What is the difference between persecuting people on the basis of their ethnicity or on the basis of their religion? And, even there, since historically people have by and large not been able to marry outside their religion, religious differences lead to segregation into ethnic groups, and the differences between the two classifications get quickly blurred. In the case of antisemitism it is particularly hard to separate ethnicity and religion.

I don't know what anticlerical laws of the Second Republic you are referring to. Unless you think that enforcing separation of church and state for the first time is akin to Jim Crow or Apartheid. To think of the Spanish Catholic Church as oppressed is too ludicrous a concept to consider, and if the Poles like Franco they can have another 40 years of dictatorship for all I care.

As for the opinion of Polish Catholics, one of the appaling things about post-communist Poland seen from Spain is how strong the grip of the Catholic church is on the country's politics. Spain's anti-clericalism was a popular movement stemming from centruries of stultifying and oppressive collusion of priests, landowners, and the apparatus of the State. Spain has suffered immensely from the Catholic zealotry of its kings (starting with the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Fernando, and Spain's leading role in the Counterreformation under their Grandson Emperor Charles V and his son Philip).

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman