Virtually the entirety of the Spanish episcopate supported the Franco regime during and after the war because it represented continuation of a traditional way of understanding Spain's history. One critical member of the hierarchy commented in 1979 how ideological and political clashes had ‘shattered the life of the country and the conscience of many during the last few centuries; we have still not yet emerged from these’. The remote and recent past would weigh heavily on Catholic conscience during post-war social and political change. Stimulated by currents within society and searching for an appropriate role in a changed world, reformists began to adopt a position of self-examination, humility, and what one described as ‘active political neutrality’, during which the history of the patria and the association of Spanish identity with wars against ‘invaders’ were reconceived. A reformer of the post-‘crusade’ generation, the priest and theologian Olegario González de Cardedal, born in 1934, reflected on the troubled past and on the new era ahead at the end of the 1970s and was both critical of the hierarchy's political compromises in the past and empathetic in appreciating the devastating effect on the Church's collective consciousness of the wartime revolutionary purge of priests. But, as the passage quoted at the beginning suggests, compromise with the Franco regime came with significant costs to the Church, though González de Cardedal overstated the extent of the Church's ‘defeat’.