The origins of the Christian Democracy in Portugal and salazarism (II)

Abstract

The development of capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century in Portugal, with the unavoidable aggravation of social conflicts, led to the gradual establishment, among the Catholics, of the priority of the «social question» as to the «religious question». The most dreadful enemy of the ecclesiastical power was less and less the bourgeois liberalism and its secularizing rationalism, giving room to the socialism and the working-class movement that were placing and developing themselves in Portugal. The «Catholic party», that had been the axis around which almost all the theoretic and organizative polemics had been produced among Catholics, becomes the «Christian democratic action» or the «Catholic social action», with which they want to face the rising «social question», avoiding a socialist answer to it, as well as earlier they had tried to fight the masonic-liberal answer to the «religious question». Thus the rising of a Catholic social movement, after the last years of the nineteenth century, at the same time with the new ecclesiastical policy of rallying with the liberal governments established, reflects the reaction to a new threat for both and to a new common enemy: socialism, as a programme of ideas, and the Portuguese working-class movement, as its organizative achievement. The Christian democracy was therefore born as an answer to the socialist democracy, in competitive and antagonic terms. Democracy, that earlier had been attacked, as a political creation of liberalism, begins to be shaped, conditioned and used in order to fight socialism. Nevertheless from this instrumental vision of democracy one will pass, in the course of time, to the conceptualization of a substantial alternative: the Christian democracy will gradually elaborate a content of its own, with a strongly corporatist stamp. Thus, at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, a Catholic corporatism, historical and ideological ground in the making of Salazarism, will appear in Portugal.