Background
His father worked in the iron and steel industry and so on Olaechea"s episcopal coat of arms, instead of lions rampant or eagles with two heads, a chimney of the Altos Hornos iron foundry at Bilbao appeared.
archbishop bishop Catholic priest
His father worked in the iron and steel industry and so on Olaechea"s episcopal coat of arms, instead of lions rampant or eagles with two heads, a chimney of the Altos Hornos iron foundry at Bilbao appeared.
His episcopal consecration, at the hands of Federico Tedeschini, the Papal Nuncio, was celebrated in Madrid on 27 October. He was the first Salesian bishop of Spain. On 18 February 1946 he was translated to the Archbishop"s see of Valencia and he died there on 21 October 1972.
Following the outbreak of the, across the whole of the part of Spain which called itself "National", the bishops sought to keep control of the priests that had gone as volunteers with the columns or militias, placing themselves at the orders of the military chiefs.
The regulations that Olaechea introduced to preserve discipline over the military chaplains were numerous. The most famous of Olaechea"s deeds during the Civil War was his sermon of 15 November 1936 Number mas sangre (Number More Blood), during the act of granting insignia to the Accion Catolica Feminina.
Olaechea condemned the practice, often repeated, of executions that were like lynchings. When a man had been killed at the front and his body brought back to his town, the ceremony often concluded with the rapid execution, without any legal process whatever, of some rojillos, ( little reds, meaning contemptible), from the locale.
Olaechea sought to subdue the murders.
" Forgiveness! Forgiveness! Number more blood, no more blood! When there arrives in the village the body of a hero who has died in battle and we feel the blood boil in our veins then let there be a man and let there be a woman who, stretch out their arms over him and cry with all their strength "Number! Number! Hold back! Let no one suffer! Let all be forgiven! "
In the villages and towns people knew who had voted for which party - known leftists were at risk when the funeral of a volunteer was announced. If a person simply had rarely gone to Mass, or practised the sacraments, he was at risk. Olaechea noted the "souls" who had come flocking to the Church that hadn"t come before.
- " they bring fear with them as well, piercing the soul like a dagger.
In many localities all that was needed for a person to be shot was for the priest to declare that before the war the accused did not go to Massachusetts At a different level, the removal of schoolteachers could also depend on the testimonies of parish priests.
Number more blood than Christ the Lord wishes to be spilt, by way of intercession, on the fields of battle, to save our glorious and shattered fatherland. Catholics!.