The Portuguese protestant communities and the Law of Separation: expectations and contributions (original) (raw)
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2020
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.
Catholic and monarchist nationalism in twentieth-century Portugal
Studia nad Autorytaryzmem i Totalitaryzmem
The subject of this article is Christian nationalism in twentieth-century Portugal in its two ideological and organizational crystallizations. The first is the Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista), operating in the late period of constitutional liberal monarchy, founded in 1903 on the basis of Catholic circles, whose initiator, leader, and main theoretician was Jacinto Cândido da Silva (1857–1926). The second is the metapolitical movement created after overthrowing the monarchy in 1914, aimed against the Republic, called Integralismo Lusitano. Its leader and main thinker was António Sardinha (1887–1925), and after his untimely death — Hipólito Raposo. Both organizations united nationalist doctrine with Catholic universalism, declaring subordination to the idea of national Christian ethics and the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. The difference between them, however, was that, although the party led by Cândido was founded, i.a., to save the monarchy, after its collapse, it...
Over the last quarter of the 20th century, the newborn democratic regime of Portugal sought not to antagonize the Catholic hierarchy. Aware of the clerical weakened position (after the April Revolution in 1974), the left-wing political forces that gained power after 1974, subtracted little from the church's institutions's public domain.Far from withdrawing those acquired rights, it was given a place to a system where minorities were given the opportunity to rise to the same level of respect that the state granted to the dominant religion. For example, through airtime on radio and public television and confessional space of schools. Because of the value and the respect that are gained, minorities adhered and still adhere to these models defending it as the most perfect realization-as the redaction of the Religious Freedom Act of 2001 reflects perfectly. Today, we have minorities supporting the status quo, defending the place and position of the Catholic church for fear of losing their rights by, in practice, decreasing the power of the majority.
Relations between Church and State in Portugal in the Transition to Democracy
The transition to democracy in Portugal (1974–75) posed, amongst other matters, the problem of constructing a new model for relationships between the state and the Catholic Church. The objective of this article is to analyse the construction of the relationship in that historical period. It examines, in particular, the attitudes of the provisional governments and some military sectors on the one hand, and the Portuguese episcopacy on the other. It also attempts to examine the importance of those relationships in the configuration of the democratic model that was being established in Portugal.
Roman catholicism and religious pluralities in Portuguese (Iberian) history
2008
Th e religious history of Portugal is usually told as the history of a monolithic Catholic belief-system that excludes other religious options. Contrasting this tendency, there is also a political-anticlerical-construction that regards the Catholic tradition as the origin of economic, intellectual, or even ethical backwardness. Taken together, these presuppositions make it diffi cult to provide an impartial description of the religious situation in Portugal, both contemporary and historical. Th e present article intends to challenge those theological and political agendas and to replace their historical narratives with a more pluralistic picture of religion in Portugal.
2013
The ‘Catholic question’ in contemporary Portugal obliges us to consider whether Catholicism will remain a force in Portuguese associational life in the next century, or whether it faces a future of slow and steady decline. On the one hand, an overall statistical drop of church membership, and the lack of religious practice by almost half of self-identified Roman Catholics, suggests that the future of the Catholic Church in Portugal will probably be very different than the past. On the other hand, the church’s support for democratic processes, the important social services it provides, and its educational establishment, have certainly been a positive factor in Portuguese associational life, and helped the larger process of democratic-regime consolidation since the Carnation Revolution of 1974. This paper suggests that social scientists need to move beyond the lens normally applied to the question of Catholicism in contemporary Europe (i.e. it is a dying, anti-modern, anti-rational, c...
Progressive Catholicism in Portugal: Considerations on Political Activism (1958-1974
João Miguel Almeida, 2016
This article argues that the “national front” between the Estado Novo and the Catholic Church favored the rise to prominence of those Catholics who, in 1958, publicly broke with the dictatorship and felt legitimized by the theological renewal that was enshrined in the Second Vatican Council. The “progressive Catholics”, by no means the only Catholics who opposed the Estado Novo, had a rather public profile, and –by contrast with other Catholic oppositionist milieu– they took up quite radical positions regarding the colonial war (1961-1974). May 1968 and Liberation Theology also left their mark on Portuguese “Catholic progressivism”, always retaining a pluralist outlook. The post-Vatican II crisis was visible in Portugal via sometimes high-profile departures from the institutional Catholic Church and radical criticism against both ecclesiastical and political power.