The Historical Context of the Portuguese Concordat

During the First Republic (1910–1926) the Portuguese state ceased to be confessional. Through the 1911 Law of Separation of State and Churches, modelled on the analogous French Law of 1905, religious teaching was forbidden and the properties of the Catholic Church were confiscated. In parallel, the republican regime banned religious orders, allowed divorce, abolished religious oaths, closed the Faculty of Theology, made mandatory the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths, ended civil recognition of religious marriage and ceased diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

The First Republic collapsed in 1926 due to political instabilityFootnote ¹ and the anticlerical policies shaped by French laicismFootnote ² that failed to reflect the social reality of the country. Following a coup d’état carried out by a conservative civilian-military coalition, a military dictatorship was imposed and, in 1928, António de Oliveira Salazar, a Catholic Professor of economic law, was appointed Minister of Finance. The economic situation inherited from the previous regime compelled Salazar to demand extra financial sacrifices from the nation, with the approval of Cardinal Mendes Belo, Patriarch of Lisbon and head of the Portuguese Catholic Church. The clergyman expressed his support in a declaration that the democratic opposition would ironically christen the ‘Pastoral Letter of Finance’. Following the death of Mendes Belo in 1929, Salazar's closest friend, Manuel Cerejeira, was appointed head of the Portuguese church. The relationship between the two men was pivotal to the Holy See's choice.Footnote ³

Soon afterwards, Salazar became head of government (Presidente do Conselho) by appointment of the President of the Republic, General Óscar Carmona, who had been in office since 1928. In 1933 a new constitution abandoning the Jacobin tendencies of the First Republic was approved by plebiscite, officially inaugurating the New State (Estado Novo). While the constitution maintained the separation of church and state, freedom of worship was ensured and religious teaching was allowed in private schools. Unlike Francoism, which ‘as a political system rejected the fundamentals of the liberal legacy’,Footnote ⁴ the new Portuguese regime merged corporatist traits with liberal characteristics, namely regular parliamentary and presidential elections – though, in practice, the elections would be fraudulent. These distinctive characteristics mirrored power trade-offs within the regime,Footnote ⁵ which was supported by actors as diverse as radical and moderate right-wing partisans, monarchists and republicans, Catholics and non-Catholics, military officers and civilians. While their relative importance varied over time, the balance between these groups was the key aspect behind the regime's resilience. Equilibrium was obtained in part through Salazar's relationship with Carmona, who provided military backing to the regime. The fact that the President of the Republic had authority to dismiss the head of government was implicit in their cooperation, but eventually Carmona found himself losing political clout due to Salazar's centralised method of policy-making.Footnote ⁶

Shortly after his nomination as President of the Council, Salazar, who himself was a devout Catholic, proposed to the Holy See the negotiation of a concordat. However, although the Vatican acknowledged the Portuguese New State, the consolidation of the regime ended up delaying the negotiation of the treaty. The institutional stability of the dictatorship was achieved through a series of mechanisms. The first direct elections to the National Assembly, held in 1935, served to formally appoint deputies already chosen by the single party (União Nacional). Simultaneously, a Corporatist Chamber of a strictly advisory nature was formed to represent the nation's economic, professional and social bodies.Footnote ⁷ Political police (Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado), censorship, an official propaganda machine (Secretariado Nacional de Propaganda) and corporatist structures all played important roles in shaping the regime's internal cohesion.Footnote ⁸ Numerous organisations inspired by the fascist regime had been established by the mid-1930s, including the paramilitary youth movement (Mocidade Portuguesa) and the militia (Legião Portuguesa). In 1936 and 1937 Salazar managed to subdue the armed forces, which included elements still defending a regeneration of the First Republic based on a military dictatorship rather than a constitutionalised dictatorial regime. In 1936 the need to deal with the electoral victory of the left-wing coalition (Frente Popular) in Spain, a country with which Portugal has its single land border, is also likely to have further delayed the agreement.Footnote ⁹ In the course of time the New State overcame most of the internal divisions remaining from the Military Dictatorship, and the negotiations could finally begin in 1937.

