How Portugal Stayed Catholic: Fatima, Empire and the Inquisition

Roman Catholicism is Portugal's dominant religion by a wide margin: roughly eight in ten residents identified as Catholic in the 2021 census. Regular practice runs far behind identity, with well under a fifth of the population at Mass in a typical week, which makes Portugal a country that is culturally Catholic more than it is devout.

Catholic on paper, selective in the pew

Portugal's census asks about religion of residents aged fifteen and over, and the 2021 round returned a figure near 80 percent Catholic, with about 14 percent declaring no religion and small shares for other Christian denominations and non-Christian faiths. Set that against the 2011 census, which returned a similar Catholic share but a much smaller unaffiliated group, and the shape of the change becomes clear: the Catholic column is holding roughly steady while the non-religious column grows, mostly among younger people and mostly in and around Lisbon and Setubal.

Geography still divides the country. The rural north around Braga and Viana do Castelo remains among the most observant regions in Iberia, while the Alentejo, with its history of large estates, landless labourers and anticlerical politics, has been the least churchgoing part of Portugal for over a century. Baptisms and funerals remain near-universal social rituals, but church weddings have fallen to a minority of all marriages inside a single generation.

Cova da Iria: how a field became a world shrine

In 1917 three shepherd children near the village of Fatima reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary on the thirteenth day of six consecutive months, from May to October. On the final date a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands gathered in the rain at the Cova da Iria and many reported seeing the sun spin and plunge. Two of the children, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, died within two years in the influenza pandemic and were canonised at the sanctuary on the 2017 centenary; their cousin Lucia dos Santos became a Carmelite nun in Coimbra and lived until 2005.

What grew on the spot is now among the largest Marian pilgrimage complexes on earth. The Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary was completed in the 1950s at the head of an esplanade roughly twice the area of St Peter's Square, and a second, low modern basilica seating several thousand opened in 2007 to absorb the crowds. Several million visitors come annually, with the vigils of 12 to 13 May and 12 to 13 October drawing the largest numbers. In the days before, Portuguese roads fill with pilgrims in reflective vests walking from Porto, Lisbon or the Algarve, and some cross the last stretch on their knees along a purpose-built track. Successive popes have visited, and the so-called third secret was published by the Vatican in 2000.

Faith as cargo: the Padroado and the Age of Discovery

Portugal did more than practise Catholicism; it exported it as state policy. A series of fifteenth-century papal grants created the Padroado, a patronage arrangement under which the Portuguese crown gained the right to nominate bishops and the obligation to build churches and fund missions across the territories it claimed. Church and caravel travelled together, from Brazil to Goa, Malacca, Macau and Japan.

The Jesuit Francis Xavier reached Goa in 1542 and Japan in 1549; his remains lie in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa and are displayed to pilgrims only once a decade. The results are still legible on a religion map of the world: Brazil is the largest Catholic country there is, East Timor is overwhelmingly Catholic, and Catholic communities persist in Goa, Macau, Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique with Portuguese saints' names. As Portuguese power faded, the Padroado became a liability, producing jurisdictional quarrels with Rome and rival missionary structures in India that were not fully wound up until the middle of the twentieth century.

The Inquisition, the conversos, and a passport three centuries late

The darker half of that story begins in 1492, when tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain crossed into Portugal. In 1496 and 1497 King Manuel I ordered their expulsion and then, rather than lose a skilled population, had them forcibly baptised instead, creating a large class of New Christians whose sincerity was permanently suspect. A mob killed thousands of them in Lisbon in 1506. The Portuguese Inquisition was established in 1536 and operated until 1821, prosecuting Judaising above all else, and driving a Sephardic diaspora that carried Portuguese surnames to Amsterdam, Salonica, Istanbul and Recife.

Belmonte, the community that never left

In the hill town of Belmonte in Beira Baixa, a community of descendants kept a hidden Jewish practice alive for centuries: Friday-night rites conducted by women, marriage within a closed circle, outward Catholic conformity. Their existence became widely known in the twentieth century, and from the 1970s members formally returned to normative Judaism. A synagogue opened in Belmonte in 1996, and the town now has a Jewish museum.

Restitution by nationality

In 2013 Portugal amended its nationality law to allow descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from the country to claim Portuguese citizenship, with applications opening in 2015 and Sephardic ancestry certified by the Jewish communities of Lisbon and Porto. Tens of thousands of people naturalised under it, many from Israel, Turkey and Latin America, before the criteria were tightened in 2022 to require a more substantial demonstrated connection to Portugal.

Stone that shows off: the Manueline church

Portugal's signature religious architecture is Manueline, a late-Gothic style that decorates buildings with the equipment and imagery of seafaring. The Jeronimos Monastery at Belem, begun in 1501 and funded in part by a levy on the spice trade, stands where Vasco da Gama's crew kept vigil before sailing in 1497; its cloister crawls with carved ropes, corals, armillary spheres and the cross of the Order of Christ. The chapter-house window at the Convent of Christ in Tomar, a Templar foundation later handed to the Order of Christ, is the most extravagant single example anywhere.

Older layers survive alongside it. Batalha Monastery was built to fulfil a vow made before the 1385 victory at Aljubarrota, and its Unfinished Chapels have stood open to the sky for five hundred years. Alcobaca offers the opposite mood, a vast bare Cistercian church holding the facing tombs of Pedro and Ines.

Saints, sardines and street altars

Popular religion in Portugal peaks in June with the festas dos santos populares. Lisbon celebrates Santo Antonio on 12 and 13 June with grilled sardines, decorated street altars, all-night neighbourhood parades down the Avenida da Liberdade, and a batch of couples married together at the cathedral. Porto answers with Sao Joao on 23 and 24 June, where strangers hit each other on the head with plastic hammers. Braga stages one of Iberia's oldest Holy Week processions, beneath the Baroque zigzag staircase of Bom Jesus do Monte. In the Azores, the Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres procession fills Ponta Delgada each spring, and Holy Ghost brotherhoods maintain small crowned chapels called imperios on every island and in Azorean communities in New England and California.

Who else prays in Portugal now

The 1911 Law of Separation stripped the church of property under the anticlerical First Republic; the 1940 Concordat restored much of its position; the 1976 constitution established a non-confessional state, and a Religious Freedom Law in 2001 put minority faiths on a firmer legal footing. Portugal's Muslim community, numbering in the tens of thousands, grew largely from Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau after decolonisation in 1974 and 1975, joined more recently by South Asian workers; the Lisbon Central Mosque opened in 1985. Hindu and Ismaili communities arrived by the same Mozambican route and built a Radha Krishna temple and an Ismaili Centre in Lisbon in the late 1990s. Brazilian-founded Pentecostal churches have expanded fastest of all, often taking over former cinemas in working-class suburbs.