January 2024 Print

by Angeline Tan

A perfunctory Google research on Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar would suffice to find various mainstream media outlets and their academic echo chambers hurling numerous epithets like “dictator,” “fascist,” and “autocrat”^[1] at the former Portuguese prime minister.^[2]

A more in-depth study of Salazar’s life, including his background, writings, and actions, however, reveals that there is more to this much-maligned man than merely half-substantiated sobriquets. Rather, Salazar’s Catholic faith shaped his governance of Portugal, enabling his country to work in tandem with the Catholic Church and so cause Portugal to flourish under his rule.

By no means is this piece an exhaustive literature review or biography of Salazar’s entire life and political career, with all its ebbs and flows. Rather, this piece is only the tip of the iceberg showing how Salazar’s Portugal was an excellent case study of a thriving union between the Catholic Church and the State in the twentieth century, when modern man had supposedly “outgrown” the confessional state. We will take a step back in time and space to Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to highlight Salazar’s accomplishment.

Religious, Political and Economic Turmoil in Portugal

Born in 1889 to a modest family in Vimieiro, Portugal, the young and precocious Salazar spent some time in a seminary before discerning that God had called him to another vocation. Influenced primarily by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclicals Rerum novarum, Quod apostolici muneris, and Graves de communi re, Salazar made his first inroads into politics by writing for Catholic political publications. As time went by, Salazar completed his tertiary studies at the prestigious University of Coimbra and eventually rose to become a renowned professor in economic policy in the Law School there.

During this time Salazar witnessed the 1910 downfall of Portugal’s constitutional monarchy as well as the animus of the subsequent República Portuguesa (First Portuguese Republic) towards the Catholic Church.

Rather than tackle the pressing economic problems Portugal was facing at that time, this Masonic regime under Afonso Costa launched a full-blown assault against the Catholic Church by expelling religious orders, confiscating Church property and goods, and implementing a series of anti-Catholic laws such as those suppressing religious education in schools and legalizing divorce.

This salvo of diabolical laws overseen by Costa and his anticlerical cronies eventually culminated in the passing of a law separating Church and State in 1911 and the country’s severance of ties with the Holy See in 1913.

In turn, Pope St. Pius X issued Iamdudum, an encyclical denouncing the public crimes of Costa’s regime, including the “incredible series of excesses and crimes which has been enacted in Portugal for the oppression of the Church.” One paragraph from Iamdudum reads:

At the outset, the absurd and monstrous character of the decree of which We speak is plain from the fact that it proclaims and enacts that the Republic shall have no religion, as if men individually and any association or nation did not depend upon Him who is the Maker and Preserver of all things; and then from the fact that it liberates Portugal from the observance of the Catholic religion, that religion, We say, which has ever been that nation’s greatest safeguard and glory, and has been professed almost unanimously by its people.^[3]

The first years of the First Portuguese Republic were very tumultuous. They were characterized by moral turpitude, frequent strikes and soaring inflation. Portugal’s entry into World War I during this time was calamitous. An indication of the instability of the Republic is that, from 1910 to 1926 alone, Portugal had eight presidents, thirty-eight prime ministers, one provisional government, and a constitutional junta!

Rising the Political Ranks

At the urging of the Portuguese Bishops, the Centro Católico Português (CCP) was established, with Salazar joining in the ranks while still writing for Portugal’s political Catholic press. With the CCP, Salazar stood for parliament on various occasions, and was elected in July 1921 for a while till 19 October 1921, when in an episode called the noite sangrenta, or Bloody Night, radical Republicans murdered various conservative leaders and took the legislature down.

The government that followed a successful military takeover on May 28, 1926 was no more stable than the previous anticlerical First Portuguese Republic that it had ousted, as many politicians competed for their own governing visions of Portugal.

Despite his brief appointment as Portugal’s Minister of Finance in June 1926, Salazar continued contributing to the government of his country by working with João José Sinel de Cordes, the new Minister of Finance, and reviewing the state’s tax intake.

After some time cooperating with the tax commission, teaching at Coimbra, and writing on national economics and politics, the eventual president of the new government, Óscar de Fragoso Carmona, invited Salazar once again to address Portugal’s budgetary problems.

