Nicholas Rankin
Murky Waters
Papa Spy: Love, Faith and Betrayal in Wartime Spain
By Jimmy Burns
Bloomsbury 416pp £20 order from our bookshop
It is debatable whether the Catholics or the communists in 1930s Britain were quicker to ignore wrongdoing – one lot through religious faith and the other through political ideology. Just as Stalin’s crimes were excused by the Communist Party of Great Britain and their fellow-travellers as mere egg-breaking for the great socialist omelette, so many Roman Catholics in Britain applauded Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and Franco’s ‘crusade’ in Spain as blessed extensions of Christian civilisation.
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