The decree that shut Portugal's monasteries: 30 May 1834

Number 127 of the Crónica Constitucional de Lisboa, the government's gazette, came out on Saturday 31 May 1834. Its first page carried the bulletin from the Necessidades palace: Their Majesties and His Imperial Highness were in good health, and the day before, the regent had held a Council of State with his ministers of finance, justice and the kingdom present. Five days earlier the army of the absolutist pretender, Dom Miguel, had surrendered in the Alentejo, and the civil war was over.2 sources2 sources

Inside, the paper printed a long report addressed to the regent, Dom Pedro, by his minister of justice and ecclesiastical affairs, Joaquim António de Aguiar. It ran across three pages. It began by declaring that a prejudice that had lasted for centuries was now dead: the belief that the religious orders were indispensable to the Catholic religion and useful to the state.1 source1 source

Then came the decree. Its first article read: “There are hereby extinguished in Portugal, the Algarve, the adjacent islands and the Portuguese dominions all convents, monasteries, colleges, hospices and any houses of religious of all the regular orders, whatever their denomination, institute or rule.” Further down the same page, after a Treasury list of chapel lands for auction, an unsigned editorial told readers what they had just read.1 source1 source

Portugal had been at war with itself since 1832. Dom Pedro, the former emperor of Brazil, was fighting for his daughter, Queen Maria II, and for the Constitutional Charter he had given Portugal in 1826. His brother Miguel had been acclaimed absolute king in 1828. Many friars and monks preached for Miguel, and the liberals saw the orders as his allies.4 sources4 sources

The liberals did not wait for victory to act. After they entered Lisbon on 24 July 1833, a Commission of General Ecclesiastical Reform was created on 31 July. On 5 August decrees banned all admissions to holy orders and to monastic novitiates, sent home the novices already in the convents and stripped of their posts any clergy who had abandoned them to follow Miguel. Another decree closed every house with fewer than twelve professed members.3 sources3 sources

The quarrel with the clergy lasted to the end. On 30 May 1834 the gazette printed an order of the ecclesiastical reform board, dated 26 May: a great number of priests, monks and friars, it said, had left their churches and convents to follow the rebel troops from town to town and province to province, trying by every means to keep the war going. No cleric was to exercise his orders without proof that he had been appointed by the regent or by the church authorities the regent had installed.2 sources2 sources

Some houses went one at a time. In April 1834 the gazette printed the reform board's sentence of 22 March suppressing the great Hieronymite monastery at Belém, today's Jerónimos. Its debts, the board found, came partly from “vicious causes and fraudulent administrations” going back to 1796 and partly from the general calamities of the times. In December 1833 the regent had already ordered the orphans of the Casa Pia, Lisbon's charity school, moved there from the Desterro monastery.1 source1 source

The board's file weighed the number of monks, their “services or disservices” to religion and the state and the value of keeping the house, with statements from witnesses. It also noted that most of the monks supported the liberal government.1 source1 source

The war ended with the Convention of Evoramonte, signed on 26 May 1834, the subject of its own article. Two days later Pedro signed the general decree.2 sources2 sources

The decree was short. After the first article closed the houses, the second made their property part of the national estate. The third handed the sacred vessels and vestments to the bishops, to be shared out among the neediest churches of each diocese. The fifth repealed every law to the contrary. Pedro issued it, the preamble said, after hearing the Council of State.1 source1 source

The fourth article dealt with the people. Every member of the closed houses would receive an annual pension from the Treasury for his keep, as long as he had no church living or public post that paid as much.2 sources2 sources

Six groups were excluded: men who had taken up arms against the legitimate throne or national liberty; who had abused their ministry in the confessional or the pulpit for the “usurpation”; who had accepted a living or a post from Miguel's government; who had denounced or persecuted their neighbours for loyalty to the Charter; who had marched with Miguel's troops; or who had abandoned their convents when the queen's authority returned.2 sources2 sources

Aguiar's report made the case at length. Jesus Christ had not created the orders and the Apostles had not known them, he wrote; communities born as refuges from persecution had fallen into laxity that no reform had cured. He blamed the mendicant friars, from the thirteenth century on, for weakening the authority of bishops and parish priests. Then came economics: a nation's strength depended on its population and population on marriages, and putting the orders' property to use would bring wealth and more people.1 source1 source

Aguiar was born in Coimbra on 24 August 1792, the son of a surgeon, and left his studies as a teenager to join the student battalion raised against Napoleon's invasion. He became a doctor of law and a lecturer at the university. His liberal opinions cost him his college place in 1823, and in 1828, when Miguel dissolved parliament, he was ordered out of Coimbra and went into exile in London.1 source1 source

He sailed with the liberal expeditions to Terceira in the Azores and landed with Pedro's army at Mindelo in July 1832, the same landing as the young Alexandre Herculano. In besieged Porto he was a judge of the war tribunal and sat on the commission drafting new penal and commercial codes. Pedro made him minister of the kingdom on 15 October 1833 and minister of justice on 23 April 1834, a post he held until Pedro's death.3 sources3 sources

