Priest Charged With Insult

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31319, 15 March 1967, Page 13

Priest Charged With Insult

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) MADRID, March 14. A young priest went on trial in Madrid yesterday charged with insulting General Franco’s movement by saying, in effect, that atrocities took place on both sides during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.

The Rev. Father Victor Manuel Arbeloa, aged 31, faces a gaol sentence of four years and two months if convicted. A verdict is expected later this week.

cross-examined by the presiding judge, the priest stood by an article which he wrote last Jun j in the Catholic Action youth magazine “Signo.” He told the Court that he had been challenged in controversy with another Spanish magazine to say whether he was on the side of those who killed thousands of priests and bishops during the civil war.

In his article in “Signo”— the magazine was later confiscated by the authorities—he replied: “I do not back any murder—neither those who bombed Guernica, murdered in Badajoz, or carried out shootings on the roadsides of Navarre.”

Many priests, and some nuns, were among those who listened in Court as the public prosecutor charged that Father Arbeloa’s article was

“highly offensive,” a calumny and an insult to General Franco’s national movement. The defence counsel submitted a statement by the Bishop of Badajoz which said that many killings had taken place in his diocese during the civil war.

Summing up, the defence counsel said that certain “very painful” events took place during the civil war, and the prosecution had not denied this.

No-one could deny, for example, that the bombing of Guernica took place, he said.