Works Cited, The Spanish Labyrinth

I would suggest then that the anger of the Spanish Anarchists against the Church is the anger of an intensely religious people who feel they have been deserted and deceived. The priests and the monks left them at a critical moment in their history and went over to the rich. The humane and enlightened principles of the great theologians of the seventeenth century were set on one side. The people then began to suspect (and the new ideas brought in by Liberalism of course assisted them) that all the words of the Church were hypocrisy. When they took up the struggle for the Christian utopia it was therefore against the Church and not with it. Even their violence might be called religious. The Spanish Church, after all, has always been a Militant Church and down to the twentieth century it believed in destroying its enemies. No doubt the Anarchists felt that if only, by using the same methods, they could get rid of all who were not of their way of thinking, they would make a better job than the Church had done of introducing the earthly paradise. In Spain every creed aspires to be totalitarian.

Brenan, Gerald. The Spanish Labyrinth (Canto Classics) (pp. 309-310). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.