Thomas Hackett’s essay was originally published in Issue 3 of New Polity magazine. Hackett is a co-founder of Tradistae, a website, podcast, and movement dedicated to the exposition and popularization of the social encyclicals of the Catholic Church. We publish his essay here in the hopes that it will further our understanding of what is—and what is not—the essential form of the Christian society.
Part I: Salazar’s Rise
Salazar: Background and Influences
António de Oliveira Salazar was born in 1889 to a relatively poor rural family in Vimieiro, Portugal. The intelligent young boy attracted the attention of a local curate, who provided him the opportunity of a preparatory education at the seminary in Viseu, the district capital. He continued on to theological studies and even received minor orders, but did not pursue the priesthood, possibly due to romantic trysts, of which we know little. Nonetheless, he was a friend of the Church, teaching at a religious secondary school.
By 1909, at age twenty, Salazar had made his first forays into the Catholic political press of the day. His greatest influence was Pope Leo XIII, whom he admired as providing a solution to the problems of the age, with such encyclicals as Rerum Novarum, Quod Apostolici Muneris, and Graves de Communi Re.
As he continued on to university education in Coimbra—the Oxford of Portugal, with all its prestige and medieval heritage—Salazar made a smooth climb from student to professor in 1914, when he graduated with prodigious marks. He became a prominent professor of law and economics.
During this time, he had watched the overthrow of the Portuguese constitutional monarchy (5 October 1910) and the hostility of the new Republic to the Church. This regime was characterized by the disastrous Portuguese involvement in World War I, the usual self-interest of private Capital, constant strikes and inflation, parliamentary partisanship, and plumenting trust in the State to competently resolve any of these disorders. In 1917, in response to the exhortations of the Portuguese Bishops, the Centro Católico Português (CCP) was created to pursue ralliement politics within the Republic. Salazar continued to write for the political Catholic press and was an important member of the CCP. With them, he even stood for parliament multiple times, and was elected in July 1921 (though this lasted only until October, when in an event known as the noite sangrenta, radical Republicans murdered several more conservative leaders and brought down the legislature).
The ailing Portuguese Republic ended suddenly on 28 May 1926, when the army launched a successful coup. The “National Revolution” would be the springboard for Salazar’s New State and last until the Carnation Revolution in 1974. However, the military dictatorship which immediately followed was no more unified than the parliamentary Republic which it had dismissed. Many factions, from all sides of the political spectrum, vied for their own vision of Portugal's government.
In the midst of this confusion, Salazar’s ascendency began. He was appointed, by the military triumvirate, as the Minister of Finance. They also selected two other Coimbra professors for their government. This lasted only from the 4th of June to the 17th, when all three men quit to avoid being caught in a power struggle due to a coup within the coup.
Nonetheless, Salazar was still involved in the government. “He cooperated with Sinel de Cordes [the new Minister of Finance], but simultaneously worked to undermine him. Cooperation was achieved through accepting the presidency of a commission designed to review the sources and nature of the State’s tax intake; undermining Sinel de Cordes was done, cruelly, in the press”.[1]
It was during this two-year period—spent teaching at Coimbra, writing on national economics and politics, and working with the tax commission—that Salazar received his divine mandate. Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey, the “Apostle of the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart” throughout Europe, arrived in Portugal in December 1927. “[A]ccording to Franco Nogueira, the three men—Fr Mateo, Cerejeira [a priest and faculty member at Coimbra, who would later serve as Cardinal-Patriarch of Portugal, from 1929–1971], and Salazar—engaged in long political discussions, while Fr Mateo became the confessor and spiritual advisor of his Portuguese hosts.” It was with these friends that he deliberated and heard Mass on the very day that he phoned Lisbon to accept his position. At some point during this visit, Fr Mateo told Salazar, “You can’t fool me. Behind this coolness lies an insatiable ambition. You are a volcano of ambition.” But this was not deficiency; in a Europe where the Church’s declining influence was being eliminated ever more rapidly, Salazar was, as Cerejeira would say years later, “a chosen one, almost God’s anointed.”[2]
General Carmona would eventually win the internal military conflict and be declared (the lasting) President of the Republic on 16 December 1926. He put down revolts and solidified his regime by holding an election, in which he ran unopposed on 25 March 1928. At the end of April, Salazar was formally appointed the Minister of Finance in this new government. From here, he climbed, securing far-reaching promises from the General that he would be granted complete control over financial matters, earning him the name “o ditador das finanças.”[3] When his power was threatened, he countered by threatening to resign; his financial prowess and ever-increasing public renown made him indispensable to the stability of the dictatorship. For the next four years, he dueled politically with opposition within the cabinet, moving from strength to strength.
In 1932, General Carmona made Salazar the Prime Minister of Portugal. A year later the 1933 Constitution was instituted, formalizing this arrangement. The Estado Novo was born.
In the pursuit of this weighty vocation, Salazar had few doubts about the best way forward. When he had accepted the initial invitation from the dictatorship, his colleagues in the CCP believed that Salazar “would work to develop the country, to, in a strictly technical sense, modernize it, allowing it to thrive among its competitors, while at the same time recuperating, enshrining, and protecting values which he associated with Portugal and its past glories, and which were threatened by the uncontrolled quest for the modern: religion, patriotism, and family. The sole agent capable of bringing about this difficult task—balancing development and the preservation (if not actually resuscitation) of tradition—was the State.” In interviews given in 1932, Salazar provided a clear vision of a technocratic (he would say "organic") state which allowed no dissension from his will (he would say the "the finest principles of the national spirit").[4] The National Assembly, one of his innovations, was to be an apolitical body of national unity, “an organism permanently open to all Portuguese, not as a center of reunion of diverging mentalities or processes, but as a convergence point of all who are convinced, or will become convinced, of the superiority of our processes and the dignity of the ends we intend to achieve.” It was “incompatible with the spirit of partisanship and political faction, judging that spirit contrary to the principle of the moral unity of the Nation and the nature and ends of the State.” The spirit of the monarchy was to be retained, but with all the totalizing absolutism of the modern state and without the traditionalist resistance to modern developments. He saw this synthesis as healing from the divisive “wound” inflicted by the Republic of 1910 and moving on from the recent and unexpected passing of Dom Manuel II, who died without an heir: “The Republic was by essence incompatible with the person of the king. Over 20 years have passed through the new path on which the Nation has driven her destinies.”[5]
So-called “fusionists,” at the close of the 20th century, forged an alliance between neoliberal economics and conservative social values, believing that they lived in a “Catholic moment,” when the teachings of the Church could fulfill the potential of (conservative) liberalism. In many ways, Salazar, like the fascists of his day, was a fusionist of an earlier breed. Liberal democracy might not be compatible with tradition and family, he would argue, but the modern state and capitalist (though corporatist, not libertarian) economics were. The “Catholic moment” of this early fusionism was that of the 1930s, not the 90s. Yet both found, in different ways, that the Progress to which they attached themselves would consume and eventually replace their politics. Fusionism, it seems, only lasts so long, and it is always the conservatives, not the capitalists, who crumble. To consider this point more fully, let us look at what Salazar accomplished with absolute power and a mandate from God.
