Portugal's Law of Separation: how the Republic broke with the Church in 1911

On Friday 21 April 1911, readers of the Diário do Governo, the official gazette of the six-month-old Portuguese Republic, found a long decree starting on page 1619. Earlier in the issue, the Ministry of the Interior divided the country into constituencies for the coming election of a Constituent Assembly. Then came the Ministry of Justice, under the heading “Law of separation of the State from the churches”.1 source1 source

Article 1 guaranteed full freedom of conscience to every citizen and to foreigners living in Portugal. Article 2 ended the status that the constitutions of the monarchy, from 1822 on, had given the Catholic Church.2 sources2 sources

The text ran to 196 articles over six pages. It was dated “in the Palace of the Republic, 20 April 1911” and signed by the eight members of the Provisional Government: Teófilo Braga, António José de Almeida, Afonso Costa, José Relvas, António Xavier Correia Barreto, Amaro de Azevedo Gomes, Bernardino Machado and Manuel de Brito Camacho. Article 195 said the decree would be put to the Constituent Assembly.1 source1 source

The very next decree in the same issue showed the law's spirit. Signed by Afonso Costa and Brito Camacho, it moved the industrial school of Covilhã into the former residence of the Jesuits, and gave the school's old building to a textile workers' association. The Jesuits had been expelled six months earlier.2 sources2 sources

Under the monarchy's Constitutional Charter of 1826, Catholicism was the religion of the kingdom. In the census of 1900, 99.8 per cent of the population declared themselves Catholic. Priests also did the state's paperwork: until February 1911 it was the parish clergy who recorded births through baptism, married couples and buried the dead.1 source1 source

Portuguese republicans wanted that world gone. They argued for a state neutral in religion, for compulsory civil registration and for schools free of the Church, and saw the clergy as allies of the monarchy. By 1909 anticlericalism had a mass following in Lisbon, shown by a large demonstration on 2 August.1 source1 source

When the Republic was proclaimed on 5 October 1910, the Provisional Government governed by decree, without a parliament. Afonso Costa, its Minister of Justice and Worship, set the pace on religion, and the separation law is credited to him.2 sources2 sources

The historian Fernando Catroga noted that French republicans took almost 25 years to pass measures their Portuguese counterparts decreed in about seven months. They did so in a country where about 70 per cent of people could not read and about four in five lived in the countryside.1 source1 source

The law was long by any standard, and it regulated almost everything, from the ringing of church bells to what priests could wear in the street. It drew on the French separation law of December 1905 and, in places, on the French Revolution's Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790.1 source1 source

Money came first. From 1 July 1911 the state, local councils and public bodies stopped paying for any form of worship (article 4). Every cathedral, church and chapel, with the property used for worship and to support the clergy, was declared to belong to the state or to local councils, to be listed and inventoried parish by parish (articles 62 and 63). Churches still needed for worship would be lent free of charge, on a revocable basis (article 89). Churches built by the Jesuits could never again be used for worship (article 92).1 source1 source

Worship itself was handed to lay bodies. The faithful could pay for it collectively only through Portuguese charitable bodies, such as the misericórdias and lay brotherhoods, or new ones authorised by the Ministry of Justice (article 17), and priests could not sit on their boards (article 26). At least a third of what they received for worship had to go to charity (article 32). Any church they built in future would pass to the state, without compensation, after 99 years (article 30).1 source1 source

The pension chapter was the most provocative. Priests serving cathedrals and parish churches when the Republic was proclaimed could receive a lifetime state pension, set by district commissions according to twelve criteria, from age to the size of the parish (article 113). A priest suspended by his bishop for marrying would keep it (article 150), and on his death a share would pass to his parents, widow or children, legitimate or not (article 152).1 source1 source

The historian Sérgio Ribeiro Pinto calls the result a “quasi-separation”: it separated the churches from the state but did not separate the state from the churches, because it set out to shape and control their internal life. Republicans called it “the Intangible”, a name coined by António França Borges, editor of the Lisbon daily O Mundo, for a law that could not be touched without betraying the Republic.1 source1 source

The hierarchy was already at war with the government. Before the law appeared, the Bishops of Porto and Beja had been driven from their dioceses. Within five weeks of its publication the bishops had jointly rejected it, declaring, as the Pope summed up, that they would rather lose all their property than accept servitude “for the sake of paltry pensions”.1 source1 source

On 24 May 1911 Pius X answered with an encyclical, Iamdudum. It called the law a decree that bore the name of separation but in fact reduced the Church to poverty and servitude, and listed its grievances: confiscated property, lay committees running worship, the ban on cassocks and processions, state control of seminaries, and pensions for priests who married.1 source1 source

The bishops told their priests to refuse the pensions and to keep away from the lay associations. In the Algarve, Bishop António Barbosa Leão called the law “despoiling, oppressive, insulting” and one that could “almost be called extinctive of the Catholic religion in Portugal”. In a circular of 24 December 1911 he ruled that anyone who joined a worship association would be refused the sacraments and a church burial.1 source1 source

The government replied with banishment. The Attorney General ruled that the bishop's circular had been printed without the state's approval, against article 181, and in January 1912 the Minister of Justice, António Caetano Macieira, barred him from his district for two years. He spent them in Lisbon, until January 1914.1 source1 source