The orders decree, a dictionary of 1904 noted, “earned him the nickname of Mata frades”, the Friar-Killer. It stuck through a long career. He was prime minister three times, in 1841–1842, in 1860 and from 1865 to January 1868. He turned down the titles and favours he was offered and never wore his foreign decorations. He died on 26 May 1874 and was buried in a plain grave in the Conchada cemetery in Coimbra.1 source1 source

The state moved fast. By early June the Ministry of Justice was sending copies of the decree to the dioceses, asking the vicar capitular of Coimbra for an exact list of the religious of the closed houses, with notes on each man's circumstances. The Treasury told provincial authorities to take possession of the property of every house.2 sources2 sources

Instructions signed on 20 June 1834 set the procedure. Before taking over a house, the prefect was to warn the bishop, who would name trusted clergy to receive the church and the objects of worship. Everything else went into inventories drawn up in the presence of a fiscal official, and livestock was to be auctioned at once. On 14 July the decree was extended to the military orders.2 sources2 sources

A decree of the same day fixed the pensions. A professed member of the endowed orders was to get 12,000 réis a month and a mendicant friar 7,200 réis, raised to 18,000 and 10,800 réis for men over seventy or invalids. To claim it, each man had to prove before the prefect that he fell under none of the exclusions and had sold none of his house's property.1 source1 source

Those inventories still exist. The Torre do Tombo, the national archive, keeps 454 extinction files for male houses, the last from 1919, and 124 for female houses, which run until 1961. The historian Paulo Barata counted 563 religious houses at the time of the extinction. Fewer than half, 243, had libraries, and the inventories list more than 150,000 books.1 source1 source

Books had been on the liberals' minds since the siege. A decree of 3 July 1833 founded a public library in Porto from the libraries of its closed convents and of defeated absolutists, opening with the claim that “ignorance is the most irreconcilable enemy of liberty”. Alexandre Herculano, the future historian, worked there as a librarian. In Coimbra, the libraries of the university colleges run by the orders were broken up.4 sources4 sources

In Lisbon a depot for the books, archives and paintings of the closed convents was set up on 16 October 1834 in the Franciscan convent of São Francisco da Cidade, in the Chiado. By 1836 it held more than 300,000 books and over 6,000 paintings. The new Academy of Fine Arts picked the best pictures, and the depot was merged into the national library in 1841.2 sources2 sources

Much of the art arrived in poor shape. Altarpieces had been darkened by candle smoke and incense or damaged by damp walls and leaking roofs, and others were later harmed by unskilled restorers. Many important works, a vice-inspector of the Academy wrote in 1868, never reached the depot at all.1 source1 source

The decree spoke only of religiosos, male religious. Nunneries were not closed in 1834. They were placed under the authority of their bishops and left to run down: since August 1833 no novice could be admitted, so each house was closed only when its last nun died. That is why extinction files for women's convents in the national archive run until 1961.4 sources4 sources

Lisbon was full of empty religious buildings, and the new state needed offices. On 20 July 1834 Pedro went to “the extinct Monastery of São Bento da Saúde”, a Benedictine house, to inspect the work on chambers for the two houses of parliament. An order of 9 August renamed it the Palácio das Cortes, and there, on 15 August, he read the speech from the throne that opened the new Cortes.3 sources3 sources

The work had begun early. The public works accounts for May 1834, printed in the gazette in July, already list money for the Cortes chamber at São Bento, for the Royal Academy of Sciences in the Convento de Jesus and for branch post offices in the convents of the Barbadinhos and São Domingos.1 source1 source

Outside Lisbon the story was often harsher. At Sintra the Hieronymite friars left the monastery of Pena in 1834 and it was abandoned until King Fernando II bought the ruin in 1838 and built his palace there. At Batalha, when the Dominicans left, the Founder's Chapel, where Henry the Navigator lies, was stripped of everything used for worship. The convent at Vidigueira where Vasco da Gama was buried was auctioned by the state in 1841; around 1840 looters had broken open his vault.4 sources4 sources

Not everyone admired Pedro's government by decree. The Annual Register in London, reviewing his decrees of 1834, quoted the order for “the total extinction of all convents, monasteries, colleges, and religious houses of monks of the regular orders” among the acts of what it called a “wide, though well meant despotism”.1 source1 source

The law outlived the monarchy that made it. When the Republic was proclaimed in 1910, its Provisional Government decreed on 8 October that the laws of 1759 and 1767 against the Jesuits and the 1834 abolition of the orders remained in force.1 source1 source

Its most visible legacy is in stone. The monastery of São Bento became parliament's home in 1834, and the Constituent Assembly that finished the Constitution of 1976 sat there too. Lisbon's archaeological museum stands in the Carmo ruins, founded in 1864 partly to rescue the carved stone being lost from closed convents. The extinction inventories in the Torre do Tombo are now used to rebuild the lost libraries and archives of individual houses, one catalogue at a time.5 sources5 sources