Salazar: Minister of Finance
Portugal’s dictator had little interest in the methods of Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco. His springboard was not the militant mob, but the press. Salazar was, after all, educated, a member of the elite. Both at home and abroad, praises were sung of the energetic economic reforms of the Minister of Finance, and later, Prime Minister. Salazar began with gentle protectionism, reorganizing and increasing taxation, and investing in the modernization of infrastructure. These public-works projects were proof of concept for what would become the New State. Portugal was an agrarian nation with a largely unelectrified countryside; these projects modernized the nation with schools, roads, post offices, bridges, dams, revamped ports, and in Lisbon, along with many government buildings, “a long-planned neighborhood of affordable houses destined for the city’s working class.” Salazar also began to tackle the large national debt with State surplus.[6] The political stability and sustained economic growth would eventually, as was hoped, bring in foreign Capital.
But “the most emblematic policy of the period” was the Campanha do Trigo (Wheat Campaign) which sought to make Portugal self-sustaining in its food supply so as to end the necessity of trading for food imports. It was driven by State subsidies, prizes for production output, and credit availability.[7] However, these policies (which, it cannot be denied, produced growth) did little for local landowners, who did not have the venture capital to borrow government credit and pay back with usury. Large landowners had the money to make money and could produce greater yields with more industrialized and expensive farming equipment.
Shortly before the launch of the Campanha, Alfredo da Silva, a “captain of industry” for Portuguese fertilizer, happened to invest with the help of government tariff protection on his products; he enjoyed handsome profits. “An important economic alliance between large landowners and industrialists was thus forged by the State through the Campanha do Trigo.” Unsurprisingly, the modernization of agriculture through Capital did not prove sustainable. “The land yielded more wheat per acre than ever before, but soon the fertility of land long fallow was exhausted—so much so that soil erosion made much of it unusable for any other purpose.”[8]
The economic growth of Portugal, which earned Salazar so much praise and support, was not purchased without a price. Austerity measures were at the heart of Salazar’s economic growth. To ensure the success of the Campanha, a guaranteed sale price was placed on wheat, driving up the cost of food. “One estimate is that, throughout the 1930s, the prices set by the State were some 50% higher than international market prices.” New and reformed taxes (see footnote 4) were essential to amassing the State’s Capital;[9] they were felt harshly by the working class, especially by those in urban areas. Salazar’s Council for Budget Reform cut spending by the equivalent of $118,802,891 today. “Civil servants, army officers, and old-age pensioners were all hit.”[10]
As a result, many layers of Portuguese society began to have reservations about the regime. This unrest would only continue to grow for the next four decades. Though he would later turn to more violent methods, Salazar fought back against the critiques with the help of government censorship and by making publications of his budgeting successes. He provided frequent interviews, calling for noble sacrifice and frugality which would give rise to national resurgence. This propaganda campaign was met with limited success. An anonymous letter to Salazar from 1928 reads:
Imagine, Dr. Salazar, that you are no longer minister, but rather an honest head of a family, and a worker, whose weekly income is 108 escudos, but whose weekly outlay is 140 escudos, while having to feed seven people: yourself, your wife, and five small children. How would you resolve the domestic finances, that is, the imbalance between income and expense? According to your criteria as a Minister, you would throw one, two, or three children into the street to bring down the expenses [...].[11]
It would be strange to expect a dramatic change of heart when Salazar’s power was ossified in 1932, precisely because of the economic reforms explored above. Nonetheless, this later period deserves close examination because Salazar unveiled a project which purported, in the name of the encyclicals, to overcome the class struggle, by “draw[ing] the two classes more closely together” (Rerum Novarum § 48). This ideal is that of corporatism, which seeks to coordinate the disparate classes and demographics for the sake of the common good. Only a year before Salazar’s inauguration as Prime Minister, Pope Pius XI called on the premodern traditions of medieval guilds, where employers and workers harmonized their interests, to solve the bitter conflict which was raging between non-owning workers, who must sell their labor to survive, and employers, who own productive private property: “But complete cure will not come until this opposition has been abolished and well-ordered members of the social body—Industries and Professions—are constituted in which men may have their place, not according to the position each has in the labor market but according to the respective social functions which each performs” (Quadragesimo Anno § 83).
Even today, some integralists still regard corporatism as the “Third Way” between capitalism and communism. Missing in this discussion, however, is another integral pillar of the Encyclicals: the distributive mandate. Explored extensively in the works of English Catholic writers Chesterton and Belloc, distributism requires that “the law... should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” (Rerum Novarum § 46). Notably, Pope Pius XI’s corporatism, developed in §§ 78–97 of Quadragesimo, is immediately preceded by discussion of just wages. The purpose of just wages is so that “the abundant fruits of production will accrue equitably to those who are rich and will be distributed in ample sufficiency among the workers” such that “the non-owning workers through industry and thrift advance to the state of possessing some little property” and “[emerge] from the insecure lot in life in whose uncertainties non-owning workers are cast” (QA §§ 61–63).[12] Such wisdom was clearly absent from the Campanha, which favored large landowners over family farms, and the austerity regime which further immiserated the working-class. While the corporatist school of thought contains many valuable insights, Salazar’s economy provides an important historical example of its limitations when divorced from distributism.
Salazar: The New State
The 1933 Constitution was the soul of the New State. For a general overview of its structure, it relied on three factors: it was built on the formalization of the status quo, justified by a reactionary military fear, and propagandized as a uniquely Christian authoritarianism. To the first point, the Constitution dictated that the directly elected President would select the Prime Minister, who could then propose his Council of Ministers. A National Assembly, with ninety directly elected members, shared legislative initiative with the Council of Ministers. Additionally, there was the Corporative Chamber with representatives of local governments and social interest, who could only give opinions on bills before they were debated in the National Assembly. The Constitution provided the usual litany of political rights to its citizens, but because the enforcement of laws fell ambiguously to the government as a whole, it was the Council of Ministers, and more precisely, Salazar who decided the exception (and created new exceptions, when necessary). The main difference between Salazar as Minister of Finance and Salazar as Prime Minister of the New State is a technical one: he was no longer wielding significant power (with occasional battles with fellow ministers) at the behest of a military dictator, General Carmona; now, he was wielding near absolute power at the behest of the President of the Republic, General Carmona.