The Holy See had recently declared that a concordat with France, a constitutional regime observant of state and church separation, was not required for a proper understanding between the two powers.Footnote ¹⁰ The argument was promptly seized by Salazar to minimise Portuguese obligations towards the Church during the concordatary negotiations. Thus, when officially handing over the first draft of the concordat to the apostolic nuncio, Salazar informed the Holy See's diplomatic representative that the Portuguese government was merely keeping an old promise. An agreement was eventually reached in 1940 but, unlike fascist Italy and Francoist Spain, Salazarist Portugal was not overly generous; the former legal status of the Church was not restored, no financial compensations or worship funding were granted nor were significant privileges established.

Motivation for Interwar Concordats

The concordats were designed to fight the threats posed to the Catholic Church by socialism and communism, as well as by liberalism and democracy; their status of international treaty bestowed protection against political contingencies and domestic law.Footnote ¹¹ In short, concordats were instruments against the ‘superior forces of modernity’ and aimed to restore the Church's influence and authority in societies where Catholicism was once dominant or an important creed.Footnote ¹²

The Catholic Church acquired important benefits through the concordats, namely control over ecclesiastic organisations, protection of worship, free exercise of religion, financial support and financial compensation for expropriated property. The first three guarantees drew upon the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which embodied a centralised concept of papal authority in matters such as the appointment of bishops, catholic marriage and education.Footnote ¹³ However, the concordats were also advantageous to the fostering states. Through the concordats the regimes acquired both legitimacy and stability – the former because treaties with the Holy See in interwar Europe were viewed as sanctioning the governments and the latter because the religious peace promoted therein was considered a path to social harmony.Footnote ¹⁴

A large number of concordats were established during the pontificate of Pius XI (1922–1939), leading the period to be known as the ‘Age of Concordats’.Footnote ¹⁵ In the 1920s and the 1930s the pope signed concordats with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes as well as democratic ones.Footnote ¹⁶ This shows that the agreements did not imply exclusive support to dictatorships. Indeed, the pope felt that the Church was not limited by any form of government ‘provided that the divine rights of God and of Christian consciences were safeguarded’.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, the Holy See's anti-communist strategy led to concordatary agreements with Mussolini in 1929 and Hitler in 1933,Footnote ¹⁸ even though many ecclesiastic and lay men saw these dictators as icons of ‘new paganism’.Footnote ¹⁹ The Spanish treaty, signed after the Second World War, followed the European interwar model, marked the end of the ‘Age of Concordats’ and was also the result of the same anti-communist strategy.

The Holy See backed the interwar dictatorships not only by conferring legitimacy and stability to the regimes but also by contributing to the eradication of political pluralism. The dissolution of Catholic parties was frequently a quid pro quo for concordats. The Italian People's Party (Partito Popolare Italiano) was dissolved in 1926 due to pressure from the pope, who considered the party an obstacle both to solving the ‘Roman Question’ and to establishing a concordat with Mussolini. Hitler had also ordered the dissolution of the German Centre Party (Zentrumspartei) in exchange for the Reichskonkordat.Footnote ²⁰ The Church's official journal in Portugal, Novidades, provided a clear interpretation of the matter: ‘the chancellor, in signing the Concordat, succeeded in abolishing an organisation that could become inconvenient, while the Church, by sacrificing the Zentrum, obtained recognition of its fundamental rights from the German government’.Footnote ²¹ In 1934 the Portuguese Catholic Party (Centro Católico) was dissolved by episcopate imposition against the will of its leader.Footnote ²² In fact, Salazar had decided that the Catholic Party was ‘inconvenient for the progress of the dictatorship’ and, in an official speech, invited the party to transform itself into an organisation dedicated solely to social action.Footnote ²³

The agreements reached with the interwar dictatorships do not imply that there was a ‘totalitarian model of concordat’ based on the Church efforts to impose the 1917 Code of Canon Law, as argued by Margiotta-Broglio.Footnote ²⁴ The Holy See negotiated with both democratic and authoritarian regimes. In addition, such a model would not have been compatible with the great variation in benefits granted, even if most of the subjects covered by the concordats were the same – i.e. related to marriage, teaching, nomination of bishops and Church property. In fact, it was the Portuguese concordat's relatively small concessions to the Church that enabled the treaty to endure until 2004, spanning thirty-four years of the subsequent democratic regime.

