on March 22, 2026
Blood, Division,
and the Long Shadow
ETA, Violence, and the Wounded City
There are things that cannot be skipped over. This is one of them. To speak of Donostia without speaking of ETA is to describe a person’s face while carefully avoiding their deepest scar.
This is the hardest part of the series. It is also, in some ways, the most necessary — because the Gospel has nothing to say to a city that hasn’t first been allowed to name what it’s carrying. And this city has been carrying something very heavy for a very long time.
The Wound That Runs Deeper Than Politics
ETA — Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Liberty — was founded in 1959, during the Franco dictatorship, when the Basque language was banned from public life and Basque cultural identity was actively suppressed by the Spanish state. The grievance was real. Franco’s regime did genuine harm to this people and their culture. That is part of what makes this history so painful: a legitimate wound gave birth to an illegitimate response, and the illegitimate response created a thousand more wounds on top of the original one.
Over five decades, ETA assassinated soldiers, police officers, judges, politicians, journalists, and civilians. Bombings in Madrid. Shootings in Donostia’s own streets. A car bomb that killed a supermarket full of shoppers. And running alongside all of it — in the bars, in the schools, in the churches — a culture of silence that was sometimes complicity, sometimes fear, and sometimes the impossible position of people who were genuinely caught between two fires.
Every family in the Basque Country was touched. There were no neutrals. Everyone was, in some way, on one side or the other — or destroyed by the impossibility of being on neither.
The Church That Chose Silence
The deepest wound — and the one most relevant to understanding why Donostia is now so profoundly secular — is not what ETA did. It is what the Basque Church failed to do.
Unlike the Church in Poland, which stood clearly against the communist regime and paid a price for it. Unlike the Church in Latin America, which often put itself between the powerful and the poor. The Basque Church, faced with a political violence that claimed to represent Basque identity, largely did not condemn it. Basque bishops did not attend the funerals of ETA’s victims. Some clergy offered pastoral care to ETA members without a corresponding care for those they had harmed. The Vatican later identified this failure as a primary driver of the region’s rapid secularization.
A Church that chooses tribal solidarity over prophetic witness loses its moral voice. And when the moral voice is lost, the congregation eventually notices — and leaves.
“When the Church became the voice of one side of a conflict, it ceased to be the voice of the God who stands above all sides. And people stopped listening.”
No single figure represents this wound — it is distributed across a thousand families. A father murdered at a checkpoint. A judge killed by a car bomb. A child who grew up without a parent. Alongside them: the former militant who now lives in the same town as the family of the person he killed. The reconciliation processes underway in the Basque Country are among the most complex in modern Europe. They require something politics cannot provide: a way to hold grief, name injustice, and still find a way through — not by forgetting, not by excusing, but by refusing to be finally consumed by the wound.
What the Silence Since 2011 Has Not Resolved
ETA declared a permanent ceasefire in 2011. The guns went silent. And the silence has revealed something: that stopping violence is not the same as achieving peace. Peace requires something that ceasefire agreements cannot legislate — something that has to happen in the interior of people who have been harmed and people who have done harm.
Some former ETA members have expressed genuine remorse. Some have not. Some victims’ families have engaged in reconciliation processes of extraordinary courage. Others — who would have every right — have not. The city holds all of this simultaneously, in the way that cities hold their histories: in the street names, in the bars where certain conversations are still not had, in the funerals that were and were not attended, in the grandchildren who are only now beginning to ask their grandparents what really happened.
The wound is not healed. It is quieter. Those are not the same thing.
Stopping violence is not the same as achieving peace. Peace requires something that no agreement can legislate — something that has to happen on the inside of people who have been broken and people who have done the breaking.
The Spiritual Wound
Unforgiven wounds and unhealed victims on all sides. A city that witnessed terrorism in its streets, moral compromise from its Church, and generational trauma passed down through families — producing a culture that has rejected religion as complicit in its pain. The wound is not just political. It is theological. People need someone who can name the injustice without excusing it, hold the grief without collapsing under it, and offer a way through that is neither revenge nor silence.
The Gospel Bridge
The suffering servant of Isaiah 53 — Jesus, who is wounded by the powerful yet intercedes for them from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). The cross is the only place in history where justice and mercy actually meet — where wrong is not minimized, but neither does it have the final word. Donostia needs a theology of lament before it can hear a theology of grace. The God of Psalm 22 — who cries “How long, O Lord?” — is a God who can be trusted with the city’s unanswered questions.
The cross is not a symbol of defeat. It is the place where the most profound injustice in history was absorbed without being answered with more injustice. Jesus was murdered by a political and religious collaboration that protected its own power at the expense of the innocent. He died crying out to God in abandonment. And then — on the far side of that death — He said: Father, forgive them.
That is not a cheap forgiveness. It is not a forgiveness that pretends the harm didn’t happen, or that justice doesn’t matter, or that the victims’ pain is less important than moving on. It is a forgiveness wrested from the deepest possible suffering by the deepest possible love — and it is, therefore, the only kind of forgiveness that can speak credibly to a city that has seen the worst of what human beings do to each other.
The God of the Bible is not a God who offers easy comfort to complicated grief. The Psalms are full of people who bring their rage and their confusion and their unanswered questions directly to God — and God does not shut them down. Psalm 22 begins: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus quoted it from the cross. He was not performing piety. He was showing a city — every city, this city — that God is acquainted with abandonment, that the divine does not flinch from human suffering, that there is nowhere in the landscape of human pain that God has not already been.
That is the Gospel that Donostia needs to hear. Not a Gospel that skips to the resurrection before it has sat with the crucifixion. Not a Gospel that says “it all worked out” before it has said “it was genuinely, catastrophically wrong.” A Gospel that names the wound — and then, only then, speaks of healing.
Key Scriptures
“He was despised and rejected… he took up our pain and bore our suffering.”
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?”
“Do not take revenge… overcome evil with good.”
For Reflection
The cross is the only place where justice and mercy actually meet. Is there something in this city’s history — or your own — that has made you wonder whether those two things can ever coexist? What would it mean to bring the unhealed wound to the God who said “My God, why have you forsaken me?” — and found that the other side of abandonment was resurrection?