Political stability is always desirable, not least due to Salazar’s goal of luring foreign investors back to Portugal. But what helped push the New State into the world was the reactionary fear of global communism. In 1931, revolts in Madeira, Azores, and Guinea were put down by the dictatorship. In that same year the victory of Spanish Republicans against General Primo de Rivera and King Alfonso XIII raised the threat of disorder and anarchy. The strength of the State was the only thing stopping international bolshevism from overthrowing patriotism, family, and religion.
This reactionary impulse was not unique to the New State: the same could be found in every Western nation, and it would embolden liberal and fascist regimes alike. But the New State did not brand itself as a fascist regime; Salazar was loath to be a Portuguese Duce. Though he was a friend of Mussolini and Franco, he did not want to be associated with the “pagan Caesarism” of Italy. Salazar was a technocrat at heart; he did employ the methods of the police-state to cultivate and protect his image (the SPN, the censorship department, and the PVDE (later rebranded as the PIDE), the secret police, would both come into being in 1933), but he had little interest in grandstanding or rousing speeches. More than that, “[f]or Salazar, Catholicism was indistinguishable from Portuguese identity.” Portuguese nationalism was not as militant as others;[13] it was described in terms of its noble spirit of courage, dignity, selflessness, sacrifice, etc; its Christian heritage, stretching back to its 12th century Kingdom; and its national and imperial destiny, especially tied to its colonial ‘lusotropicalism.’ Portugal’s unique method of colonialism, it was asserted, was not exploitative, but cooperative, producing racial harmony, rather than domination.
Part II: Salazar’s Reign
Salazar’s Corporatism in the 1930s
Advocates of the Third Way may have been disappointed to learn the details about the Campanha and the “Portuguese Miracle” in the late 1920s, but may yet be excited to examine the model of corporatism in the New State. The language of the 1933 Constitution is very promising.
If one reads Michael Derrick, an English Catholic journalist of the era, he will find a thorough study of Corporatism on paper: pure and ideal theoretical corporatism. The third chapter (“The Corporate State”) of his 1938 book, The Portugal of Salazar, proclaims that “The Estado Novo has meant justice for the labouring Portuguese such as he had not known for over a century.
"Salazar has always put the working-man first.”[14] He describes in detail how certain phrases of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno (promulgated in 1931) make their way into the Constitution.[15] As an Englishman, he also ties the regime of Salazar to the ideas of Chesterton and dismisses any unsavory accusations of fascism: “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.”[16] Given Salazar’s careful cultivation of his international press relations—and the fact that his neutrality in World War II did not condemn him to damnatio memoriae—such propaganda is not difficult to find. And for those who ‘fixate on form,’ it cannot be denied that theoretical descriptions of the Corporative Chamber will resonate with readers of Rerum Novarum. Let us take great care, then, not to ‘exclude the content.’
When reading the Constitution, aside from its historical practice, it is easy to praise. Catholics, whether integralist or conservative, could also be pleased to find that Title III, Article 11 read: “The State assures the constitution and defense of the family, as fount of conservation and development of our people, as the primary base of education, discipline, social harmony, and as the foundation of all political order by its aggregation and representation in the parishes and municipalities.”[17] Title VIII, Article 35 tells us that “Property, capital, and labour perform their social function in a regime of economic cooperation and solidarity, with the law being able to determine conditions for its employment or exploitation in conformity with its collective end.” And in Article 41: “The State promotes and favours institutions of solidarity, providence, cooperation, and mutualism.”[18]
Yet from the outset, we may complain that the Corporative Chamber described in the Constitution did not seem to have concrete political power. On the national level, it was relegated to the advisory role in a legislature which was itself largely advisory to the Council of Ministers. And while the Constitution was full of the State’s duties to support workers, a more critical student of the Social Encyclicals will complain that there was no preferential option for the poor; the rights of Capital and labor were considered as composite halves of an equation, with no attention paid to the vast power difference between those wealthy capitalists who control the means of production and those who must sell their labor just to feed their families. Salazar seems to have forgotten what he read in Rerum Novarum:
Still, when there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to special consideration. The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government. (§ 37)
Again in Title VIII, Article 39 states that “In the economic relations between capital and labour, suspension of economic activities by any of the parts with the purpose of forcing their respective interests is not allowed.” This forbids both worker strikes and employer lockouts, but while the former has nothing remaining to fall back upon, the latter party has many other avenues to power. In summary, the Constitution plied in memes about harmony and cooperation to soften the reality of the unresolved conflicts that remained buried by rhetoric.
On the ground, the hidden contradictions of the Constitution were confirmed. In general: independent unions did not trust the Chamber and were dealt with harshly, while employers railed against corporatism as “white bolshevism” and were gently appeased. Workers, whose ability to legally strike was eliminated by incorporation into the National Syndicates found themselves “absorbed into the corporative machinery.”[19] Their grievances could only be legally heard if they filtered up through the State-run institutions; their independent organizations were eliminated. Employers, on the other hand, could negotiate from a position of strength. The State, far from being an impartial arbiter, was still reliant on the health of its economic sector to keep pace with other European nations. This is nothing more than what Pope Leo XIII told us. “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”[20] Costa Pinto, a modern historian of Portugal, surmises, “Employers reacted badly to ‘forced collaboration’ and in many cases they ignored these laws. Whenever ‘the free will of all parties’ was permitted it was actually the ‘free will of the employers’ which invariably won the day… It is obvious that employers gained much more from Salazarism.”[21]
The corporatism outlined by the Constitution was implemented more precisely by the National Labor Statute and various laws decreed in that same year. Workers had to be organized into the National Syndicates or the Grémios (Guilds) created by the State; unions had two months to sign up or disband. Between these associations and the Council of Ministers, the INTP (National Labor and Welfare Institute) and the FNAT (National Foundation for Happiness at Work) served as intermediary institutions, to dictate and enforce the will of the State (i.e., Salazar’s Council).
