The Religious Question and the Catholic Revival in Portugal, 1900-30

Abstract

Fortunato de Almeida, in the preface to his monumental history of the Church in Portugal, wrote: 'To aspire to study the historical evolution of the Portuguese people by first removing its religious life and the mission of the regular and secular clergy, would be tantamount to trying to understand the circulatory system without the blood-vessels'; and his strictures would seem to apply most emphatically to the time at which he was writing --1910. Traditional interpretations of Portuguese history stress that the emergence of the independent nation in the twelfth century was a by-product of the Christian Reconquest of the Peninsula from the Moors and that the Church played an indispensable role in assuring independence by making Afonso Henriques the Pope's vassal and subsequently recognizing the rulers of Portugal as kings under Papal suzerainty and protection. As was the case elsewhere, successive kings were determined to assert royal power against excessive ecclesiastical claims; by the end of the thirteenth century the question of rival jurisdictions had been so settled, in general terms, as to last until the eighteenth century. The ties between Portugal and the Papacy were strengthened by the diffusion of the Faith in the wake of the Discoveries and by the intellectual and social dominance, after the middle of the sixteenth century, of the Inquisition and the Jesuits. The break with the old tradition came with Pombal, who ushered in a new era of State supremacy which severely weakened the status and influence of the Church in Portugal. To put the religious question and the Catholic revival of the early twentieth century into perspective, it is necessary to bear in mind not only this ancient tradition of close Church-State cooperation but also to appreciate the straits to which the Church was reduced in the nine-