Salazar's Concordat in a Comparative Perspective

The uniqueness of the agreement promoted by Salazar resulted from the political legitimacy achieved by the Portuguese regime, which was not critically dependent on the influence of Catholics or on Holy See sanctioning. The stability of the New State strengthened its negotiating position, lessening the Church's dominance. The dictator's educational background in law, his mind-set and the authoritarian character of the regime also enhanced the distinctiveness of the treaty.

Some historians argue that the concordats of Pius XI were instrumental in providing international security to the various branches of Catholic Action.Footnote ²⁵ That is to say that the Holy See endorsed the dissolution of Catholic political parties to enhance the Church's policy-making through Catholic Action. However, there was continuous competition between the Catholic Action and state organisations. In Italy, Mussolini's regime intended to ‘establish an alternative religiosity endangering the true values of Catholicism’, as pointed out by a contributor to Azione fucina, the publication of the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana.Footnote ²⁶ In turn, the Catholic Action organisations did not always restrain their activities to the religious and societal realms. As witnessed by fascists, ‘circumventing what was established by the Lateran Pacts, members of Catholic Action, largely former members of the Partito Popolare, are involved in politics’ and ‘the nation cannot, if it wants to endure and thrive, tolerate doctrinal competition’.Footnote ²⁷ Precisely for this reason Mussolini promoted a post-concordat agreement in 1931 which stated that members of parties opposed to the regime could not be Catholic Action leaders. In 1934 Hitler too established a post-concordat agreement to require the incorporation of all Catholic organisations into Catholic Action and reduce their scope to religious, cultural or charitable actions.Footnote ²⁸

Remarkably, the Portuguese concordat did not regulate Catholic Action organisations.Footnote ²⁹ Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, Salazar firmly refused to recognise the Catholic Action's social, cultural or professional purposes. The Portuguese government considered them unacceptable since, ‘as with any Portuguese corporatist organisation, the formation of unions or guilds with a confessional nature is not allowed’.Footnote ³⁰ The dictator feared that the former Catholic Party would carry on its political activities within the framework of Catholic Action, as had happened in Italy and Germany, and by the end of the negotiation process this matter had not been settled. Indeed, even when the Portuguese official mission was at the Vatican to sign the treaty, the nuncio and Cardinal Cerejeira still tried to convince Salazar to include Catholic Action in the agreement.Footnote ³¹

Standing by his decision, Salazar chose to ward off future political interferences from Catholic organisations, even though, unlike in Italian Fascism or Nazism, competition for social indoctrination between the Portuguese dictatorship and the Catholic Church was so mild that in 1935 a constitutional amendment promoted by the head of the female paramilitary youth movement gave state education a Catholic orientation.Footnote ³² A decade later, when negotiating the Spanish concordat, Franco would also attempt not to acknowledge the Catholic Action due to its notorious political activities in other countries and to conflicts that had arisen between single unions and the Catholic workers’ movement. However, Franco had limited room for manoeuvre and felt compelled to give in.

Despite this, the Portuguese treaty contained important concessions to the Church. For instance, Salazar had resisted prohibiting divorce, even in the case of canonical marriage. Despite this, under pressure from the Roman Curia, he ended up creating a dual system: couples married through the Catholic rite – nearly everyone – would renounce divorce, while for civil marriages divorce was allowed.Footnote ³³ The apparent support for divorce bore no relation to Salazar's private beliefs and instead emerged from his concern about the political consequences.Footnote ³⁴ According to Salazar, at that moment ‘the working class was routinely Catholic; the middle class was detached from religion or professed a loose Catholicism and the upper class and intellectuals were divided on the issue’.Footnote ³⁵ Therefore, complete abolition of divorce could have jeopardised Portuguese society's support for the dictator. The search for equilibrium was a key aspect of the regime, even more so when religious issues were at stake, contributing to its longevity.Footnote ³⁶

In contrast to Portugal, in the case of the Italian state the pope considered the insolubility of marriage a condition for successful concordatary negotiations.Footnote ³⁷ Mussolini agreed to include the matter in the treaty because divorce had not been granted before the fascists came to power – divorce was introduced in Italy only in 1970. In Spain divorce was allowed during the Second Republic, but Franco recognised the sacrament of marriage even before signing the concordat. In 1939 an abrogation Act abolished divorce with retrospective application to Catholic marriages.Footnote ³⁸ Epitomising both the regime's traditional Catholicism and its totalitarian tendency, the measure would be included in the concordat of 1953 without debate.Footnote ³⁹