The creation of these institutions was guided by Pedro Teotónio Pereira, a former monarchist turned National Syndicalist to work within the Salazar regime. Despite his reformist zeal, he quickly found himself neutralized. A minimum wage was announced in 1935, along with other social welfare measures. This went too far; “business interests were angered by this ‘white bolshevism’, and, acting in concerted fashion, forced a retreat… In many cases, employers simply ignored laws on work schedules and the minimum wage; nothing was done.” The “People’s Houses,” which were ordained as centers for agricultural laborers, were chronically underfunded.[22] Salazar, a man of personal austerity, was disappointed and frustrated by the greed of these capitalists, but not so much that he was moved to act. In terms of regime stability, breaking up worker strikes is far more effective than risking the wrath of the captains of industry. Pressured by these interests, Salazar removed Teotónio Pereira to a less tendentious role in the government.
The unresolved conflict between labor and Capital gave rise to another significant figure: Rolão Preto, leader of the far Right National-Syndicalist Movement. He emerged as the ‘chefe’ of the movement which had been growing since their first rallies in 1932. The chief goals of these working-class Blue Shirts were twofold: to mobilize the masses to create a truly fascist state (rather than the elite technocracy of Salazar’s corporatism) and to prepare the people to resist the coming communist revolution and save Portugal. At their height, they numbered roughly 30,000. Increasingly, the Blue Shirts called on Salazar to recognize them as the reactionary vanguard of Portugal and to carry through the promised reforms of the National Syndicates. He hesitated, then acted quickly. The moderates of the movement were incorporated into the regime, along with their fascist aesthetic; the radicals were dismissed. In July 1934, the remaining Blue Shirts were officially deemed “potential enemies.”[23] Rolão Preto’s appeal to both President Carmona and (possibly) the Nazi Party failed him. After a wave of arrests, he was forced into exile.
Such incidents were highly characteristic of the regimes of twentieth century Europe. To counter the threat of the Marxists unifying the workers, fascist movements relied on a competing popular mobilization. This came with no small supply of anti-capitalist invective. However, at every juncture, the class cooperation which would be mediated by the fascist State came apart in favor of Capital rather than labor. In the same year that Salazar eliminated Preto’s Blue Shirts, Hitler orchestrated the “Night of Long Knives,” which saw the leader of the Strasserite wing of the Nazi party, assassinated. A decade before (1925), Mussolini outlawed both independent unions, both Catholic and Socialist, in the Pact of Vidoni Palace. Such a phenomenon is not exclusive to the Right. Lenin’s “On Party Unity” Resolution in the 10th Bolshevik Congress (1921) similarly banned independent unions, to support the centralization of the Socialist State in opposition to Trotsky (whether this decision inevitably led to Stalinism is a debate which continues in leftist circles). Like an iron law of history, it seems that the State struggles to take hold of Capital without Capital taking hold of the State. Stability at home and competitiveness in the global arena cannot be accomplished without a subordinated workforce.
In light of this, the dominance of Capital seems inevitable; the liberation of labor from abuse, impossible. But to imagine an escape from the materialism of modern politics, we should learn from the failures of Salazar. The dictator knew his encyclicals well enough to reject libertarian economics, but he saw the nation-state of Portugal as a more or less neutral tool with which to tame divisive individualism and the chaotic profit-motive. This was tempting to the nobly intentioned (and ambitious) Salazar because it was easy. It remains a temptation today to hope that we can reconstruct Christian civilization without rooting out structures of sin. It is no wonder that the form of the modern State—complete with the technocratic paradigm which races after endless modernization, the nationalistic culture of death which manufactures militarism, and the totalitarian statolatry which throttles subsidiary societies—proves wildly inadequate to tame the evils of liberalism. Rather, the State of modernity was built on the same violent premises that created the Market: a brutal world of Hobbesian competition, where order can only be enforced from above, rather than permeated on every level by the indwelling grace of the virtuous. It is right and just to desire the consecration of the State, but it is dangerous to do so if we cannot tell the difference between the “national interest” (i.e. the power of the regime, which can be pursued to the detriment of others) and the common good (e.g. peace and justice, which do not diminish when they are shared by all).[24]
Salazar’s Corporatism in the 1940s
During World War II, Salazar managed the impressive feat of remaining neutral. His clever wartime policy allowed Iberia (for Franco was prevented from joining the Axis, in no small part due to Salazar) to suffer few foreign blows. Unfortunately for the New State, Portugal would find itself, like Spain, in a state of constant internal turmoil.
The corporatism of the previous decade did not set Portugal up for success. The cost of living was spiraling, not only due to wartime shortages, but also to the abject failure of the corporative system. The Grémios, inept at best, corrupt at worst, were widely hated. During the War, three waves of strikes would shake the nation and severely damage the legitimacy of the regime. The first came in October 1942 and won some minor concessions; workers were energized by their newfound agency. The next, in July 1943, was met with severe repression: “Factories in which strikes had broken out were closed while the workforce was purged and the actions of the employers investigated; arrest of political suspects took place on a massive scale. Barreiro was flooded with police and troops, PVDE snatch squads operating at night.”[25] More strikes in May 1944 received the same treatment.
Though these strikes were primarily organized by the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party), they were not only supported by leftists. Indeed, the reactionaries’ fear of communism faded in the face of the tyranny of Salazar. Working-class Catholics had little reason to support the regime. Fr Abel Varzim, who ran a newspaper titled O Trabalhador (The Worker), and others affiliated with Catholic Action were “a mouthpiece for working-class complaints, and for a critique of the top-down nature of the regime’s corporatism.”[26]
With Álvaro Cunhal (a prominent communist organizer) pointing out “the sterility of [the left’s] dogmatic anti-religious campaigns and the counter-productive nature of attacks on popular Catholicism,” it is no surprise that, in December 1943, all “from communists to disgruntled monarchists”[27] would join together in the Movimento de Unidade Nacional Antifascista (MUNAF) against Salazar’s New State.[28]
In another telling anecdote, Colman O’Donovan, the Irish chargé d’affaires, met with Cardinal-Patriarch Cerejeira in 1945. The former noted that the Cardinal “regarded the corporative state in Portugal as a camouflage and an imposture and holds out that it will collapse without Salazar. It had not ‘caught on’ with the people, on whom it was imposed by force. It had nothing in common with the ideals behind the encyclicals though great propaganda had been made of them to put it over…” O’Donovan concluded “The condition of the poor is miserable beyond description and nothing effective is being done about it.”[29]
Salazar: Church and State
At this point, it would be repetitive to spell out the exploitations and injustices of Portuguese corporatism in the 1950s. Little changed, except that the New State’s legitimacy became ever weaker. In part, this was due to the post-war political scene: liberal democracy was back in vogue. Though Salazar made a show of holding elections and joined the post-war economic consensus by entering the EFTA, the IMF, and the International Bank in 1960 (Franco did likewise with his Stabilization Plan in 1959), his police state would receive none of the international praise which propelled him to power decades ago. More immediately, the Church would launch devastating attacks on the New State.
