Portugal of the Portuguese

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

Soll ich vielleicht in tausend Büchern lesen

Dass überall die Menschen sich gequält

Dass hie und da ein Glücklicher gewesen?

But the religious orders will return to Portugal, and those beautifully situated and beautifully built convents once more fulfil their proper purpose. Or, if they do not return, almost certainly in the course of time groups of men and women will separate themselves from society and live a philosophical life apart—religious orders under another name. If they can combine philosophy, literature, and art with manual labour the expulsion of the original orders will not have been in vain. We shall have the Order of Carpenters and Musicians at Belem, of Cobblers and Sculptors at Alcobaça, of Philosophers and Tailors at Batalha, of Painters and Ploughmen at Thomar, of Poets and Foresters at Bussaco, and so on. It was easy for demagogues to persuade the people, in whose eyes omne ignotum pro—malefico, that dreadful crimes were committed behind convent walls, just as the uneducated Russian believes that the Jews sacrifice Christian children, and the expulsion of the religious orders figured as the most prominent item on the programme of the Republicans, and was put into practice immediately after the Revolution of 1910.

The Jesuits.

Considering the great services of monks and nuns in education, in nursing, and in the Portuguese possessions overseas, the only fair course in Portugal would have been at the most to banish the Jesuits, if their action was thought to be political, and any congregations that had emigrated to Portugal after their expulsion from France. For the rest, they could be undermined slowly by education: obviously if no new members were found willing to profess they would come to an end of their own accord. The Jesuits, whom half-educated Republicans, knowing very little about them, believe to be peculiarly maleficent and satanic, were not very numerous in Portugal. In the beginning of 1909 there were only 355 as compared with 3,002 in Spain. In the beginning of 1910 there were in Portugal 387 (161 priests, 123 coadjutors, and 103 students). It may or may not have been expedient to expel them, but in any case they stood upon a different footing from that of the other religious houses, whose sudden expulsion brought consternation and misery to many a village. But the action of the reformers did not stop here: it was extended to the secular clergy, and seemed to be directed against the very existence of religion. The precept of O Seculo a few years earlier (11th March, 1901) was forgotten: “It is necessary not to confuse the religion of the State with Jesuitism, our regular clergy with the Jesuits.”

Clergy and People.

Portugal had been fortunate in possessing an enlightened clergy. Many priests were liberal in politics, and only a few of them—in some remote parts of the country—were fanatics. The mass of the people is equally unfanatic. But only a section of the population of a single city—Lisbon—is non-Catholic. Indeed, according to one computation, there are only six thousand non-Catholics in Portugal, or one in every thousand inhabitants. To the mass of the people religion is a pleasant show, and a refuge from the grinding reality of their lives, the Church ceremonies, the processions and pilgrimages are the notes of holiday and gaiety in the villages.[29] To the educated it was part of the glorious traditions of Portugal’s past, ever intimately connected with religion (fé e imperio. Camões, Lusiads, I, 2), so that the extreme anti-clerical who carries his creed to the length of striking at the root and existence of religion will, if he is logical, look askance at those Portuguese heroes who fought in Portugal and in India in the name of Santiago, and at the most magnificent old buildings in Portugal. The cry of anti-clericalism in Portugal has proved itself in the Spanish phrase a necedad de siete capas—seven times foolishness. It is not in any sense national, but has been imported bodily from abroad. Senhor Teixeira de Sousa, the last Premier of the Monarchy, said in an interview to a correspondent of Le Matin: “La question cléricale ne se pose pas ici comme en Espagne, car le peuple portugais n’est pas clérical.” So the Republican Intransigente could say later (31st December, 1911): “There was no religious question in the country, and now the religious question, provoked by certain measures of a secondary character and by the so-called Law of Separation between Church and State, rises over the country like a menace of civil war.” And the anti-clerical Mundo itself admitted (9th March, 1914) that the religious question in Portugal “has never had the serious aspect which it has had in other nations.... If recently the religious question has begun to make itself felt that is due to the deference of certain persons who call themselves Republicans to clerical pretensions.” Thus the religious question, having been provoked by anti-clericalism, was to receive a homoeopathic remedy—more anti-clericalism. Gambetta had exclaimed, “Le Cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi,” and Portuguese politicians had adopted this cry from Paris. In the public schools religion has been forbidden by law, in the private it has only been given at the expense of denunciation and persecution. When it is remembered that in many parishes the priests have been deprived of all authority, it will be seen how little chance there is of the children receiving any religious instruction. Portuguese Democrats if they have ever heard of Cecil Rhodes probably know that he was no reactionary. It is worth quoting his words: “Their school years are the years in which to tell the children that there is one thing better than material instruction, and that is religious belief.” But in Portugal now thousands of children are being brought up to regard material prosperity as the only good. There is no God but Gold, and the Republic is its prophet. The new narrow system of education may turn out shrewd, materialistic, tram-and-asphalt citizens, but in a larger sense and in the long run Portugal is likely to suffer. It may be found when it is too late that the cera branda has been moulded to ill purpose.

The Law of Separation (1911).

The Law of Separation between Church and State was drawn up by Dr. Affonso Costa as Minister of Justice (20th April, 1911). It is a long document of 196 clauses, closely following French models or modifying them in a still more anti-clerical direction. Yet there were many considerations which should have given extreme anti-clericalism pause in Portugal. With a clergy not in principle opposed to the Republic, it might have been possible to come to an excellent working compromise. Many of the priests even acquiesce in the principle of separation between Church and State, but Dr. Costa’s law, they complain, while pretending to separate Church from State, in reality subjugates the Church to a hostile State. And it is not the priests only who say it. “The decree of 20th April, 1911,” says A Republica (13th March, 1914), “affected to separate the Churches from the State, but did nothing but subject the Catholic Church to the intervention of the Republic.” These are the words of an extremely Republican paper. The priests by this Law must either receive State pensions or starve; their authority has been replaced by that of the public worship associations, often organised by persons hostile to religion. They are deprived of the possession of the churches, and even of the bishops’ and priests’ houses, even of the libraries carefully added to by successive bishops. They are not allowed to wear clerical dress. The authority of the higher ecclesiastics is carefully undermined, and the bishops are not permitted even to issue a pastoral letter without previous censorship of the Government.