Religion classes at St. John's College. Anthony was led by a priest who fought during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 and who once shook hands with Mussolini. In addition to these two characteristics, which are equally common to thousands of his contemporaries, Father Santos made efforts, I think in vain, to make religious lessons more enjoyable than usual. It was largely due to him that the texts of the college's religious books underwent profound changes in order to make the lessons more lively and immediate, but to no avail. Our religion classes were as hard as any other monk-run college of the day.

"Witnesses" of what?

On the one hand, religion consisted exclusively in piety, addressed mainly to Mary, which was strictly monitored by the ministers of the college in order to control the piety of the children. This caused a kind of unconscious insincerity, namely, a tendency to feign religious feelings, which might have helped to advance to the next grade, if only because of deep religiosity, if not because of academic success. On the other hand, the way the monks acted was questionable. Nothing bad could be said about them, and the quality of their teaching was remarkable, but they certainly did not represent the models of holiness by which we were supposed to live. Their legalism usually evoked more indifference than fervent enthusiasm for religious subjects.

Father Santos was a perfect example of all this. With unfailing persistence he tried to attract our attention, and with the same invariability he failed. The story of him, however, forms part of our history, for it was from him that I first heard about Jehovah's Witnesses.

I apologize if I cannot accurately reproduce the circumstances of this first meeting. It seems to me that this happened at the beginning of a lesson (I must have been fourteen at the time), when he announced several "interesting topics" that he was going to talk about during the lesson (those that, we note in parentheses, did not interest us in the least), and mentioned "Jehovah's Witnesses" among other things.

In view of the prevailing situation in Spain at the time, it occurred to me at first that it was more a question of a political grouping than of anything else. The innocent ignorance of a fourteen-year-old boy! As I left the classroom, I remember asking the priest about them, and he promised me to talk about them in more detail in one of the next lessons, a few weeks later. With ease, he set forth the general features of the theological teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses, and extracted his material from some very inaccurate parish list. The teaching seemed utterly insane, but I memorized a few of its most shocking features to present to any "Jehovah's Witness" who might arise in my life.

This turned out to be a gross mistake. Father Santos inadvertently took a position that later earned Jehovah's Witnesses thousands of followers in Spain. First of all, he propagandized them. I am convinced that many Spaniards would not have known of their existence if they had not heard the bad things about them from their parish priests. This mistake can no longer be corrected. For better or worse, today this propaganda has already been carried out, and it has acquired a certain sympathy of anti-clerical elements, if only for the reason that the Catholic Church speaks ill of Jehovah's Witnesses.

Second, Father Santos presented them inaccurately, tendentiously, and without the basis of biblical teaching. Jehovah's Witnesses can destroy such notions in a matter of minutes, and convince their listeners that they have been unjustly slandered by the enemies of the true God.

Finally, Father Santos downplayed their importance by not giving us the slightest opportunity to talk to them on the basis of the Bible. Jehovah's Witnesses, like any other sect, are dangerous enough not to be neglected. If someone does not know the word of God, they can confuse him from the very first meeting. Father Santos did not give us such knowledge, and in doing so, he indirectly sent us to battle with an enemy whom we considered the weakest, while we were completely unarmed before him.

Soon I was to find out how much this mistake would cost me.