 The tragedy of the Second Republic was that it abetted its own destruction; the tragedy of the Church was that it became so closely allied with its self-styled defenders".During the war, the Nationalists claimed that 20,000 priests had been killed; the figure is now put at 4,184 priests, 2,365 members of other religious institutes and 283 nuns, the vast majority during the summer of 1936.Payne has called the terror the "most extensive and violent persecution of Catholicism in Western History, in some way even more intense than that of the French Revolution", driving Catholics, left with little alternative, to the Nationalists even more than would have been expected to do so.