To focus on the relationship between a pope and a head of state implies an important restriction of the point of view: it tends to make politics the center of reflection and takes our gaze away from other elements of unquestionable importance. This is despite the fact that we are talking about two people who never met: their relationship was always at a distance. Their profiles bring us face to face with a very interesting reality: the plural response to political questions by people who profess the same religion. Because that was what Giovanni Battista Montini and Francisco Franco had in common: their common faith, being contemporaries and having government responsibilities was what they shared. And little more. From that point on, the differences began. Montini, a man with a marked intellectual profile, had a somewhat external experience of politics: he had to promote the Catholic works that would serve in Italy as alternatives to a hostile State, first the liberal and then the fascist. He thus became convinced that a mobilization of Catholics was needed to face the new political challenges of the moment. The tragedy of the Second World War gave an unexpected opportunity to his project with the triumph of Christian Democracy after the war. Thus, he became convinced that the republic and democratic participation were valid ways to aspire to a Christianization of society and to stop atheistic offensives, in particular the communist one. 

Franco, on the other hand, lived a very different experience: he accepted the republic with dissatisfaction and ended up feeling disappointed by it. He took up arms to save it (that was what his first manifesto proclaimed) and finally sank it with a war that convinced him that victory over the communist threat was a matter of the lance and not of the pen. His idea of Catholic mobilization crystallized in what he lived during the war, of closed self-defense. He thought that from power he could guarantee the Catholicism of a people through confessionalism and in the end he had to live a bitter disappointment, when he was pushed to the repression of those he thought he was serving. It is not strange that these two characters had a disagreement. They bear witness to the pluralistic response Catholics give to temporal issues and how these change over time. It is an interesting lesson on the need not to confuse beliefs and political opinions.