Before considering the conflict between Church and State, let us dwell on some aspects of their harmony. It must be remembered, despite the brutal reality of Salazar’s corporatism, his springboard to power was writing for the Catholic press with the CCP. He was a student of the Leonine encyclicals and, in theory, was shaped by these ideas. He entered the government with a sense of duty and divine mandate.
Undoubtedly, the Church was respected far more than in the liberal Republic. Schools included Christian education in 1935; a 1937 Concordat was signed with the Holy See granting wide-ranging cultural influence to the Church, and by 1951 the State became officially confessional. Divorce, which was illegal for those bound by Sacramental Marriage, was kept at very low rates. The Church supplied military chaplains, national pedagogy, and was honored at public ceremonies.[30]
It would seem to some 21st century integralists that Portugal was in a desirable state of affairs. Some misguided traditionalists can be found claiming that “Our Lady of Fatima guided Salazar’s administration.”[31] And while the public recognition of the Holy Church is an undeniable good, such favors must not be permitted to blind us to the evils of the New State. Indeed, we would be right to ask to what degree the Church was corrupted by this influence, even while She was able to be liberated from republicanism. The Fatima Apparitions were, like many miracles, used for a particular political purpose. Among American traditionalists to this day, they are often associated with a sometimes hysteric fear of international Bolshevism, even after the End of History. It is worth asking the question: was it the State and the Portuguese Bishops, rather than Our Lady, who intended the reactionary conclusions of Her prophecy against the “errors of Russia?”
It was perhaps due to the Church’s trials during the republican phase, that many bishops so eagerly accepted Her role in the New State. But She was largely instrumentalized by Salazar. Christianity in schools was for the sake of anti-communism.
Regarding the plight of the poor, the State’s confessionalism proved little more meaningful than the Catholicism of many contemporary American congressmen. It was faith without works on a national scale.
The New State’s confessionalism was akin to its corporatism. Formal relationships between Church and State—as between Capital and labor—were favorable; but in practice, there was constant conflict. As above, many Catholics were involved in MUNAF and the steady waves of workers strikes. “In 1948 Fr. Abel Varzim was gradually removed, at the government’s insistence, from the posts he held within Catholic Action, and his newspaper O Trabalhador, was closed down.”[32] Catholic Action was closely monitored by the police throughout the 1950s.
By the end of the decade, these contradictions had only heightened. In July of 1958, the Bishop of Oporto, António Ferreira Gomes, sent a long letter to Salazar with the hope of holding a meeting with him. Contained in the brazen document are pointed questions about the regime's willingness to allow the Church to freely preach Her social doctrine and denunciations of the suffering endured by the poor of Portugal. Bishop Gomes also suggests that the union of the reactionary State and Catholic anti-communism actually only emboldened the influence of the Left, because it made socialists appear as the only ones truly committed to the cry of the poor:
I think it was Durkheim who said that for many, communism was less of a science and more of a cry of pain. I see for myself all the inconveniences of meddling with science; but I see no advantage in drowning out the cry of pain.[33]
The Bishop builds to a crescendo, making clear that Salazar's totalitarianism was far from the subsidiary reordering of society to escape the exploitation of capitalism. For all the propaganda, Rerum Novarum and its tradition of social encyclicals cannot be equated with the New State:
We have to be frank, maybe brutal: Portuguese corporatism, as others in the past, was in reality a way to strip workers from their natural right of association, which liberalism, in [18]91, had stripped from them, and which they reconquered in a hard and bloody war. And this they call corporatism; and with this they wish to compromise, and in reality, have compromised, uselessly but terribly, the Holy Church.[34]
When the letter reached the public, Salazar, naturally, was furious. He began a political campaign to muzzle the Bishop and managed to exact apologies. Hinting at the future of the Concordat, Salazar convinced the Vatican (especially in the person of Cardinal-Patriarch Cerejeira) to distance itself from Bishop Gomes, but he failed to force his removal from the Diocese of Oporto. Instead, the Bishop had to be convinced by Archbishop Costa Nunes (the Vatican’s Vice-Camerlengo and an ally of Salazar) to leave Portugal for a time of rest. When he attempted to return, he was forbidden to enter the country. “Once the bishop was gone, the Portuguese government began urging the Holy See to appoint a new bishop, not for, it claimed, political reasons, but because of… the ‘growing disorder’ in the diocese of Oporto. Salazar would also offer the possibility of a private visit to Portugal should Dom António accept a new position within the Church's hierarchy, outside, of course, the Portuguese-speaking world.”[35] The Church did not accept this condition; Bishop Gomes would remain in exile until 1969, when Salazar had been de facto replaced by Caetano.
The relation of the New State to the Church was increasingly icy in the last decade of the New State. When it was announced that Saint Pope Paul VI would visit Bombay, India, for the 38th Eucharistic Conference, Salazar was once more incensed. This was an affront to his political battle with the recently independent India over Portuguese Goa. When he proposed “consequences” for the Church in Portugal, even his friend Cerejeira begged him to back down. It was this colonial reckoning which finally broke what remained of the Church’s support for the New State.
Salazar: Race and Nation
It would be an error of great omission to consider the Portuguese mainland without at least briefly touching on its colonies: Guinea, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, Goa, Mozambique, Macau, Timor, and the Azores and Madeira. During the early period of the regime, these colonies were par for course: all of Europe had made at least a little profit from the exploitation of imperial wealth. Given the immense and unsettled conflict between Capital and labor on the Portuguese mainland, it should not surprise us to find this evil heightened by both the abstraction of a distant colony and the justification of race.
