I’m from a Portuguese family, and have been back to the Acores a number of times to visit family, etc… Even when I was very very young I remember going into the local church to look around and seeing how much gold was wasted on its interior while the village around it was still very much in a semi-poverty state. It was mind-blowing that that ever seemed “okay”.
When my folks were growing up (dad was born in 49, mom in 52) there were people on the island that didn’t have access to indoor plumbing, and yet every village’s local church was laced in gold.
Yeah, it was completely fucked up during the Fascist times: whilst the majority of people were dirt poor (Portugal even receive Food Aid back then) the Church was totally in bed with the Fascists, with priests using their position to spew pro-Fascist propaganda and controlling the poor, profiting massively from it, the very opposite of the supposed teachings of Christ about helping the poor.
Fortunately, after the Revolution in 74 that overthrew Fascism, the one smart thing done in this country was to massively invest in Education for all, so Generation X and younger pretty much all have a complete high-school education with a large percentage of them having degrees (to the point that if you look at the tables of average education of countries in Europe, Portugal has this strange characteristic of having lots of people with only primary education or less, lots of people with tertiary education and just a small number of people with only up to secondary education - reflecting the older generations having been severely under-educated followed by a complete reversal for the younger generations many of not most of whom had the chance for free or near free to get University and Technical Education and took it).
I believe it was the mix of remembering what the Church did back in Fascist days (I too heard the stories from my parents) and the massive massive improvement in education levels for the younger generations, that are behind the massive drop in practicing Catholics (or any other religions) in this country in the last 40 years or so.
Curiously, of late there has been a small uptick in religiosity due to immigration since it’s mostly from Brasil, a country which doesn’t have the same level of access to Education as Portugal and whose exit from Fascism is more recent (and was even sliding back recently with Bolsonaro, something that did not happen in Portugal).
That said you can see the same fall in Religious attendance as Education levels went up in other countries in Europe who didn’t start quite as poor and with quite such a disgustingly behaving Church as Portugal.
I’m from a Portuguese family, and have been back to the Acores a number of times to visit family, etc… Even when I was very very young I remember going into the local church to look around and seeing how much gold was wasted on its interior while the village around it was still very much in a semi-poverty state. It was mind-blowing that that ever seemed “okay”.
When my folks were growing up (dad was born in 49, mom in 52) there were people on the island that didn’t have access to indoor plumbing, and yet every village’s local church was laced in gold.
Shameful.
Yeah, it was completely fucked up during the Fascist times: whilst the majority of people were dirt poor (Portugal even receive Food Aid back then) the Church was totally in bed with the Fascists, with priests using their position to spew pro-Fascist propaganda and controlling the poor, profiting massively from it, the very opposite of the supposed teachings of Christ about helping the poor.
Fortunately, after the Revolution in 74 that overthrew Fascism, the one smart thing done in this country was to massively invest in Education for all, so Generation X and younger pretty much all have a complete high-school education with a large percentage of them having degrees (to the point that if you look at the tables of average education of countries in Europe, Portugal has this strange characteristic of having lots of people with only primary education or less, lots of people with tertiary education and just a small number of people with only up to secondary education - reflecting the older generations having been severely under-educated followed by a complete reversal for the younger generations many of not most of whom had the chance for free or near free to get University and Technical Education and took it).
I believe it was the mix of remembering what the Church did back in Fascist days (I too heard the stories from my parents) and the massive massive improvement in education levels for the younger generations, that are behind the massive drop in practicing Catholics (or any other religions) in this country in the last 40 years or so.
Curiously, of late there has been a small uptick in religiosity due to immigration since it’s mostly from Brasil, a country which doesn’t have the same level of access to Education as Portugal and whose exit from Fascism is more recent (and was even sliding back recently with Bolsonaro, something that did not happen in Portugal).
That said you can see the same fall in Religious attendance as Education levels went up in other countries in Europe who didn’t start quite as poor and with quite such a disgustingly behaving Church as Portugal.