According to Hugh Kay, author of Salazar and Modern Portugal, Salazar seemed content teaching at Coimbra, but nevertheless gave some prayer to the call to serve his country:

Salazar asked for a night to think it over, spent part of it on his knees like a squire on the vigil of knighthood, talked at length to [Cardinal] Cerejeira, and served Mass in the morning for his confessor, Fr. Mateo Crawley-Boevey.^[4]

That he would assume total responsibility for budgetary policies and that all ministers, including the President, had to abide by his projections, were some of the prerequisite conditions Salazar gave before assuming his role as Finance Minister. Carmona, considering Portugal’s economic malaise, agreed to Salazar’s conditions. Unexpectedly for all, Salazar managed to balance the country’s budget in the next budgetary session.

Due to his success in balancing his country’s faltering budget, Salazar gradually rose to greater political prominence, eventually becoming Prime Minister in 1932.

Church and State under Salazar’s Portugal

During a meeting with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St. Pius X, Salazar once acknowledged:

I do all I can for the Church. I do not know what will happen afterwards, but as long as I have the power, I want to help the Catholic Church as much as possible… For example, at the university I would like to see the truths of the Catholic Faith disseminated; so I would like the Church to appoint professors capable of teaching those truths.

Likewise, in El Portugal de Oliveira Salazar, author Sevilla Andrés wrote that Salazar had no desire for innovations in Church dogma and teaching:

“Portugal is a country of Catholic foundation …as long as the Church does not change its dogma and morals it evolves slowly in its cult, discipline, and internal organization.”^[5]

Indeed, Salazar’s Portugal saw Church and State enjoying mutually concordant and reinforcing ties. Pope Pius XII endorsed Salazar’s program of promoting Catholic values and teachings in Portugal, proclaiming: “I bless him with all my heart, and I cherish the most ardent desires that he be able to successfully complete his work of national restoration, both spiritual and material.”^[6]

In 1940, Portugal and the Vatican signed a Concordat governing church-state relations, effectively undoing many anticlerical policies undertaken during the previous anticlerical Republic, with the Catholic Church given exclusive control over religious education in public schools, as well as formal “juridical personality,” empowering it to incorporate and hold property.

Furthermore, only Catholic clergy could be chaplains in the nation’s armed forces. Divorce, which had been decriminalized by the previous Masonic regime, was again outlawed for those married in the Church.

Moreover, Salazar placed the interests of the Catholic Church and that of his country hand-in-hand when it came to the issue of Portugal’s overseas territories. He was purportedly riled at India’s annexation of Goa in 1961, which was a bastion of the Catholic Faith in South Asia. Consequently, thousands of Goans escaped to Portuguese Africa and Portugal as India attempted to eradicate Goa’s Catholicism that had spanned nearly five centuries.

Portugal’s Estado Novo under Salazar

Under Salazar’s top- down governance, Portugal emerged as an Estado Novo, or a Corporatist State that enabled a “unitary and corporative republic founded upon the equality of all its citizens in the eyes of the of the law, upon the free access for all classes to the benefits of civilization, and upon the participation of all the constituent forces in its administration and in the making of laws,” as per Portugal’s 1933 constitution.

From the very beginning of his stint as Prime Minister, Salazar went about reshaping Portugal’s economic landscape according to the ideals laid down by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno targeting the pitfalls of industrial capitalism. An excerpt from this encyclical indicates:

Even though economics and moral science employs each its own principles in its own sphere, it is, nevertheless, an error to say that the economic and moral orders are so distinct from and alien to each other that the former depends in no way on the latter. Certainly the laws of economics, as they are termed, being based on the very nature of material things and on the capacities of the human body and mind, determine the limits of what productive human effort cannot, and of what it can attain in the economic field and by what means. Yet it is reason itself that clearly shows, on the basis of the individual and social nature of things and of men, the purpose which God ordained for all economic life. But it is only the moral law which, just as it commands us to seek our supreme and last end in the whole scheme of our activity, so likewise commands us to seek directly in each kind of activity those purposes which we know that nature, or rather God the Author of nature, established for that kind of action, and in orderly relationship to subordinate such immediate purposes to our supreme and last end.^[7]

Put simply, with Catholic teaching as a beacon of light, Portugal could curb the immoderation of capitalism while outlawing the errors of godless Republicanism and anticlericalism.