In 1930, the Acto Colonial was promulgated, which changed the relationship between the mainland and its colonies. The Republic had instituted a high commissioner, but this was replaced by a governor-general, who was more subordinate to Lisbon. Economically, the former policy of colonial development was rolled back; instead, the Act “helped restore the colonies to their former task of helping to settle the Portuguese balance of payments.” The military and administrative costs of governing (and quelling occasional rebellions) were worth the flow of resources from the periphery to the center.[36] "By contributing in this manner to bankroll foreign payments," writes Pedro Lains, "the colonies made governing the country easier, and contributed to its economic growth."[37]
Without any policy of imperial solidarity or development, questions of full citizenship or independence for the colonies (á la Brazil) were indefinitely postponed. Here again, we see a wide gulf between the theory and practice of the New State. The Portuguese theory of colonialism, only officially codified in the latter half of Salazar’s regime, drew heavily on the idea of “lusotropicalism” developed by Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s. It proposed that Portuguese colonialism, as evidenced by higher rates of racial intermarriage and its national history, had a distinctive character. The Portuguese people were more adaptable than other European powers and better able to carry out the “civilizing mission” as it created a harmonious multiracial society. This was tied to pluricontinentialism, the assertion that Portugal expanded beyond its Iberian borders; its colonies were merely extensions of the nation. In 1951, as colonialism was dismantled in the wake of World War II, Salazar was determined not to accept this fate for Portugal; he changed the designation of the colonies to “Overseas Provinces.” The development of this ideology used Catholicism to unite both nationalism and colonialism. “From the 1930s onward the educational system rigidly codified the ‘official’ version of Portuguese history which was to be revised… The heroes of the past were purged of all vices, and their saintliness eventually confirmed by scientific investigation. The sole objective of the ‘Maritime Discoveries’, for example, was noted to be the ‘spreading of the faith and of the empire’, and the positivist view of the discoveries as a ‘mercantile adventure’ was eliminated.” During the anti-colonial war in Mozambique (1964–1974),[38] the Portuguese military printed posters with slogans such as, “Many Races, All Portuguese,” “The Portuguese People are the African People,” and “Race does not count… Together We Will Win.”[39]
Propaganda about the solidarity of Portugal with her colonies clearly rang hollow in the face of decades of centripetal imperialism and unregulated abuse of workers. On the eve of the revolution in Angola, the PIDE had acknowledged in their report that the Angola cotton industry, colluding with local authorities, committed constant labor abuses (wage cuts, inhumane conditions, undermining collective action, etc). The pattern was the same in Guinea. In August of 1959, Portuguese security forces killed roughly thirty striking port workers.[40] Talk of lusotropicalism, however popular on the distant mainland, was farcical to citizens of the colonies, who witnessed the vast racial disparity, suffered the greed of white settlers and capitalists, and endured segregation.[41] In Mozambique, blacks would sit in the back of the buses. Some bathrooms were divided into rooms for “Men” (whites) and “Servants” (blacks).[42]
When violence broke out, the results were even more chilling than the secret police raids against strikers on the mainland. The attitude of whites was as frantically reactionary as that of blacks was indignantly revolutionary: “When war broke out in Angola, and once news began to filter to Mozambique, panic quickly set in. According to one official, whites saw in blacks, whom they never bothered to befriend, a potential enemy. Any small sign of dissent was seen as a harbinger of revolt.” Similar to the attitude of the right-wing death squads in Latin America, indiscriminate violence was used to terrorize blacks from the mere thought of revolt.[43] A military officer in Luanda reported of civilian militias of white settlers who “hunt[ed] blacks as one might hunt rabbits.” The result was a vicious cycle of violence. The UPA (National Liberation Front of Angola) guerillas massacred white civilians in retaliation.[44]
The racial and economic harmony of lusotropical corporatist Portugal was rapidly revealed as a sham as south Africa was rocked by a wave of anti-colonial revolt. The relation between Capital and racial domination deserves attention: a letter dated 2 May 1961 urged Salazar to send troops to Angola, which he did. When they arrived, white settlers urged the military to act quickly so they could still recoup some of their coffee harvest. Continuing to drown out the “cry of pain,” of which Bishop Gomes warned, Salazar was unflinching in his colonial policy, even while the postwar liberal West was willing to concede colonialism and explicit racism in order to save capitalism.[45] The Church was also a significant source of criticism. The Bishop of Beira began criticizing the PIDE for arresting African priests and members of Catholic Action in the early ‘60s and by the middle of the decade was calling for the decolonization of Mozambique. By the end of the decade, Fr. Alves in Lisbon was preaching and publishing against the regime, especially on the topic of colonialism.[46] Salazar’s rage against St. Pope Paul VI’s Bombay Conference should be considered in light of the latter’s 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, indicative of the Church’s growing intolerance for reactionary regimes:[47] “There are other obstacles to the creation of a more just social order and to the development of world solidarity: nationalism and racism… Haughty pride in one's own nation disunites nations and poses obstacles to their true welfare.”[48]
Salazar, in these final years of power, went all-in. The new face of Western liberalism was, in his mind, merely a fad. The West would need to return to its racial and authoritarian roots to prevent the victory of the USSR. A 1961 letter from the Prime Minister sheds light on his mentality: “Since Europe appears to have lost its sense of mission, and the United States would only understand it with difficulty, we are under the dominion of a wave of subversion raised by afro-asians which is competently exploited by international communism for its own ends…”[49]
It was Salazar himself who met with Ian Smith, founder of white nationalist Rhodesia, which declared independence from Great Britain in 1965. The small white minority in the country attempted to maintain the colonial status quo in the midst of revolution across southern Africa. Salazar encouraged the separation from Britain (who could not be trusted after failing to support him in Goa) and offered full support to Smith. Mozambique, which landlocks Rhodesia’s eastern border, was an essential ally.[50]
The balanced budget sheets which propelled Salazar to power would lose their figure in the twilight years of the New State. Between 1961 to 1974, 22% of the State’s total expenditure was required to hold together the convulsing colonial empire. Portugal began to borrow from the World Bank and Western financiers.[51] In the final years, there was mass emigration of rural Portuguese to escape persistent poverty. Decades of corporatism had left the nation dominated by “a small number of Industrialists, who taken together constituted the so-called ‘forty families’, and who were depicted by the opposition as the country’s real leadership. The New State, in its rush for growth, had encouraged an enormous concentration of wealth and power in a few hands, to the detriment of entire regions of the country.”[52]
Salazar suffered a stroke which removed him from office in 1968. He died two years later, never having been formally informed that he was deposed. Marcelo Caetano tended to the vast discontent of the New State for six years when, in 1974, the Carnation Revolution (named after the flowers placed in the muzzles of guns) ended the New State with barely a shot. Almost immediately, colonialism ended, democracy was instituted, and postwar liberalism rooted itself in Portugal.
