Um político católico no tempo das Luzes: a religião em Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo

This text addresses the issue of religious identification of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo. As one of the most referenced Portuguese statesmen of the eighteenth century, the first Count of Oeiras and Marquis of Pombal, he played a very important role in the reforms carried out during King José’s reign. It is commonly argued that it was the political ideology of Carvalho e Melo that made his ecclesiastical policy, but in this work, inserting Pombal into the Catholic Enlightenment current, we propose that it was his cultural and religious sensibility that influenced the Pombaline reforms in general and ecclesiastical reforms in particular.