Despite differences on the issue of divorce, concordatary marriage had common features; provided some rules were observed the act would have civil effects. In both Portugal and Italy it was mandatory to send the minutes of the proceedings to the civil registry. However, unlike the Italian concordat, the Portuguese treaty established penalties for non-complying clergymen. During the negotiations with Portugal, the Holy See suggested repeatedly that the penalties ought to be consistent with ecclesiastic status and that violations ought to be punished by a fine rather than imprisonment. However, Salazar ended the discussion by stating: ‘the Holy See's repeated insistence leads the Government to recognise, with great regret, that it is not possible to reach an agreement, and therefore, the negotiations should be considered aborted’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The debate typifies Salazar's opinion on the relations between State and Church: nothing was above the State, not even the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, towards the end of negotiations, a secret arrangement was settled. The Portuguese government would not apply sanctions against priests in cases where marriage had been authorised by the bishop due to serious and urgent reasons (secret marriages). In other situations, the government would establish penalties compatible with ecclesiastic status. This secret arrangement reveals the importance of appearance and demonstrates that the authoritarian dictator could not afford to increase the antagonism of anticlericals whom he had not ousted, unlike his Spanish and Italian counterparts.

It is worth also comparing the Portuguese New State's rules on marriage to that of its Spanish neighbour. In 1938 Franco had already suspended the 1932 law conceding juridical value only to civil union, and from 1941 onwards all baptised Spaniards had to marry in a Catholic ceremony. According to the concordat of 1953, civil officers had to witness the religious ceremony in order to register marriages in civil records. Only in 1958 was civil marriage re-inscribed in the civil code, and even then only for Spaniards who were apostates or did not profess the Catholic religion.

The Portuguese concordat guaranteed teaching of Catholicism in state schools, except for in higher education. Nevertheless, parents could request exemption, which was not even contemplated in, for instance, the Polish concordat fostered by a parliamentary regime.Footnote ⁴¹ Initially, the Portuguese government proposed that religious education should be provided only to those who requested it. However, the Holy See protested, demanding religious education for all except for those students whose parents refused it ‘in writing and explicitly’. Salazar considered this an untenable obligation for a constitutional system which observed the principle that education should rest firstly with the family.Footnote ⁴² Ultimately, however, the Holy See managed to impose its will, yet the right to refuse attending to the religious classes remained in the agreement. The case was explained in a report by the Corporatist Chamber: the Portuguese State is not ‘totalitarian’, thus ‘it does not impose a doctrine, but proposes it’.Footnote ⁴³

Conversely, the Italian concordat stated that the teaching of Christian doctrine according to the Catholic tradition was ‘the foundation and the crown of public instruction’. Nevertheless, compulsory religious teaching at the higher education level, which had never even been proposed to the Portuguese negotiators, would be refused by Mussolini, who declared in the Chamber of Deputies that ‘in this domain, the fully fascist state claimed the right to set moral rules. It is Catholic, but it is fascist, indeed above all, exclusively, essentially fascist’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Spain's treaty was even more beneficial to the Church than the fascist concordat: all educational levels were to be shaped by Catholic doctrine. Religious education had been mandatory in state schools long before the concordat (1938), and the only possible exemption from religious classes was for non-baptised children.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Santos Juliá argues, the Catholic Church completely controlled education in Spain,Footnote ⁴⁶ and this was fully in line with ‘neo-traditionalist religious policy, roofing the solid edifice of Catholic support for [Franco's] new half-fascist, half-Catholic fundamentalist system’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Again, the negotiating behaviour of the Portuguese authoritarian government contrasts with the attitude of the Italian and Spanish regimes.Footnote ⁴⁸ The exception for religious education granted by the Portuguese dictatorship avoided anticlerical protests and conceded flexibility to the treaty. In fact, the rule would continue to be in force during the 1974 Portuguese revolution and persist until the end of the ensuing unstable democratisation process (1974–1982).

The Portuguese concordat had some other unique features pertaining to Catholic education. Catholic schools were subjected to state supervision while Catholic seminaries were forced to communicate to the government which non-philosophical and non-theological books were followed in the study programs in order to guarantee ‘the patriotic spirit’ of the pupils. The Vatican considered the state intervention dangerous, ‘more so in states where there is a totalitarian tendency’, such as in Portugal.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, Salazar's position on the relations between church and state largely prevailed in the concordat.

