Didn’t the Spanish “republicans” go on a violent anti-church pogrom during their civil war in the 1930’s?
Yes. During the Seige of the Alcazar in Toledo, the defenders had no priests inside the Alcazar to minister to their religious needs. At the beginning of the drama, the priests in Toledo thought that holing up in the Alcazar would have been suicide. So, they stayed outside.
In the end, most of the defenders of the Alcazar survived until they were relieved but most of the priests in Toledo were executed by the Republican Reds.
It is estimated that 13,000 priests, religious (nuns and brothers) and lay leaders were killed by the leftists in the 1930s.
In the “Republican” zone, no Catholic worship was permitted and churches were desecrated and destroyed.
The leftists would go into convents and drag the nuns out and kill them and they would attack seminaries and kill all the students. They attacked individual parishes and Catholic schools and priests, and priests had to hide out and be smuggled around from family to family. Naturally, the entire family would be killed if it was found that they were hiding a priest.
“Didn’t the Spanish “republicans” go on a violent anti-church pogrom during their civil war in the 1930’s?”
It started before the war (and contributed to the start of it). The burning of churches and closing of catholic schools took place in the spring of 1936; the generals revolted on mid-July of that year. Spain had over 7,000 clergy (including nuns, and 12 or 13 bishops) killed during the course of the war.
I was just reading an account of the talk Calvo Sotelo, a Spanish parliamentarian, made in mid-July, 1936, in which he reported the official figures for violence what had occurred in Spain in the previous 5 months:
The next day this same Calvo Sotelo, parliamentarian, was taken out and shot.
That was when leading officers of the Spanish military decided there was no hope in "reforming" the Lefitst government by nonviolent electoral tactics. Franco made his move.
What resulted was the hideous Spanish Civil War with huge casualties and atrocities aplenty on both sides. But it was by no means the Church that brought this on; the Church took her place among the suffering, and suffered.