Doc » 'High officials of the State' and 'Princes of the Church': the episcopate in the Portuguese constitutional monarchy (1848-1910)

It corresponds to Paulo Alexandre Alves' PhD project in History at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University of Lisbon (NOVA-FCSH). It was co-supervised by Prof. Sérgio Ribeiro Pinto at the Center for the Study of Religious History (UCP-CEHR).

In the period between the first portuguese liberal revolution (1820) and the law of Separation of Church and State (1911), the catholic bishops were under a double binding: the integration on the States’ organizational chart and the submission towards Rome. The first one gave them the status of high officials, eventually with access to the upper house of the parliament, and the second one that of agents of Catholic internationalism, having the Pope as its highest figure. Frequently accused, both by catholics and non-catholics (each one from its own standpoint) of not being able to cope with the nature of their functions, they were also pictured as being deunited and unable to look beyond the portion of land assigned to them. This thesis analyzes some of the coordinates of this double binding, whilst developing a prosopographic study on the set of individuals who held a diocesis in mainland Portugal or its adjacent islands during the aforementioned period. It establishes profiles capable of accessing such position as well as some global tendencies. It also aproaches the filling of the episcopal geography, its maladjustments and conflicts, both in terms of individual and territories. In this second subject it focuses on the lenghty reorganization proccess of the diocesis, which was concluded in 1882. It defines some of the vectors that mark a transition on the episcopal function in two complementary ways: from a solipsist view to a group view; from the primate of the binding to the States’ organizational chart to the primacy of the binding towards Rome.