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In Majorca, Nationalist squads collected suspects from their homes at night, drove them to cemeteries or roadsides, and shot them, often after a summary 'confession' to a priest. Bernanos estimates the island's victims in the thousands, taken mostly for opinions, associations, or denunciations rather than acts. The story shows that mass killing can run as a routine administrative process in a peaceful place with no front line.
When bishops and priests bless a repression, and when clergy hear confessions at execution sites, killing gains the look of a religious and moral duty. Ordinary believers then stop seeing it as a crime. Bernanos argues that the hierarchy's complicity was a deeper betrayal than the killing itself, because it spent the Church's moral authority to cover the murders.
Preventive terror targets people for what they might do later, not for anything they have done. Because the category 'potential enemy' has no natural limit, the purge keeps finding new suspects. It ends up eliminating whole social types, such as workers, union members, and the merely suspect.
Bernanos traces the cruelty less to fanatics than to the 'right-thinking' middle classes. Their fear of losing property and order made them willing to accept, and even demand, the extermination of the poor. Seen this way, atrocity is driven by the anxious respectability of comfortable people who want security at any price.
Bernanos was a Catholic monarchist whose son initially wore the Falange uniform. His condemnation of the Nationalists therefore cannot be dismissed as enemy propaganda. His argument is that honor requires denouncing crimes committed by one's own side, and that loyalty to a cause does not excuse silence about how it acts.