Salazar's concept of separation of church and state is also patent in the agreement reached on the nomination of bishops; the Portuguese government did not require an oath of loyalty from nominated bishops. Besides this, the Portuguese paragraph regulating the nomination of bishops was similar to the Italian text. The name of the selected clergyman would be communicated to the government for political sanctioning. In contrast, the corresponding article of the Spanish concordat reproduced the convention signed in 1941 between the Spanish government and the Holy See and relied on a complex formula aimed at overruling the traditional Spanish right of patronage and simultaneously enforcing the bishops’ loyalty to Franco.Footnote ⁵⁰ After Vatican II the arrangement proved totally inadequate, and in 1969 Paul VI asked Franco to revoke it.Footnote ⁵¹ In Portugal, the situation was quite the reverse. The relatively flexible nomination process made the government's right of objection fairly irrelevant – veto was exercised only once – enabling the text to remain in force until 2004.

Due to a decree issued by the military dictatorship, the Church in Portugal was already in usufructuary (limited) possession of properties confiscated during the First Republic when Salazar seized power. In his early ruling, more buildings were returned to the Church and full ownership was reinstated through the concordat. However, neither financial compensation nor funding for worship were granted, which led the head of the Portuguese Church to wrote to his friend Salazar and asked rhetorically: ‘Is the concordat burdensome for the Portuguese state budget? One answers frankly with these harsh words: not at all!’ Cardinal Cerejeira also pointed out that the Portuguese treaty was the least beneficial for the Holy See, which is a correct assessment.Footnote ⁵²

By contrast, the Italian concordat of 1929 extended the financial benefits of the public worship fund (fondo per il culto) to all churches provided they were opened to the public. Furthermore, it settled that the Italian state ‘shall continue to cover the deficiencies in income of Ecclesiastical benefices’. The concordat was part of the Lateran Pacts, which established additional exemptions for Church properties and included financial compensation for the loss of the Papal States due to the Italian unification in 1870.

The Spanish concordat of 1953 was also quite beneficial to the Church in terms of financial support, since it established that the state would pay the salaries of religious personnel, as well as for the reconstruction of Church property destroyed during the Civil War (1936–1939). This was not a novelty in Spain, as the worship budget had already been fully restored in 1939, confiscated properties had been returned and the reconstruction of church buildings was declared of public interest in 1942. While the Italian and Spanish governments assumed that the state was compensating the Church for former losses, Salazar never acknowledged the Church's claims on this matter. In fact, the Church had no chance to claim damages: from the beginning of the negotiation process, Salazar had declared that no further concessions to the first draft of the concordat would be made and that his position was not negotiable.Footnote ⁵³

The manner in which the future expropriation of religious buildings was regulated in the Portuguese concordat also differentiates Salazar's regime from the other interwar dictatorships. The government proposed a text that exempted the expropriation of church proprieties from ecclesiastic consent, not only in cases of urgent need – war or fire – but also whenever in the public interest. Again, Salazar insisted that the international treaty could not overrule domestic law, according to which only the State could declare public interest.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Vatican found this unacceptable, noting: ‘it is surprising that the Portuguese government refuses what was accepted by the German government’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Salazar replied that the Holy See should remember that ‘the Reichskonkordat was made hastily for political purposes [and, therefore,] cannot be invoked as an example’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Why was the Holy See reluctant to agree on this issue even though something similar had been accepted in the Polish concordat? Possibly because the Portuguese minister of public works, Duarte Pacheco, had just decided to build a large avenue in central Lisbon, expropriating the Palace of the Nunciature, an action supported by the President of the Council.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the Portuguese concordat, religious assistance to the armed forces was restricted to periods of war. Formal permanent assistance was established only in 1966 in the context of the colonial war in the African territories (1961–1974). By contrast, the Fascist and Francoist regimes provided for ecclesiastic assistance to military Catholics in peacetime. Even before the concordat, an agreement was reached between the Spanish government and the Holy See concerning permanent religious assistance. According to the French ambassador to the Holy See, this arrangement testifies ‘the particular and very close ties that Franco's regime strives to keep with the Catholic Church and the Holy See in various areas of public life’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Central to the singularity of the Portuguese concordat were the provisions that applied to the overseas territories. The treaty reaffirmed the Oriental Patronage (Padroado Português do Oriente), in other words, the patronal rights of the former Portuguese crown over imperial possessions. At stake was the right to present bishops in some of the Indian dioceses.Footnote ⁵⁹ In addition, the concordat subordinated all missionaries in the colonies, from either the secular clergy or religious congregations, domestic or foreign, to the jurisdiction of the Portuguese diocesan bishops rather than to Propaganda Fide, the congregation of the Roman Curia responsible for missionary work. It was also decided that the missions’ directors should be Portuguese and that the admission of foreign missionaries was allowed so long as they declared submission to Portuguese law and courts. In return, the Portuguese government recognised the missions’ legal status and, in contrast to what had been established for the metropolis, financial support was provided.

