D. António de Castro Meireles

: subsídios para a compreensão da sua acção pastoral no contexto da I República

Abstract

Following the etymology of the word “University”, which in its linguistic root means a better understanding of the Universe, I have to point out, that in my professional career, the figure of António Augusto de Castro Meireles was often taken as a model, feeling however the need of a scientific contribution that could reveal what is still unknown about his vast work, during the First Republic. In the historical Period in which Meireles operated his Ecclesiastic ministry many realities crisscrossed his action: the laicity of the State, the Church’s resistance to loss of its rights, the visibility of the Church in the political sphere and its presence in the media, the defence of the christian values in the private school, the democratic role of the Church in the public sphere. In Meireles we will see the difficulty of finding a frontier between the political and the ecclesiastic. We could say that these touching realities bring up the same actual question: how far can the church intervene in the public sphere? Meireles, in the research develloped in this work, comes out as a paradigmatic key study in the art of tainting the social sphere with the hues of Christyanity, an expert in comunication inherited from Leon XIII, called ralliement.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rogério Santos (Supervisor)