When speaking of the situation in Portugal before Salazar came to power, Sir George Rendel, a British diplomat, maintained that he “could not describe the political background as anything but deplorable... very different from the orderly, prosperous and well-managed country that it later became under the government of Sehnor Salazar.”^[8]

What arguably contributed to the rise of the Estado Novo was the encroaching threat of global communism, including the victory of Spanish Republicans against General Primo de Rivera and King Alfonso XIII and the accompanying dangers of anarchy and strife. Therefore, a strong, Catholic state would be a useful bulwark against the destructive forces of international bolshevism undermining God, nation and family.

Opposed to atheistic communism, anticlericalism and anarchism, Salazar’s Estado Novo safeguarded Portugal’s Catholic heritage by Catholic socio-economic principles and patriotism. Unlike the unbridled excesses of capitalism and the godless ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the Estado Novo did not regard individuals as cogs in the wheel, but rather valued them as part of God’s plan for redemption.

In his book Doctrine And Action, translated by Robert Edgar Broughton, Salazar reiterated his political thought, clearly backed by his Catholic Faith:

We wish to organize and strengthen the country by means of principles of authority, order, and national tradition, in harmony with those eternal verities which are, happily, the inheritance of humanity and the sustenance of Christian civilization.^[9]

Similarly, in the 1938 book, The Portugal of Salazar, author Michael Derrick, an English Catholic journalist, added that “Salazar has always put the working-man first.”^[10]

As an Englishman, Derrick likened Salazar’s governance to the propositions of Distributism promoted by Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, disavowing accusations that Salazar’s Portugal was a Fascist State. “If the English reader finds it difficult to understand unless it is assimilated to some -ism that is known to him, it is much more nearly true to say of the Portugal of Salazar that it is a Distributist State than to say that it is Fascist,” Derrick contended.

As public finance was Salazar’s academic preoccupation, the Portuguese leader also made it the crux of his program for rebuilding Portugal economically. Such was Salazar’s repulsion for credit-based economic systems that characterized much of Western Europe that he refused loans from the globalist World Bank during Portugal’s financial problems in the 1960s, as such loans would have entailed external pressure on Portugal’s national budget.

Perhaps Hugh Kay’s synopsis of Quadragesimo anno could enable us to evaluate the extent to which Salazar followed the principles of subsidiarity expounded by Pope Pius XI:

The ultimate foundation of public order and the origin of all legitimate power is not the will of the people, but God. This is true even where democratic elections are held... The Church can accept historical variations in the form of government, their relative good being conditioned by the circumstances.^[11]

While Portugal was by no means the most industrialized (and credit-reliant) country in Europe during Salazar’s stint as Prime Minister, the God-fearing and astute leader nonetheless kept his nation solvent and rather self-sufficient. Little wonder then, did many of the Eurocratic and anticlerical media outlets at that time lambast the Portuguese leader’s approach as “dictatorial” without a proper context, for Salazar’s methods were at odds with “European economic-political integration.”^[12]

According to Formas de Legitimaçã do Poder by José Rebelo, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon from 1929 to 1971, reportedly told Salazar:

God is with you, and for that very reason all those who belong to the spirit of darkness will be against you. You do not know how much you are loved in Portugal....But there are also those who hate you. It is the hatred of those who know they have been repulsed. It is the hatred of those who hate you because they hate God. Courage! Your work has only just begun.^[13]

Debunking Accusations that Salazar was a “Fascist” or a “Caesarist”

Salazar clearly saw how the false ideas of liberty propagated during Europe’s so-called Enlightenment period brought Christendom in large swathes of Europe to its knees. Hence he strove to curtail the pernicious influence of liberalism and Marxism in Portugal and ensure the continued success of his government by adopting a tough stance against such ideas .

Although his critics and enemies asserted otherwise, Portugal as whole generally reacted well to Salazar’s rigorous policies that curbed evil influences and kept the country officially in line with Church teachings.

Gustave Thibon (1903–2001), a French Catholic philosopher and author, stated that while the Portuguese State under Salazar undoubtedly kept a close watch on possible subversive activities, it did so in reaction to unfavorable circumstances. These circumstances included threats to the Catholic religion, private economy, and family in Portuguese society itself. As Salazar himself pointed out:

The constitution of the family, religious organization, private economy, spontaneous and voluntary association for cultural, moral, and athletic ends… this all seems to oscillate according to the salutary or evil impetus of power and effectively depends on it.^[14]

Thibon noted that the situation Salazar was in showed the “paradox of our epoch that the central power has an unending need to revive and control social organisms that normally would serve as a counterweight and a brake.”

