section_path: Industrial age/Anti-clericalism
section_name: Anti-clericalism
paragraph_text: Anti-clericalism
  
  The 20th century saw the rise of various politically radical and anti-clerical governments. The 1926 Calles Law separating church and state in Mexico led to the Cristero War in which over 3,000 priests were exiled or assassinated, churches desecrated, services mocked, nuns raped and captured priests shot. In the Soviet Union following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, persecution of the Church and Catholics continued well into the 1930s. In addition to the execution and exiling of clerics, monks and laymen, the confiscation of religious implements and closure of churches was common. During the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, the Catholic hierarchy supported Francisco Franco 's rebel Nationalist forces against the Popular Front government, citing Republican violence directed against the Church. The Church had been an active element in the polarising politics of the years preceding the Civil War. Pope Pius XI referred to these three countries as a "terrible triangle" and the failure to protest in Europe and the United States as a "conspiracy of silence".