Politics and religion under the dictatorship in Portugal (1933-1974): rebuilding the separation between the State and the Church

Abstract

What were the means of religious regulation, and more specifically, what were the terms for the institutionalisation of the Catholic Church that the Portuguese authoritarian state adopted? This article adopts a new historiographic interpretation on these questions in order to emphasise both the experience of restructuring the separation and defending the persistence of secularism in the political and cultural debate over the course of the 20th century in Portugal. This argument moves away from the until recently dominant perspective that there was prevailing in Portugal that phenomenon termed “clerical fascism” that some of the literature deems to have been generalised across the dictatorial regimes of Europe between the World Wars.