Portugal is one of Europe's most Catholic countries: in the 2021 census about 80% of the population declared themselves Catholic. Religion has deeply marked the country's history, art, calendar and landscape, dotted with churches, chapels and crosses. But as across Europe, religious practice is declining and society has secularised quickly.
Church and state
Portugal's very birth is tied to the Church: the first king, Afonso Henriques, obtained papal recognition in 1179, and the Reconquest was fought as a crusade, with help from military orders such as the Templars (see Tomar). The First Republic, in 1911, separated state and church with strongly anticlerical laws. Salazar's dictatorship, by contrast, relied on the Catholic Church, with the 1940 concordat and the motto "God, Fatherland, Family". Today the state is secular, but the Church keeps an important social role, especially in welfare through the Misericórdias.
Fátima and popular piety
The centre of Portuguese devotion is Fátima, where in 1917 three shepherd children said they had seen the Virgin: the sanctuary welcomes millions of pilgrims a year, many walking from all over the country for the great pilgrimages of 13 May and 13 October. In 2023 Lisbon hosted World Youth Day with Pope Francis, with over a million participants.
Popular piety is expressed in romarias, pilgrimage festivals to sanctuaries with processions, music and feasting, especially in the north, and in the June festivals of the popular saints: St Anthony, born in Lisbon around 1195 and the city's patron (though known in Italy as St Anthony of Padua), St John in Porto and St Peter. In the Azores, the cult of the Holy Spirit, with its colourful chapels and handouts of bread and soup to the poor, is a medieval tradition that survives only there and in Azorean emigrant communities.
Portuguese Jews
In the Middle Ages Portugal had a thriving Jewish community, swelled after 1492 by tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain. In 1496-1497 King Manuel I, in order to marry a Spanish princess, ordered their expulsion, but in practice imposed forced conversion. The "New Christians" were persecuted by the Inquisition, established in 1536 and abolished only in 1821, and many fled to Amsterdam, London, Livorno and the Ottoman Empire, forming the Portuguese Sephardic diaspora. Some went on practising Judaism in secret for centuries, as at Belmonte. The Jewish quarters of Castelo de Vide and Trancoso and the synagogue of Tomar preserve their memory.
Other faiths
Portugal has small Muslim communities, largely of Mozambican and Guinean origin and, more recently, from South Asia, with Lisbon's large central mosque opened in 1985. Since 2015 Lisbon has been the world seat of the Aga Khan's Ismaili Muslim community. There are also Hindu communities, mainly from Mozambique, and fast-growing evangelical churches, often linked to Brazilian immigration. See also Portuguese traditions.