“A alma cristã de Portugal dependerá, Deus sabe até quando, desta obra”: a formação de uma cultura política católica na gênese do salazarismo (1910 – 1940)

Abstract

This research was developed through the theoretical-methodological debates of Cultural History and Discourse Analysis, especially its French current. For the fulfillment of our objectives, we examined periodicals, political speeches, institutional, legislative and ecclesiastical documents that circulated in Portugal in the first half of the 20th century. On October 5, 1910, when the First Portuguese Republic was established, the monarchy was perceived as closely linked to the Catholic Church and this relationship was interpreted as one of its main problems. In this sense, the republicans started a secularist project that aimed to end the Catholic religion in the country in a few decades. In opposition to such measures, several Catholic intellectuals began to fight the secularism orchestrated by the republican government. The gradual exercise of these agents committed to the actions of re-Catholicization of society, linked to the impacts of the messages attributed to the supposed apparitions of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, in the region of Fátima, led to the promotion of a Catholic political culture, providing the rise of a military dictatorship in the 1920s and, later, the institution of the Estado Novo, an anti-democratic, corporatist government based on Christian doctrine. My research problem is to understand the process of formation and propagation of these political-religious representations expressed in an authoritarian way that provided the basis for the emergence of Salazarism and, consequently, for a rapprochement between the State and the Church. Throughout this process, important members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, such as the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, participated in the re-catholicization project of the Portuguese State, although formally the secularity and independence between the institutions remained. Salazarism cultivated the Catholic political culture and authoritarian bias in its territories on this side and overseas, structuring a regime deeply connected with ecclesiastical power and, therefore, structuring it while being legitimized.