GERALD WARNER is spot on:

Even in the pontificate of Benedict XVI, thanks to the lingering, though happily dwindling, legacy of the Second Vatican Catastrophe, there are still plenty of fellow travelling useful idiots wearing mitres. Recently the Bishop of Vitoria, in Spain’s Basque country, Miguel Asurmendi, conducted a religious service in his cathedral to commemorate 14 Basque priests allegedly executed by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Crusade of Liberation, 1936-39.

He could, of course, have celebrated a discreet and perfectly legitimate requiem in intercession for the souls of these men, but his words betrayed a different agenda: to support the systemic slander against his own Church being orchestrated by the Zapatero regime. “The silence with which officials of our Church surrounded the deaths of these priests is not justifiable, nor acceptable for much longer,” he claimed. “Such a long silence was not only a wrongful omission, but also a lack of truth and an act against justice and charity.”

So, 14 priests were executed for aiding and lending spiritual comfort to Basque separatists whose fanaticism for establishing a Basque nation (which never existed historically) led them to sustain the atheist Republic while it butchered their fellow clergy and Catholics in the rest of Spain. Bishop Asurmendi wants to commemorate dead priests? I’ll give him dead priests. The filthy obscenity that was the Second Republic slaughtered 13 martyred bishops (Spain had a more robust episcopate in those days), 4,184 diocesan clergy, 2,365 male members of religious orders and 283 nuns, sometimes accompanied by tortures and mutilations indecent to recount in the public prints.

This was the worst persecution of Catholicism in all history, exceeding that of Nero, Diocletian and the French and Russian Revolutions. It was accompanied by the murders of 66,000 lay Catholics and the destruction of thousands of churches, government-supplied petrol being used to burn them.

Keep reading.