The agreement also included the organisational principles of the missions, which would be regulated by the Missionary Agreement (Acordo Missionário), an arrangement negotiated separately but signed at the same time. Two of those principles stand out: the Portuguese nationality of the mission's director and the subordination of the mission to the respective colonial bishop. This agreement gave the Portuguese government a major political advantage because it reinforced Portuguese sovereignty in the African colonies. Salazar noted publicly that the Missionary Agreement ‘translates the principles of nationalisation of our missionary apostolate, indispensable for the nation's defence and rebirth’. Thus, while the effects of the concordat were in essence internal, the Missionary Agreement had important external repercussions.Footnote ⁶⁰

All the negotiating processes were long – always more than three years –, and all were difficult, secret and with direct involvement of the heads of government – albeit in different ways and to varying degrees. Salazar himself engaged in the negotiations from beginning to end. During the preparatory stage, he led the group responsible for designing the initial government proposal. This group comprised five lawyers and the general-secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From July 1937 onwards he led a large number of one-on-one meetings until the final wording was settled. As a key actor in the agreement, his mindset affected the final document.

Conversely, Domenico Barone, who was a member of the Italian Council of State, a prestigious senior civil servant and also a fascist, was officially empowered by Mussolini to negotiate on behalf of the government in 1926. Barone died in January 1929, and Mussolini himself only finalised the last details of the agreement.Footnote ⁶¹ As in the Portuguese case, lawyers rather than diplomats were crucial in forging the Italian concordat.Footnote ⁶² Reflecting a certain lack of bargaining power, the Francoist negotiations were led by the Spanish ambassadors to the Holy See.

The governments of Italy and Portugal required that their respective negotiation processes remained secret, while secrecy in the case of Spain was a requirement of the Holy See. All of them wanted ‘to avoid damaging upheavals’, although in the 1953 Spanish concordat it was the Holy See who feared the reactions of the international community, as Francoism had been deeply discredited due to its former relations with the Axis Powers.Footnote ⁶³

As in Spain, prior to the concordat important changes had taken place in Portugal which benefitted the Church and Catholicism: until 1934 property confiscated during the First Republic was largely returned; in 1935 a constitutional amendment reinstated the principles of Catholicism in education; in 1936 religious assistance was introduced in prisons; in the same year the display of crucifixes became mandatory in state elementary schools, and challenges were non existent due to the convenient absence of press coverage; in 1937 Catholic priests’ military service was established in the form of religious assistance to the armed forces, yet, as permanent religious assistance to the military was not in force, priests were, in practice, exempted; in 1939 the religious oath was reintroduced in courts, and, in the same year, legal obstacles made divorce by mutual consent more difficult. In fact, the Portuguese concordat did not extend much further the privileges and guarantees already enshrined in domestic law. This situation led the head of the Portuguese Catholic Church to remark in a document sent to Salazar: ‘the Portuguese state, one can nearly say, did not concede anything in signing the concordat’. On the margin of this document, the dictator later scribbled: ‘Because everything was already given’.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Portuguese and Spanish concordats were thus largely a legal reinforcement of previously granted privileges, which were much more significant in Spain than in Portugal. Established at an earlier stage of the regime consolidation process, the Italian concordat, by contrast, which has to be assessed as a part of the Lateran Pacts, conferred extensive benefits not considered in domestic law.