Some stories have been elided for the sake of brevity. Namely, the 1958 election, the Santa Maria hijacking, and various corruption scandals. Briefly, General Humberto Delgado’s attempt to run in the 1958 Portuguese election required Salazar, who did not suspect such a successful opposition candidate, to rig the election to maintain his figurehead, President Américo Tomás. Delgado was exiled and in 1965 was murdered by the PIDE while in Spain. The Santa Maria hijacking was a ploy by Henrique Galvão to bring international attention to the Iberian regimes and rally the opposition. After a long standoff, Galvão and his accomplices traded the ship and its hostages for asylum in Brazil. Finally, while Salazar lived the frugal life he demanded from the poor of his country, his ministers were increasingly caught in state-business corruption scandals, in addition to a sex ring in 1962.
Thus we conclude our survey of corporatist Portugal.[53] The more reasonable socialists are careful to distance their program from that of Communist Russia. Fellow integralists would be wise to recognize the parallel in Corporatist Portugal. In Salazar, who fell prey to all the perils of the modern state and market, we are provided a prime example of the veneer of Catholic Social Teaching without the reality of solidarity and subsidiarity.
Conclusion
If ‘integration from within’ is really possible, then what went wrong in Portugal? Salazar had everything in his favor: a sizable and faithful Catholic population, full control of a vast technocratic State; the tacit approval of the Church (even if this relationship became strained as time went on); even a divine mandate conferred on Salazar by Fr Mateo, sustained by Cardinal-Patriarch Cerejeira, and interpreted from Our Lady of Fatima. Meanwhile, his regime was spared the grueling civil war of neighboring Spain and the Second World War which ravaged the rest of the Continent, all while remaining in the relatively good graces of the United States.
Salazar should not be dismissed as a mere black sheep amid the prewar fascists. The soil of history was tilled and the seed of the encyclicals was sown in perfect concert. How can we reconcile the outpouring grace of God, and His love of righteousness, with this failure to bear fruit?
Tragically, we must locate this failure in the sins of Salazar, who tried to serve two masters. In all the fundamental conflicts of modernity—Capital and labor, freedom and order, pluralism and nationalism—he drank, but not deeply, of the Church’s wisdom, and a little learning is a dangerous thing. Alongside Her teaching, he accepted the necessity of the modern Market and produced a toothless corporatism. While it gave nominal representation to many, it provided genuine political power to none. Capital retained its ownership, labor lost its independent organization, and the Corporative Chamber without the distributive mandate proved entirely insufficient to cast down the tyranny of money.
There is a lesson for any would-be Catholic politics here: Just as we must learn to be unimpressed with the propagandists of the “national interest,” we should be wary of confessionalism without true integralism. What good is “defeating secularism” if the usury and defrauding of capitalism persists? The Fifteenth Psalm tells us that the righteous man is not only he “who holds the godless in disdain, but honors those who fear the Lord,” but also “he who keeps his pledge, come what may; who takes no interest on a loan and accepts no bribes against the innocent. Such a man will stand firm for ever.” The concessions to the Church can serve as such a bribe to overlook oppression of the innocent and the poor. They do not serve “the Father’s will” as Our Lord explains in the Parable of the Two Sons (Matthew 21:28–32).
Salazar likewise accepted the apparent necessity of the modern State, with all its totalizing jurisdiction and violent apparatus. The halls of power were sprinkled with Holy Water, but Pharaoh’s chariots were never drowned in the transforming waters of Baptism. The Church’s conceded privileges bolstered the regime, but the regime never let the Kingdom break in, lest it lose its grip on power.
Most damningly of all, Portugal’s chosen one maintained a thoroughly modern Empire, with its implicit racism and global exploitation. Here we should consider how poorly Salazar reacted to the Second Vatican Council and the guidance of St. Pope Paul VI. The Council, in its declaration on the Church in the modern world, marks not only an outpouring of Her global solicitude, but a new recognition of “the signs of the times” for “[t]oday, the human race is involved in a new stage of history” (Gaudium et Spes § 4). No longer does She grasp to what remains of Christendom against the surging revolts of Protestantism, Liberalism, and Marxism; Christendom is no longer, and we seek again, as the Church Fathers, to build a new society in the shell of the old. We are not living in the Middle Ages, in need of tireless spiritual reform; we are living in modernity, the age of alienation, acceleration, and idolatry, in need of transcendent revolution. These are “evil days” like none other, and we must acknowledge the reality, walking “as wise, not as unwise,” if we are to “redeem the times” (Ephesians 5:15–16).
The rhetoric of Portugal’s New State can be enormously attractive, especially to integralists. In the face of so much sin crying out to Heaven, anything to drown out the noise would be consoling. The temptation to despair of Catholic politics and the emaciated imagination of mainstream intellectuals in the Church, primes us to be either naive or compromising. First comes the temptation to naively wield modern instruments of power in God’s Name; for what good is a pagan sword for breaking ground, if it is not first beaten and reforged into a ploughshare? Then, when one has tasted power, riches, and glory, comes the temptation to compromise, for how many men have sold their soul for worldly things? All these will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me. An integralist loyal to the Lord must follow His example: there is simply no shortcut to the politics of virtue and the common good. This is not a dismissal of the possibility of a Catholic social order (indeed, how else are we to describe King Louis’s France?), but to set the bar as high as it ought to be.
We have so much work to do. Yet if we obey the First Commandment, abandoning all our idolatries,
I believe I shall see the LORD’s goodness
in the land of the living.
Hope in him, hold firm and take heart.
Hope in the Lord! (Psalm 27:13–14)
Sean Domencic is contributing author for New Polity and the former editor of Tradistae. He and his wife, Monica, are involved in the Catholic Worker Movement and raising their children in Lancaster, PA. He prefers to write for free but would appreciate your support through prayer and alms. Donations can be made at patreon.com/tradistae
[2] Consider this birthday address to Salazar (AOS CP 47, letter, 29 April 1944, Cardinal-Patriarch Manuel Cerejeira to Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, quoted on page 613 in Meneses): “My Mass was said for you, with praise given to God for the exceptional gifts he bestowed on you, for the historical missions He assigned to you and for all the good you have carried out…” and likewise, on 26 May 1945: “The fact that our peace was a favor from Heaven predicted since the start of the war, does not diminish your merit. On the contrary, it has made you a chosen one, almost God’s anointed. It was you, among all Portuguese, that he chose to carry out the miracle. God gave you the prudence, power and the genius with which to accomplish one of the greatest tasks in all our history. You know well that God accomplishes the plans of his Providence through the men he chooses. And you were the chosen one! He has been preparing you for so long, and with such care!” (my emphasis).
