Syncretisms and Popular Catholicisms in Portugal

Abstract

Contrary to popular conceptions, contemporary Portugal is not a country marked by uniform patterns of religious observance: while urban Portuguese society has adopted many of the secular characteristics which apply across most of Western Europe, rural Portugal is much more traditional in its customs; and, even within the context of rural society, the Northern regions of the country maintain a much higher level of participation in religious observance than the South. The predominant form of religious worship is, of course, Roman Catholicism, in spite of the growth in recent years of the Protestant Churches and the liberalisation of the climate of belief which followed the 1974 Revolution. Nonetheless, the precise forms of religious belief and practice which exist even within Portuguese Roman Catholicism are much more varied than might be imagined. The present discussion does not take into account the cult of Our Lady of Fatima, which is populist, rather than popular, in nature: in other words, in spite of the significant popularity of this manifestation of the Virgin amongst the Portuguese public, this is a figure whose cult has been, to some extent at least, cultivated by the Church hierarchy (and, to some degree at least, by political authorities) with a view to its dissemination amongst the people. Our Lady of Fatima is, therefore, ultimately an expression of orthodox Roman Catholicism with a superficial overlay of specifically Portuguese characteristics and popular festivities, rather than a genuine creation of the popular mind. The two principal forms of belief focussed on in the present paper are Cryptojudaism and Popular Catholicism. The latter phenomenon may certainly be labelled a genuinely syncretic practice, in that it involves the simultaneous co-existence of two (if not more) very different forms of belief, while the former might be judged by some commentators to be only superficially syncretic, in the sense that a superstructure of Christian practice has overlaid a deeper, non-Christian core purely as a matter of disguise rather than what might be seen to be the genuinely syncretic practice of simultaneously holding beliefs or engaging in practices from two different belief systems.