A Digression

How the LDS Church Came to Spain (continued)

In short order, the Madrid Branch was meeting on base at Torrejon, with Brother Oliveira as branch president.3 The next year, Patrick Graff (the Oliveiras’ older son) became the first Spanish subject ever to serve a mission for the Church: assigned to the French Mission, he was set apart by President Anderson and then served under his supervision. Similar stories developed at Barcelona and Sevilla.

All this was OK, as long as the air bases were technically American soil:4 Spanish law had for many centuries forbidden non-Catholic religious organizations to assemble, to own property—indeed, to exist legally in the Kingdom. The Spanish State was so totally in bed with the Vatican that, we were informed, new French and Spanish Cardinals came to Madrid, not to Rome, to receive their red hats from Franco, not from the Pope.

Church membership in Spain was also growing each August, as Spaniards observed the traditional Western European vacation month and flooded across the Pyrenées to the resort communities of Bayonne and Biarritz, on the French side of the border.5 One of my Pappy’s first acts as president in Paris was to open those two cities and to assign top missionaries to welcome the Spanish, many of whom relished the chance to escape from the concordat which governed their own country.

Concurrent Miracle #2:

Generalissimo Francisco Franco, then still very much alive and in charge, but aware that he didn’t have much time left, woke up one day with an idea for strengthening the monarchy, which he wanted to preserve to succeed him. So he promulgated an edict to the effect that on a certain date, forty (40) non-Catholic religious organizations would receive official recognition as legal entities in Spain.6 With the edict came a list of criteria by which the forty would be chosen: it would help if you had adherents, owned property, baptized people, held worship meetings, and so forth. It came down to the odd proposition that the more you had flouted the law in the past, the more likely you were to become legal.

This posed a problem for us law-abiding types. True enough, we’d taken advantage of the “foreign-soil” fiction to develop our air-base branches, but, in accordance with Church policy, we’d been very careful to stay within the law of the land. So, on the face of it, the smart money wasn’t on us to come in with the First Forty. (More, next page)
3Patrick: “Back then [1960] the church met in Madrid in a building used as a school by the USAF and embassy people. The branch president was David Wright, a CIA person assigned as the cultural attaché at the embassy. David Wright was my mother's brother.”
4Patrick: “Military bases were the property of the Spanish Government and were never ‘technically’ considered to be U.S. soil.”
5Replaced by a roughly-compensating crowd of Frenchmen vacationing in Spain.
6Patrick: “In late 1966, France did change the law and some protestant AND LDS churches were allowed to come and file papers to be recognized. There had to be a Spanish head or representative. So for the first ten years, (until Franco died in 1976) Jose Oliveira was the head of the LDS Church in Spain, as far as the Spanish government was concerned.”
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