For the whole war, Portugal was instrumental in providing the Nationalists with a vital logistical organisation and by reassuring Franco and his allies that no interference whatsoever would hinder the supply traffic directed to the Nationalists that crossed the borders of the Iberian countries. The Nationalists even referred to Lisbon as "the port of Castile". In 1938, with Franco's victory increasingly certain, Portugal recognized Franco's regime and, after the war in 1939, signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression pact, the Iberian Pact. Portugal played an important diplomatic role in supporting Franco, including insisting to British government that Franco sought to replicate Salazar's "Estado Novo" and not Mussolini's Fascist Italy. Among many influential Catholics in Spain, mainly composed of conservative traditionalists and people belonging to monarchist groups, the religious persecution was squarely blamed on the Republic. The ensuing outrage was used after the 1936 coup by the propaganda of the rebel faction and readily extended itself. The Catholic Church took the side of the rebel government and defined the religious Spaniards who had been persecuted in Republican areas as 'martyrs of the faith', selectively ignoring the many believing Catholic Spaniards who remained loyal to the Republic and even those who were later killed during the persecution and the massacres of Republicans. The devout Catholics who supported the Republic, included high-ranking officers of the Spanish Republican Army such as the Republican General Vicente Rojo Lluch, as well as the Catholic Basque nationalists who opposed the rebels. Initially the Vatican refrained from declaring too openly its support of the rebel side in the war, but it had long allowed high ecclesiastical figures in Spain to do so and to define the conflict as a "Crusade". Throughout the war, however, Francoist propaganda and influential Spanish Catholics labelled the secular Republic as "the enemy of God and the Church" and denounced it by holding it responsible for anticlerical activities, such as shutting down Catholic schools, killing of priests and nuns by exalted mobs and desecrating religious buildings. Forsaken by the Western European powers, the Republicans depended mainly on Soviet military assistance, which played into the hands of the Nationalists, who portrayed the Republic as a "Marxist" and godless state in Francoist propaganda. Its only other official support was from the anti-Catholic and nominally-revolutionary Mexico. By means of its extensive diplomatic network, the Holy See used its influence to lobby for the rebel. During an International Art Exhibition in Paris in 1937 in which both the Nationalist and the Republican governments were present, the Holy See allowed the Nationalist pavilion to display its exhibition under the Vatican flag although the Nationalist flag was still not officially recognised.