The Patriarch of Lisbon, António Mendes Belo, was expelled from Lisbon for two years for breaking the law, and lived in his home town of Gouveia; a biographical dictionary of the cardinals dates the exile to 1911 to 1913. On 27 November 1911 Pius X made him a cardinal in secret, in pectore, because the turmoil in Portugal made a public announcement unwise. It was published only in May 1914.1 source1 source

The Constituent Assembly approved the Republic's first constitution on 21 August 1911, with freedom of conscience, equality between faiths and neutral state schooling. In 1913 Portugal broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.1 source1 source

The law expected each of Portugal's 3,814 parishes to hand its worship to a lay association, which would be lent the church. In practice Catholics stayed away. At the end of July 1911 there was one association with approved statutes in the whole country, at Alte in the Algarve, probably set up by its own parish priest, a pensioner who wrote for O Mundo. By 1918, by one count, 411 had been formed, about one parish in nine.1 source1 source

The pensions split the clergy along the country's religious map. Priests appointed to a parish for life received the pension unless they wrote to refuse it; others had to apply by 30 June 1911. Takers clustered in poor rural parishes. In the archdiocese of Évora, in the Alentejo, four in five eligible priests took it. In the archdiocese of Braga, in the north, where Catholicism was most deeply rooted, four did, out of 993.1 source1 source

Bishops punished the pensioners. All ten in the Algarve were suspended at once, and two were later excommunicated. Priests were also prosecuted for wearing cassocks in public: in Loulé one was fined ten days at 500 réis a day.1 source1 source

Processions were the flashpoint, because the law allowed them only where they caused no trouble. Radicals learned to provoke trouble by watching with their hats on, and the faithful hit back. On Maundy Thursday, 4 April 1912, a clash at the torchlight procession in Chamusca, on the Tagus, left one dead and several wounded. Faro's Good Friday procession was banned from 1911 to 1914, and the Easter procession in Lagos from 1911 until 1940.1 source1 source

Parliament debated revising the law in March 1914, prompted by the programme of Bernardino Machado's government. Afonso Costa opened the debate by accusing opponents of inventing “a law of intolerance and persecution” in order to attack it. The republican deputy Rodrigo Fontinha replied that some of its articles set out “to vex the Catholic Church and its faithful”. The debate dragged on into the following months, but the law stayed as it was until 1918.1 source1 source

The change came with a coup. Sidónio Pais seized power in Lisbon in December 1917, and on 10 December a decree cancelled every penalty imposed on bishops for breaking the separation law. In January 1918 the commission that enforced it was reorganised and its members replaced.2 sources2 sources

Decree 3,856 of 22 February 1918, published the next day and known after the Minister of Justice as the Moura Pinto law, rewrote the core. Priests could now sit on the boards of the bodies that ran worship, which only had to notify the authorities of their members. Worship in suitable places needed no permission and had no time limit. Church documents no longer needed state approval, and the charity share fell to ten per cent. The cassock ban and the pensions for priests' widows and children went.2 sources2 sources

On 15 May 1918 Sidónio became the first republican head of state to attend Mass, and on 10 July Portugal restored diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The bishops never publicly accepted the decree: in December 1918 the Patriarch wrote to the president asking for the return of everything the state had taken in 1911.3 sources3 sources

The Moura Pinto law outlived Sidónio, who was murdered in December 1918. An informal truce followed: in May 1919 the Holy See promised in writing not to appoint bishops the government objected to for political reasons. In June 1924 the Minister of Justice, José Domingues dos Santos, proposed restoring the 1911 law in full, but religion stayed a live issue in parliament until the military coup of 28 May 1926 ended the Republic.2 sources2 sources

The dictatorship that followed, shaped by António de Oliveira Salazar into the Estado Novo (New State), was friendly to the Church but did not undo the separation. Its constitution of 1933 guaranteed freedom of worship for all religions (article 45) and said the state “maintains the regime of separation” from the Catholic Church and any other religion (article 46).1 source1 source

On 7 May 1940 Portugal and the Holy See signed a Concordat in Vatican City, with a separate Missionary Agreement for the colonies. Article I recognised the legal personality of the Catholic Church and provided for a nuncio in Lisbon and an ambassador at the Vatican. Article II let the Church publish its documents without state approval.2 sources2 sources

Article VI dealt with what 1911 had taken. The Church regained ownership of churches, bishops' palaces, parish houses, seminaries and objects of worship still held by the state, except those in public use or classified as national monuments or buildings of public interest. Those stayed state property, permanently assigned to the Church and maintained by the state.1 source1 source

The Concordat also reached into private life. Under article XXIV, couples married in church gave up the right to a civil divorce, a rule that lasted until 1975 and is told in the story of the 1910 divorce law.1 source1 source

The memory lasted inside the Church. In a study of Portugal's bishops, Luís Salgado de Matos found that the experience of the separation law marked almost all Portuguese bishops until the revolution of 1974, because they had been trained while its wounds were still open.1 source1 source

Its central principle survived. The Constitution of 1976 says that churches and other religious communities “are separated from the State” and free to organise themselves. Article 3 of the 1911 law said no one could be questioned by any authority about their religion; article 41 of today's constitution says the same, with an exception for anonymous statistics.2 sources2 sources

Relations with the Catholic Church are still set by treaty. On 18 May 2004 Prime Minister José Manuel Durão Barroso signed a new Concordat in the Vatican, and John Paul II said it confirmed the mutual respect between the Holy See and Portugal.1 source1 source