The Relationship between Granted Benefits and National Contexts

The matters regulated by all the concordats were similar and were of greatest importance to governments and the Church, while the differences between them were essentially due to the extent of privileges and guarantees granted. This depended on a variety of factors and not on the religious faith of the leaders. The distinctiveness of the Portuguese concordat arose from the authoritarian nature of the regime and from the fact that Salazar was a hard-headed law professor who rejected conflicts with the constitution. Portugal's colonial empire also contributed to the uniqueness of its treaty. Yet these aspects do not totally explain why the Portuguese treaty benefited the Catholic Church the least. Fundamentally concordats were the result of the specific historical and political circumstances of each country.

The Italian concordat recognised Catholicism as the ‘religion of the Italians’. However, this cannot be seen as a generous state concession, as Catholicism had always been the state religion. Mussolini simply preserved a status quo that would continue until 1984, when a new agreement was settled. Above all, the Duce ‘used the historical tie between the Italians and the Catholic Church to integrate the institution into the Fascist state’.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, to obtain the Catholic Church's consent, significant concessions had to be made. In 1919 Mussolini had stated that all Church patrimony should be confiscated, privileges should be abolished and the Catholic influence upon the State should be eliminated,Footnote ⁶⁶ which naturally fuelled the Church's suspicion of him. Nevertheless, just before seizing power in 1922, the Duce informed Pius XI that he would solve the ‘Roman Question’. One year later when the prestigious leader of the Catholic party, Luigi Sturzo, proclaimed himself to be against fascism, he was deprived of the Vatican's support and, in 1924, was sent into exile, a clear demonstration of cooperation between the Fascist state and the Holy See. In addition, Mussolini restored the display of crucifixes in classrooms and courtrooms and enjoyed the Church's support during the Matteotti crisis.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, the Holy See required Catholics to vote for the single list in the general elections held one month after the Lateran Pacts was signed in 1929.Footnote ⁶⁸

Franco believed that ‘the Spanish state should be firmly identified with the Church and should give cultural, institutional and financial support to catholic institutions’.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Paul Preston, ‘Franco regarded the Church in the same way that a medieval king would, considering it to be a legitimating agent of his own divine right of sovereignty’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Most important to the concordat's final wording was Francoism's desperate need for legitimacy, with the regime facing internal and external difficulties following the Civil War and its alliance with the Axis powers. Although the relationship between the Church and the Spanish state was already largely regulated by partial and bilateral agreements,Footnote ⁷¹ a concordat with Rome would have a ‘very positive international impact’,Footnote ⁷² enhancing respectability and favouring financial and military support from the United States of America.Footnote ⁷³ However, the Holy See distrusted the intentions of Francoism due to its totalitarian tendenciesFootnote ⁷⁴ and was reluctant to recognise the regime through an international treaty.Footnote ⁷⁵ The beginning of the Cold War, as well as the Church's anti-communist strategy in democratic Europe and the United States, assisted Franco in achieving an agreement with the Holy See. Nevertheless, the Vatican attempted to dim its commitment by asking that the 1953 concordat had a discreet ratification ceremony.Footnote ⁷⁶ Franco's ‘urgent need to show great proximity to the Vatican gave Rome the opportunity to demand almost anything’ the French ambassador noted to the Holy See.Footnote ⁷⁷ As a result international law was used to enforce the Church's prominent role in education and society, and Catholicism was assumed to be the state religion.Footnote ⁷⁸

Francoism was clearly legitimised by the Holy See, and the importance of the concordat ‘lies less in its specific terms than in its political effects’.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to the Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, the Spanish concordat ‘does not end a period of tension, but strengthens and stabilises the situation in which it came about. Its conclusion was neither necessary nor urgent’.Footnote ⁸⁰ This statement explains the huge privileges conceded by Franco, which made the Spanish concordat untenable in the long term.

Salazar was appointed Minister of Finance due to his reputation as a financial expert, and at the time he made clear that Catholics were ‘absolutely alien’ to his presence in the government as well as to all his political actions.Footnote ⁸¹ However, his prestige as a Catholic provided him with the necessary legitimacy to eliminate the Catholic Party, to maintain the regime of separation between church and state and to not grant financial compensations.Footnote ⁸² These would be the premises for an agreement with the Holy See.

