This weekend I read Por qué soy marxista y otras confesiones, by Alfons Carles Comín (1933-1980), which Laia publishing house published exactly 47 years ago, in June 1979 (in reality it is a collection of articles, some of which had been published several years earlier). To better adapt to the ideological fashion of that time, the title is misleading. In reality, it should have been called Por qué soy cristiano-marxista, as it literally appears in the first sentence of Comín's essay; the year '79, however, would have been quite problematic: fashions, all of them, generate their corresponding antibodies. Although it is unfindable, I recommend this book. It formulates one of the most nuanced and historically informed approaches to the relationship between Christianity and Marxism in late Francoist Catalonia, and in the European context of the post-Vatican II Council. It should be said that other authors of the same period were neither so well informed nor so nuanced. Comín's approach is born of a double commitment: to the workers' tradition and to Christianity lived as a radical ethical demand. This perspective allows him to read Marxism not as a substitution of faith, but as a historical hermeneutics capable of revealing the structures of oppression that Christianity, in its institutional version, had often ignored or even legitimized. Comín did not precisely come from a working-class family, let alone a Marxist one, but he was Catholic. On page 22 he states that Catalonia has suffered ""an attempt at authentic ethnic genocide". No small matter.

Joan Comorera, born in Cervera in 1894, died ill in the Burgos prison on May 6, 1958. He had been the right-hand man of President Lluís Companys, and one of the founders of the PSUC and its first secretary until he was expelled from the party. Persecuted by the Francoists and the communists, he was finally imprisoned in June 1954. Until now it was not very clear who betrayed him. The journalist Antoni Batista (Barcelona, ​​​​1952), ombudsman of the ARA, has had access to the manuscripts of the commissioner who arrested him: Antonio Juan Creix. Everything was in order and there was first-hand police material, including the exhaustive statement in which Comorera reviews his life. Batista, as he has done in other books, carries out an exhaustive investigation to give clues about what Comorera's last years were like and his relationship with Creix. The truth of the Comorera case. A story of espionage, harassment and betrayal (Now Books).

Joan Comorera, born in Cervera in 1894, died ill in the Burgos prison on May 6, 1958. He had been the right-hand man of President Lluís Companys, and one of the founders of the PSUC and its first secretary until he was expelled from the party. Persecuted by the Francoists and the communists, he was finally imprisoned in June 1954. Until now it was not very clear who betrayed him. The journalist Antoni Batista (Barcelona, ​​​​1952), ombudsman of the ARA, has had access to the manuscripts of the commissioner who arrested him: Antonio Juan Creix. Everything was in order and there was first-hand police material, including the exhaustive statement in which Comorera reviews his life. Batista, as he has done in other books, carries out an exhaustive investigation to give clues about what Comorera's last years were like and his relationship with Creix. The truth of the Comorera case. A story of espionage, harassment and betrayal (Now Books).