[3] “They [the promises secured by Salazar] were, briefly, that each government department live within the budget allotted to it by the Ministry of Finance; that all measures liable to affect the State’s revenue or expenses first be discussed with the Ministry of Finance; that the Ministry of Finance have power to veto any proposed increases in expenditure; and that the cooperation of all government departments be given to the Ministry of Finance for the purposes of reducing expenditure and collecting revenue.” Meneses, Salazar, 47.
[4] Ibid., 33. Consider further the economic reasoning of Salazar. He “was also in favor of finding an alternative to progressive income tax, which hurt what he called the ‘best contributors’ disproportionately” (Meneses 36). Though by no means an advocate of the free market, he, like other 20th century “corporatists,” shared a logic common to all capitalists: “growth,” as defined by the constant increase of Capital-producing infrastructure (whether State or privately owned) is the lifeblood of the State, and therefore must precede all other endeavours. See also Laborem Exercens § 14, Centesimus Annus § 35, and Laudato Si § 109, on the problem of “State capitalism” and the “technocratic paradigm” of accepting the capitalist telos: market growth.
[5] José Barreto, “As primeiras entrevistas de Salazar como chefe do governo.” Malomil. 11 May 2018. Accessed 7 June 2019. https://malomil.blogspot.com/2018/05/as-primeiras-entrevistas-de-salazar.html. The quotations are from two interviews of Salazar by Armando Boaventura by the Diário de Notícias on 12 July and 25 July, 1932. King Manuel II died on 2 July. For the sake of continuity, the monarchy was presented as the precursor to the Estado Novo (“not by chance but by the same comprehension of the national political needs, the Dictatorship has justly taken the same position [as the king]”), but not as a necessity. The remains, coming from England where the king had died in exile, were cordially buried; the monarchists (the self-identified “integralists” of the day) were placated. Translations by Rike E.
[6] Meneses, Salazar, 53.
[7] Ibid., 54.
[8] Ibid., 55–56.
[9] Ibid., 55.
[10] Ibid., 48. The budget was cut by 140,000 contos which equals £1,292,700 in 1928 which equals $118,802,891 in 2019. Cf https://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/currency.htm
[11] AOS CO PC 3D, anonymous letter to Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, June 1928, quoted in Meneses, Salazar, 59, FN 116.
[12] The earlier seeds of this concept can be found throughout Rerum Novarum, most especially in sections 19 and 48.
[13] Meneses, Salazar, 90.
[14] Michael Derrick, Portugal of Salazar (New York, Campion, 1939), 101.
[15] Ibid., 63. “The influence is so considerable that, purely as a matter of history, parallel phrases will be cited from the two documents.”
[16] Ibid., 63. “The influence is so considerable that, purely as a matter of history, parallel phrases will be cited from the two documents.”
[17] Da Constituição Do Estado Novo Português, 1933, translated by Rike E. (@rikeyboi). A Spanish translation of the Constitution can be accessed online at http://fama2.us.es/fde/ocr/2006/constitucionPortuguesa.pdf. Translator’s note: the literal translation of raça is “race”, but it has been rendered here as “people” because the sociological implications outweigh the biological.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Meneses, Salazar, 89. Contrast with Rerum Novarum § 39.
[20] Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum § 37.
[21] António Costa Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship and European Fascism: Problems of Interpretation, (New York, Columbia, 1995), 185–186.
[22] Meneses, Salazar, 117–118.
[23] Ibid., 129.
[24] Consider MacIntyre: “the importance of the good of public security, although it is a good served by this admirable devotion, and although it is a good without which none of us in our various local communities could achieve our common goods, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that the shared public goods of the modern nation-state are not the common goods of a genuine nation-wide community and, when the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both.” Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre, pg 132. William T Cavanaugh’s famous “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good” provides a similar argument at greater length.
[25] Ibid., 323.
[26] Ibid., 325.
[27] D.L. Raby, Fascism and Resistance in Portugal: Communists, Liberals, and Military Dissidents in the Opposition to Salazar, 1941–1974 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), 66.
[28] Meneses, Salazar, 320.
[29] Ibid., 326, cf fn 148.
[30] Costa Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship, 203.
[31] “Antonio Salazar: Another Catholic Statesman, Vilified by Christophobic Revisionists,” Remnant (Forest Lake, MN), 14 June 2017. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/3237-antonio-salazar-a-catholic-statesmen-vilified-by-christophobic-revisionists. The sources listed for the article are as follows, verbatim: “britannica.com, wikipedia.org, romancatholicheroes.blogspot.com, nytimes.com.”
[32] Meneses, Salazar, 439.
[33] Dom António Ferreira Gomes, “Pró-Memória” (also known as “Carta a Salazar”), 13 July 1958, 6. Accessed 13 March 2019. http://www.fspes.pt/PaginadaNet/CartaaSalazar.pdf. Translated by Rike E.
[34] Ibid., 13. Translated by Rike E.
[35] Meneses, Salazar, 450.
[36] Meneses, Salazar, 98.
[37] Pedro Lains, Os progressos do atraso: Uma nova história económica de Portugal (Lisbon, Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005), 213, quoted in Meneses 98.
[38] Costa Pinto, Salazar’s Dictatorship, 197.
[39] Drew A. Thompson, “Color Lines According to the Photographer Ricardo Rangel,” Africana Studia no. 25 (2015): 121.
[40] Meneses, Salazar, 461.
[41] Ibid., 517.
[42] Drew A. Thompson, “Color Lines According to the Photographer Ricardo Rangel,” Africana Studia no. 25 (2015): 121, 129.
[43] Meneses, Salazar, 515.
[44] Ibid., 466.
[45] Ibid., 479.
[46] Ibid., 567–568.
[47] Ibid., 575.
[48] St. Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio § 62.
[49] AOS COE 2, letter, Lisbon, 31 July 1961, letter, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar to Francisco Franco Bahamonde quoted in Meneses 520.
[50] Sue Onslow, “Resistance to the ‘Winds of Change’: The Emergence of an ‘unholy alliance’ between Southern Rhodesia, Portugal, and South Africa, 1964–65,” in The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization, ed. L. Butler and Sarah Stockwell (London, Macmillan, 2013), 220–221.
[51] Meneses, Salazar, 555.
[52] Meneses, Salazar, 560.
[53] Meneses, Salazar, 588.