In September-October 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, militias of the leftist Republican (Loyalist) faction attacked the Catholic Church in Barcelona. They dug up the coffin and the body of a nun who was buried in the convent, and desecrated the body of the nun in front of the convent of the Catholic Church by opening the coffin and exposing it openly. Church tombs were opened and the corpses of saints, priests and nuns were exhumed in the streets, displayed and desecrated.
Between 1936 and 1939 during the Spanish Civil War, about 6,800 or more Catholic clergy and religious in Spain were killed in red terror by the leftist Republican faction (Loyalists). In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Catholic Church supported the Spanish monarchy. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church supported the Spanish monarchy, and during the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans abused and massacred the Catholic Church as anti-Catholic. This was the most violent and cruel persecution of the Catholic Church in Western history.
At that time in Spain, aristocrats were tyrants in their own lands and ruled over the lives of peasants and citizens as omnipotent and absolute rulers. The priests of the Catholic Church allied themselves with the nobility and aided and benefited from their rule. The Church became the stronghold of the corrupt Catholic Church, which dominated the religious orders. In order to wrest political control from the Catholic Church, the emerging peasants and citizens of Spain were sworn enemies of the Catholic Church, which was linked to the nobility through the Red Terror.
During the Spanish Civil War, death and destruction on the battle front coincided with murder and repression behind it. Most of the deaths in the first months of the Spanish Civil War were not from war, but from political executions of Red or White terrorists. The distinction between civilians and combatants became blurred, and atrocities were rampant against social and political enemies. The number of victims of the Red Terror was estimated to be between about 38,000 and 72,344. Red terrorism began with the killing of rebels after the failure of insurgencies in major cities. It expanded into mass arrests and executions against right-wing or Catholic churches.
The rebel (nationalist) Francoists who won the Spanish Civil War propagated that the bloody red terror of the Republican faction had led to the extermination of a vast number of their fellow citizens. The nationalist victims who died were justly and nobly honored as martyrs. Since 1987, the Vatican, the headquarters of Catholics, has canonized some 1,916 martyrs and canonized 11 others.
