p. 13 | Church and State in Portugal

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 27, 1910

Church and State in Portugal

THE Catholic press is proclaiming the revolution in Portugal to be a merely antireligious movement. Doubtless the antireligious sentiment is strong, and many may be ready to denounce all Christian teaching. But it is the natural result of the centuries of Catholic instruction and repression of the truth. The Jesuits educated the generation of Frenchmen who declared for atheism in the madness of the French Revolution. And the Church of Rome has had all but unlimited power over education in Portugal. Wherever Rome rules, it ruins. Now the Portuguese mean to try another way; and because the throne was allied in their minds with ecclesiastical power, it had to go also. A press despatch says:—

By a decree issued by the provisional government, the royal house of Braganza, of which King Manuel was the titular head, is forever banished from the republic of Portugal. All orders of nobility are abolished, and all titles are revoked. The government also decreed that all state functions heretofore handled by the church were to be taken out of the hands of the representatives of Rome, and to be ministered in future by members of the government. The church, under the decree, is to have no voice in the management of the state nor in any of its co-ordinate branches. Especially is the school system removed from the church's domination.