“Most Americans don’t know about the atrocities the Spanish “Republicans” (communists) committed on Catholics. They committed mass murder against lay Catholics, priests, and religious, anyone who stuck up for traditional Spanish culture and religion.”
Thats what i’d like to find a good accurate description of.
It was the traditional Andalusian peasantry/tenant farmers, many of which worked on land the the Church had enjoyed a monopoly on since the reconquest, who were most violent toward the Church. These were not "communist agents" but just the angry "common people" taking arms against the aristocratic Church.
The actualy military civil war was indeed between a "right" comprised of landowners, aristocrats, and the Church versus the southern peasantry, the proletariat, and various leftist groups, the latter of which wound up in civil war once the Soviets got involved.
That being said, more people were killed by the White Terror of Franco than by the Red Terror in Andalucia. He even had the Luftwaffe firebomb the devout Catholics of the Basque Country because they wanted to preserve their traditional cultural/political autonomy.
It should be no surprise that so many Spaniards became anti-religious after the Franco years, and his glorification of an idealized/rural past did not jibe well with a 20th century urban society. All the Catholics who whine about how the left has "destroyed" the clerical authoritarian regime fail to acknowledge that it is the Spanish people themselves who have rejected the RCC, largely due to its perceived irrelevance, as well as its support for the Franco regime.