Cristo Rei: the bishops' wartime vow that rose over the Tagus in 1959

Shortly after six in the evening of Sunday 17 May 1959, Pentecost, the President of the Republic, Admiral Américo Tomás, arrived on the Alto do Pragal in Almada, and the ceremony began. Across the Tagus lay Lisbon. Above him rose a new concrete tower, and at its foot stood the image of Our Lady of Fátima, brought down from the Chapel of the Apparitions for the occasion.2 sources2 sources

Cardinal Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, Patriarch of Lisbon, blessed the monument. As he did, petals poured from the top of the pedestal and a few thousand pigeons were released from it. Over everyone stood a 28-metre Christ on an 82-metre base, arms spread wide towards the capital.2 sources2 sources

The crowd stood to hear a radio message from Pope John XXIII, in Portuguese. Then Cerejeira, with the bishops, the head of state and members of the government, read the act consecrating Portugal to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. His voice broke more than once, wrote the Catholic monthly Voz da Fátima, which counted “more than 300,000” people on the hill.2 sources2 sources

The evening ended with hymns and the national anthem. Getting there had taken a quarter of a century: the idea dated from 1934, the bishops' vow from 1940 and the first stone from 1949.2 sources2 sources

Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira was a priest from the Minho who had become a history professor at the University of Coimbra. He was made a bishop in 1928 and, the next year, Patriarch of Lisbon and a cardinal. He was also a devotee of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In 1930 he set himself the aim “to establish in Portuguese society the reign of the Heart of Jesus”.3 sources3 sources

In October 1934, flying home from the International Eucharistic Congress in Buenos Aires, he passed over Rio de Janeiro and saw the Christ the Redeemer statue on Corcovado. He came back wanting a sanctuary to the Sacred Heart facing Lisbon. The bishops made it a national project in their collective pastoral letter for Lent 1937.2 sources2 sources

Their reasons belonged to the 1930s. The feast of Christ the King had been created in 1925, and the bishops wanted reparation for what they called the “universal conspiracy against Christ”, thanks for the social peace Portugal had kept while other countries had not, and a “national restoration”. The rector of the sanctuary, Fr Sezinando Alberto, described the original idea in 2019 as one of Catholic militancy.2 sources2 sources

The war changed its meaning. On 20 April 1940, at the end of their annual retreat at Fátima, the bishops made a vow. Seventeen days later, on 7 May, Portugal and the Holy See signed the Concordat.2 sources2 sources

Portugal stayed neutral and took no direct part in the fighting. According to the rector, the bishops made the vow in secret, and it was only made public in 1946.2 sources2 sources

Neutrality, the sanctuary says, let a national fundraising campaign get under way, and in 1941, with the war still on, the land on the Alto do Pragal was bought. The monument was paid for only with money from public collections, which ran from the 1930s into the 1950s.2 sources2 sources

Children were enlisted too. The “Pedras Pequeninas” (little stones) campaign ran from 1939 to 1958. Its point, the sanctuary says, was the value of children's sacrifice and prayer more than the money, and it puts the total raised at about €7,500.1 source1 source

Committees did the rest. A National Commission and diocesan committees organised the collection, and a newspaper, O Monumento, publicised it. When the Pope thanked the Portuguese in 1959, he thanked “the National Commission and everyone, rich and poor, small and great” who had given their sacrifices and prayers. None of the sources consulted gives a total cost.2 sources2 sources

Cerejeira laid the first stone on 18 December 1949. The date was chosen to mark the 50th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's consecration of mankind to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1899.2 sources2 sources

The monument was designed by the architect António Lino and built under the engineer Francisco de Mello e Castro. Work on the foundations began in 1951, and from 1952 the firm Obras Públicas e Cimento Armado (OPCA) built the base. The pedestal went up in layers using travelling formwork, in which the scaffolding was the structure itself, receiving the concrete as it rose.2 sources2 sources

The concrete statue was then made in place on top of the pedestal, using plaster moulds prepared from the sculptor's model, and finished by hand more than 100 metres above the ground. The whole structure weighs about 40,000 tonnes.4 sources4 sources

The model was by Francisco Franco de Sousa, born in Funchal, Madeira, on 9 October 1885. He trained at the Lisbon academy of fine arts and in Paris, and in 1928 finished the statue of the navigator João Gonçalves Zarco that was put up in Funchal in 1930. The Estado Novo made him one of its sculptors: he made his first bust of Salazar in 1934 and a statue of Salazar for the Portuguese pavilion at the 1937 Paris exhibition.1 source1 source

Cristo Rei was his last work. The art historian Teresa Campos dos Santos sees signs of decline in it, partly caused by a car that knocked him down near his studio. Franco died on 15 February 1955, aged 69, four years before the inauguration.1 source1 source

