La censura sobre la prensa católica obrera en Portugal durante el Estado Novo

Abstract

This paper studies the incidence of press censorship on working-class Catholic media in Portugal during the Estado Novo. It starts from three premises: 1) censorship was a political weapon in the hands of Salazar's dictatorship; 2) the Church provided one of the bases for sustaining the regime from a position of a theoretical separation of powers; and 3) the Church tried to Christianise Salazarist corporatism from within. From here we pretend to analyse both the early legitimising connections and the later factors of discord and dissidence of the Catholic workers' press with the Salazarist regime. To achieve this goal, we use archival sources (both from the Direcção dos Serviços de Censura, in the Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, and from the Fundo D. Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira of the Arquivo Histórico do Patriarcado de Lisboa) and newspapers and magazines (O Trabalhador y Juventude Operaria, kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal). Its analysis is particularly relevant because Portugal experienced, from the 1930s, an early and specialized model of Catholic Action, more complete than the Belgian one, and that was much influenced by the Portuguese model, but which was also assigned to Spain a decade later. In short, the aim of this paper is to examine to what extent the censorship shaped the workers' newspapers in a country of Catholic roots before and during the period of the airs and graces of the Second Vatican Council when alternative models of Catholicism entered into conflict.