Portugal

Located at the westernmost point of southern Europe, Portugal has a long history of cultural and religious pluralism. When King Afonso Henriques proclaimed independence from Castille in the 12th century, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism already coexisted within Portuguese territory. However, this threefold religious society was not to last. In the following centuries, Muslim communities were gradually absorbed into Christianity or fled to North Africa. The Jewish population grew in size and political and economical status until the last decade of the 15th century, when it was confronted with the choice between forced conversion to Catholicism or expulsion. By 1496, as in Spain 4 years earlier, the policy had been fully implemented. The establishment of the Inquisition in 1536 and the regularization of relationships between the Portuguese Crown and the Vatican ensured that Portugal remained a strictly Catholic country for nearly 400 years.

The liberal revolution of 1820 inaugurated the establishment of several Protestant denominations in Portugal. In 1926, however, a military coup initiated a 48-year dictatorship that reestablished a privileged relationship between the state and the Catholic Church, one that was openly prejudicial toward minority religions, forcing some of them, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Kardecian Spiritualism, to go underground.

The democratic revolution of 1974 that led to the independence of most Portuguese colonies brought in the right of religious association and freedom of religious choice and initiated a series of migratory flows that would dramatically change the country's religious landscape. The end of the Portuguese overseas empire led to the influx of more than 500,000 Portuguese from the former colonies during the 1970s. In terms of religious impact, this led to the foundation of the first Muslim community in Portuguese territory since the late Middle Ages. Mainly composed of former residents of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, this [Page 1010]community grew with subsequent waves of immigration from Portuguese-speaking African countries. Today, there are an estimated 50,000 Muslims in Portugal with 35 places of worship. The late 1980s saw the implantation of Brazilian (and Brazilian-inspired) neo-Pentecostal churches. Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, a Brazilian church that targeted Portugal at the early stage of its transnational expansion, and Igreja Maná, founded by an ex-Portuguese emigrant in South Africa, entered Portuguese society with an openly proselyte approach and were received with hostility from virtually every quadrant, especially from the media. Ten years later, a second mass influx of immigrants led to a very different mutation in the Portuguese religious structure. From the late 1990s onward, Portugal has received hundreds of thousands of immigrants, totaling 400,000 by 2002. The most significant qualitative change of this immigration wave was the sudden influx of Ukrainians and other eastern European nationals. Within a few years, Ukrainians became the largest immigrant community in Portuguese territory, and as a consequence, Orthodox Christianity suddenly became the second largest religious faith in Portugal.

Portuguese society is still predominantly Roman Catholic (93%, according to the 2001 Census) but also, due to immigration flows in the last three decades, considerably multireligious. Given the lack of contact with religious diversity during the last 500 years, it is perhaps surprising that, except for the neo-Pentecostal churches in the late 1980s, these new religious faiths are well tolerated by mainstream society.

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