The bishops announced the programme in a collective pastoral letter dated 16 January 1959. It would begin on 13 May with the national pilgrimage to Fátima and end on the 17th with the blessing of the monument and the renewal of Portugal's consecration to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. They wrote in the language of a crusade, calling on the whole country to answer “the blasphemous challenge of atheism”.1 source1 source

Children were asked to write down “millions of sacrifices” for the conversion of sinners on slips of paper, which the Eucharistic Crusade in Braga gave out free and collected in time for the Virgin's visit to Lisbon. The published programme set the inauguration for 17:00 on the 17th, when the bells of every church in the Portuguese empire were to ring, with illuminations in every town from nightfall to midnight.2 sources2 sources

On 13 May, after the pilgrimage, the image of Our Lady of Fátima left the Cova da Iria shortly after four in the afternoon on a military carriage of the armed forces, escorted by cardinals and bishops. It passed through towns including Batalha, Alcobaça, Caldas da Rainha, Óbidos, Torres Vedras and Loures and reached Lisbon in the early hours.1 source1 source

On the night of Saturday 16 May it was carried in procession from the Instituto Superior Técnico, on the Alameda D. Afonso Henriques, to the Terreiro do Paço. The procession took three hours. When the image arrived, the lights in the square went out and it was lit only by candles, while thousands of white handkerchiefs waved.1 source1 source

The image then crossed the river on the Rio Jamor, one of the Tagus ferries, decked in damask and lit by 120 candles, with the ministers of the Presidency, the Interior and the Navy on board. Fireworks went off over the water and more than a hundred ships sounded their sirens. It spent the night in the chapel of Bom Sucesso at Cacilhas.1 source1 source

On Sunday morning Cerejeira celebrated a pontifical Mass at the Jerónimos monastery, attended by members of the government and the cardinals and bishops; the Archbishop of Évora preached. The image was meanwhile carried through the streets of Almada to the monument, where the ceremony began after six.1 source1 source

Between the blessing and the Pope's message, Cerejeira spoke and the Cardinal Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, Jaime de Barros Câmara, greeted the crowd. After the consecration and the President's speech came a Te Deum, during which Cerejeira and the cardinals of Rio and Lourenço Marques carried the monstrance round the monument and blessed what Voz da Fátima called “the four cardinal points of the Portuguese Empire”. One of the white doves that had travelled on the image's litter flew onto the President's platform, the paper noted, just as the crowd sang “Procedenti ab utroque”, words about the Holy Spirit, whose feast it was.2 sources2 sources

On 18 May, after Mass at the Almada seminary, the image went home by Barreiro, Montijo, Benavente, Almeirim and Santarém, where shops and schools closed for it. It reached the Cova da Iria at about eight in the evening.1 source1 source

Tomás spoke after the consecration, and he presented his presence as an act of state.1 source1 source

Cerejeira tied it to the nation and to Fátima. It would always be “a sign of national gratitude for the gift of peace”, he said, and, addressing the Virgin, he called it a complement to her sanctuary at the Cova da Iria.2 sources2 sources

Not every bishop was at ease with the regime. António Ferreira Gomes, Bishop of Porto, had written to Salazar on 13 June 1958 in terms that made him unwelcome to the regime. On 23 May 1959, six days after the inauguration, he wrote to his fellow bishops complaining of the Church's silence about the state of the country and of the government's attacks on him.1 source1 source

On 24 July 1959 Ferreira Gomes left Portugal on holiday and was refused re-entry at the border at Valença. He spent ten years in exile and returned to his diocese only in July 1969.1 source1 source

Almada, which belonged to the Patriarchate of Lisbon in 1959, passed to the new Diocese of Setúbal in 1975, and the sanctuary now belongs to it. Inside the four pillars is the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Paz, designed by Lino, with an image of the Virgin by Leopoldo de Almeida. The pillars also hold a water reservoir that supplies Almada.4 sources4 sources

The sanctuary has kept adding to the site, often on 17 May. The Cruz Alta, the tall cross that stood at Fátima from 1951 until 2004, was given to Cristo Rei and set up in front of it in 2007. A chapel opened at the top of the stairs, 84 metres up, in 2008, and a new main door in 2016. Bronze reliefs on the four porticoes followed between 2015 and 2018, and the Pavilhão do Rosário, a hall seating 750, opened in March 2016.4 sources4 sources

Visitor numbers have grown with Lisbon's tourism. Correio da Manhã reported in March 2016 that more than 600,000 people had visited the sanctuary in the past year and 220,000 had gone up the monument, twice as many tickets as a decade earlier. In 2019 the rector, Fr Sezinando Alberto, said 110,000 had gone up in 2003 and more than 300,000 in 2018. He put all visitors at about a million a year, with growing numbers of foreign pilgrims, many of them on their way to or from Fátima.2 sources2 sources

For Lisbon the statue is now part of the view, paired with the 25 de Abril bridge in pictures of the river. The sanctuary still describes it as the bishops did: a monument to the Sacred Heart, and the nation's thanks for the peace Portugal kept while Europe was at war.2 sources2 sources