In contrast to the plethora of allegations by enemies that Salazar was a “fascist,” the Portuguese leader was not intoxicated by inflated notions about himself and his leadership capabilities. He admitted:

I am undoubtedly aware of the support I have. But I have to recall that I always fought, even against the dominant tendency of the moment, so that we would not have to cede to the temptation to incarnate in one man the future of a work that, in its extent, eclipses him. I am only one ring that does not want to let itself be twisted or broken, a simple ring in a chain that unites with another in the service to the Nation.^[15]

It is noteworthy that Salazar’s political, economic and social policies on a nationwide scale mirrored his fervent Catholicism and ascetic lifestyle that stemmed from his seminarian days. The Portuguese leader’s humility and self-knowledge despite his stature as de facto leader of Portugal for decades was also evident in another episode, when he stated that “we Portuguese, we all have around the same stature.”^[16]

Instead of regarding himself as invincible, Salazar voiced his limitations in a speech at the University of Coimbra, stating:

“My only regret is not having learned more in order to be wrong less often.”^[17]

Portugal in the Post-Salazar Years

After a four-decade stint in power, Salazar suffered a stroke in September 1968 and was incapable of governing his country any longer. He expired two years later, having lived a life of asceticism away from the limelight. The 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon staged by left-wing Portuguese military officers overthrew the Estado Novo government. Subsequently, Portugal would undergo another topsy-turvy period of transitory governments that reeked of the years under the First Republic, a situation that the Salazar government had tried painstakingly to forestall.

Since then, Salazar’s enemies of all stripes, ranging from diehard anarchists to fallen-away Catholics, have tried to besmirch and distort his religious, political, and social legacies. Nevertheless, faithful Catholics and the remnants of Portugal’s older generation fortunately still recall Salazar’s zest in serving the Catholic faith and his beloved homeland.

May Our Lady of Fatima, affectionately known by Portuguese Catholics as Nossa Senhora de Fátima, steer Portugal, the land Salazar so dearly cherished, away from the scourges of liberalism, and transform the country once again, into a veritable Santuário de Cristo Rei.

Endnotes

^[1] Sedgwick, Ellery. “Something New in Dictators: Salazar of Portugal.” The Atlantic, May 27, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/01/something-new-in-dictators-salazar-of-portugal/640628/.

^[2] Lindsay, James M., and Kat Duffy. “Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die.” Foreign Affairs, November 1, 2022. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/salazar-dictator-who-refused-die.

^[3] Pope St. Pius X, Iamdudum, May 24, 1911, §3.

^[4] Hugh Kay, Salazar and Modern Portugal (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970), 41.

^[5] Diego Sevilla Andrés, El Portugal de Oliveira Salazar, trans. Haydn Tiago de Azevedo Mafra Jones (Ediciones del movimiento, 1957), 137.

^[6] Michel de la Sainte Trinité, The Whole Truth about Fatima, Vol. 2., trans. John Collorafi (Buffalo, New York: Immaculate Heart Publications, 1989), 412.

^[7] Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, May 15, 1931, §42-43.

^[8] George Rendel, The Sword and the Olive: Recollections of Diplomacy and Foreign Service 1913-1954 (London: Murray, 1957), 37.

^[9] Oliviera Salazar, Doctrine and Action, trans. Robert Edgar Broughton (Faber, 1939), 229.

^[10] Michael Derrick, The Portugal of Salazar (New York: Campion, 1939), 101.

^[11] Kay, Hugh. Salazar and Modern Portugal: Hugh Kay, 41. NY : Hawthorn Books, 1970.

^[12] Benjamin Welles, “Salazar in Trouble,” The Atlantic, (May 28, 2022). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1962/08/salazar-in-trouble/658980/.

^[13] José Rebelo, Formas de Legitimaçã do Poder, trans. Haydn Tiago de Azevedo Mafra Jones (Lisbon: Livros e Leitura, 1998), 67.

^[14] Brain Welter and Pinho de Escobar Marco, Salazar and His Work: Essays on Political Philosophy, (Waterloo, Ontario: Arouca Press, 2021), 53.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Ibid.

TITLE IMAGE: Antonio de Olivera Salazar sitting at his desk, taken in 1940 (Bernard Hoffman).