Pius XII, the Salazar Regime, and the Colonial Question

The opening of the archives of Pius XII shed new light on several fundamental issues regarding an epoch of social transition of decisive significance for European society. One such issue was the challenge posed by the processes of African national independence, by the transformation of the missionary experience, by the decline of colonial Europe and the crisis of its cultural models based largely on the link between Christian civilisation and the primacy of the West, considered inseparable until then. The present contribution seeks to take into consideration the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the decolonisation process within an ideological/political framework of the Portuguese Estado novo and the cultural and theological context of the revision of missionary models, by reconstructing the complex interweave of the diplomatic, political, and cultural dynamics. The Portuguese case is useful to elucidate the ambiguities and contradictions of Roman Catholicism regarding the topic of colonialization and demonstrate the inadequacy of unilinear historiographical interpretations. By analysing the combination of conflicting belief conceptions (Catholic national/colonial conservatism versus new ecclesiological and missionary paradigms), this contribution traces the position of the Church with respect to the imperialist ideology of the Estado Novo, where Salazar and Pius XII signed the Missionary Agreement in 1940, an institutional cooperative pact in Africa that succeeded in consolidating for a long time the repressive Portuguese regime in the colonies as well as in the mother country. Nonetheless, the alliance between the ecclesiastical hierarchies and the State, which was helping guarantee the stability of the dictatorship, didn’t fail to arouse testimonies of religious dissent which contributed to questioning the legitimacy of the Romano-centric missionary model.