Civil War in Spain broke out in summer 1936. Due to the intervention of the third countries the conflict quickly became international in its character and was widely commented in the media. In Poland, the first six months of the war were the most widely described and commented political event in the second half of 1936. Polish catholic press while commenting the Spanish Civil War unanimously supported the rebels. The situation in the Iberian Peninsula used to be presented as defending the Christian faith against the communist revolution. It was characteristic for the Catholic press to show the situation in Spain using a kind of dichotomy: good-bad, we-they. Most articles justified the rebellion of generals and showed it as a rightful act in the face of the revolutionary ferment of the communist and anarchist party, decrepitude or a silent consent of the government to burn churches and kill clergymen. It was written that those that contributed to this situation were, most of all, freemasonry, the Soviet Union as an exporter of communism, and the Jews. Sometimes some publicists tried to prove that the Civil War in Spain was caused by the government of Leon Blum or even Leon Trotsky and the rising of the Fourth International.