Salazar's relatively modest support for the Church in the concordat had several causes. Salazar's attitude was partly rooted in an autocratic conception of power that was neither totalitarian nor clerical, as well as in his educational background in law, which made it impossible to grant benefits which conflicted with the constitution. The concordat was also influenced by his governance style, since, in order to obtain national cohesion, Salazar's actions were shaped by a constant check and balance of powers, in order to avoid political hostility from anticlerical and secularist politicians, as well as from what was a rather secularised society. This ultimately explains the regime's political longevity (1933–1974). Observing this, during the concordat negotiations the nuncio wrote to the Holy See: ‘unfortunately, it is a fact that Dr Salazar takes better into account the secularists than the Church, which he believes can be controlled through his personal friendship with the cardinal-patriarch’.Footnote ⁸³ Some years before, in 1934, the French diplomatic representative in Lisbon expressed a similar opinion:

By proceeding with caution, Salazar avoided opposition through a less generous concordat, although in reality the absence of criticism was essentially due to the fact that by the late 1930s the regime's political opposition had already been weakened or was politically controlled by the repressive apparatus. The outbreak of the Second World War also contributed to this apparent unanimity. As testified by an Italian diplomat in 1940, ‘while the [former members of the] Catholic Party gave free rein to his joy, those who in normal circumstances would be irrefutably hostile were distracted by the international situation. . . .As a result, the concordat was quickly integrated into the Portuguese New State without giving rise to controversy or incidents’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Furthermore, Salazar was not particularly in need of legitimacy. The concordat was merely the culmination of a consolidation process, with which he intended to benefit the regime, both internally and externally. Portuguese Catholics had become supportive of the regime less by international guarantees than by appropriate tactics. This included a wide range of legal measures and symbolic acts, such as the annual Te Deum commemorating the 1926 military coup d’état that had paved the way to Salazarism. The nomination of most important Catholic laypersons to leadership roles in the regime's institutions – namely, the government, National Assembly, Corporatist Chamber, single party – was also an expedient to guarantee support from Catholics. The political career of Dinis da Fonseca typifies the regime's modus operandi: during the First Republic, Fonseca had been an important Catholic leader; when Salazar formed his first government in 1932, Fonseca disapproved of Salazar's choice of ministers, considering it an affront to the Portuguese Catholics, and the relation between him and the President of the Council cooled down to nearly non-speaking terms; however, in 1935, Dinis da Fonseca was ‘elected’ as member of the National Assembly and in 1940 he was appointed as undersecretary of state for Social Assistance. As such, Dinis da Fonseca ended up fully committed to Salazarism, unable to lead any real opposition.

Particularly significant in the Portuguese case is the question of why Salazar fostered the agreement given the low importance of the Holy See in the regime's legitimation. According to a cardinal, the Portuguese concordat was only signed in May of 1940 due to the Exhibition of the Portuguese World.Footnote ⁸⁶ The event was officially opened with a Te Deum at the Cathedral of Lisbon, prepared by Salazar himself.Footnote ⁸⁷ In associating the concordat with the exhibition, and thus converting the agreement into a propaganda instrument, a step was taken toward a Catholicisation of the ‘civil religion’ (public rituals, ceremonies, symbols).Footnote ⁸⁸ In this way, the Portuguese concordat not only bestowed a providential aura upon the regime, but also, as with other dictatorships, enhanced the political strength of Salazarism by integrating the Church and Catholics within the regime.

In keeping with the regime's authoritarian nature, the uniqueness of the Portuguese agreement arguably was the result of Salazar's intentions: avoid adverse reactions from anticlericals both within the regime and in the opposition, harmonise the benefits granted by the international treaty with domestic law and defend the separation between Church and State. The relatively modest benefits granted by the Portuguese concordat to the Catholic Church served to heal the wound opened by the anticlerical First Republic. This, as well as the sensitive subject of Catholic religion in the overseas territories, was one of the main assets of the agreement for the Portuguese government.

All things considered, Salazar regarded the concordat as an instrument that would increase the internal and external prestige of the regime, contributing to the almost unanimous support of Portuguese Catholics for the dictatorship. Hence the concordat brought a definitive end to the Church's claims for compensations, privileges and influence on society. ‘Salazar annihilated the religious issue in Portugal’ said the nuncio in 1940 when the negotiation process came to an end.Footnote ⁸⁹