Doc » 'Vendaval de Utopias'. From social Catholicism to political commitment in Portugal (1965-1976). The Catholics of the Revolution and the Portuguese Communist Party

This corresponds to Edgar Silva's doctoral project under the PIUDHist - Interuniversity Doctoral Programme in History: change and continuity in a global world.

This study takes as its chronological arc the year 1965, the date on which the Second Vatican Council concluded itself. This was a remarkable milestone that expressed the renewed will of the Catholic Church, but also a symbolic reference of aggiornamento processes that crossed different societies, with dynamics of exciting hope and multi-faceted commitments to the creation of a different society. The other end of this temporal arc is 1976, when, after the April Revolution, in Portugal, the construction of a democratic model is confirmed and projected in history, after the approval of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, on April 2, 1976. In the Estado Novo, various sectors of Portuguese society mobilized, not only to overthrow the Salazar and Caetano regime but also through the imagination of an alternative society, radically different in its forms of organization, production, and development, with future horizons regarding socialism. In that context, in historiographical research, we will focus on the role of social movements, on what they aspired to transform society, on their ideals and obstacles, on the way they flowed and happened through direct action, in a collective intervention, in the search for meaning, questioning structures and proposing changes, triggering changes in the forms of organization of society. Among the social movements, we prioritized research on the peace movement, the labor and trade union movement, the movement in defense of political prisoners. In them, we identified disagreements between the Portuguese Communist Party, the Catholics, and the Church, as well as confluences and records of articulations between communists and Catholics. Amid these convergences on these social movements, the «25th of April» was also incubated. In these trajectories, the plurality of experiences of the «revolutionary Catholics» will be contextualized. Those Catholics who were motivated by an idea of «revolution» by the eschatological sense inherent to Marxism or impelled by the duty of unavoidable action to transform history, due to their edification of justice, decided to make a revolutionary option.