Priest Manuel Antunes, if “handy” is universal
The entrance of my study environment in Portugal, I came across a poster that said a conference about Father Manuel Antunes: Portugal, Europe and Globalization, the words were exactly these, but at a glance a book comes to mind Web to understand a little more of Portugal: “Rethinking Portugal” (see the pdf), later I know that there is a book of the publishing house Bertrand with this name, published in 2017.
I also review my preconceptions, of the one that I had of our mother country, not only because they arrived in Brazil, but also because they gave us the imperial rulers, D. João VI who migrated and established the crown there, D. Pedro I Portugal, D. Pedro IV) and his eldest daughter born in São Cristóvão, D. Maria II who gives name to the theater and some places in Portugal.
The initial reading, without any experience in Portugal, was from an isolated country, a little shy, and the text of Father Manuel Antunes confirmed, reads at the beginning of Repensar Portugal: “the possibility of the end of international isolation, that” proudly “which is the very contradiction of the world in which we live” (Antunes, 2011, 35), where he can already read the universal, this original work is from 1979, five years after the Carnation Revolution.
In speaking of the Revolução dos Cravos (Carnation Revolution), which ended the Salazarist era, Father Antunes said: “Carnation of May, the fraternization of the People and the Armed Forces, of collective enthusiasm, of a certain unfeigned brotherhood, of a vast availability to openness, of a sometimes candid and broad, spontaneity ” (ibid., p. 35).
At first religious curiosity moved me, thinking of the sermons of Father António Vieira, but beyond the scholarly thought, it was from this reading that I understood that I should know six essential dates for Portugal, the Carnation Revolution (1974) and: 1385, 1640, 1820 , 1910 and 1926.
At the beginning, in search of a Portuguese identity, without chauvinism, without messianism and without isolationism, he sees it as a “paradoxical living country of the strangest that the memory of men knows” (page 36), with many exceptions: a colonial empire that was so wide (Portugal was the first empire of the modern era of Macao, Goa to Africa and Brazil), except for how it carried out its political revolution (the left as it is normal), it was the armed forces themselves that demolished the State and exile members of outlawed parties.
He asked at the time, paralleling the year of the liberal revolution of 1820 (made by the crown), “Preface to the Constitutional Cortes of the same year. Will it follow 1823? ” (Page 37).
He says in his work that defining a Portuguese identity, after saying that they made several imitations (1820, Spain, 1834, England, 1910 Jacobin France with the Regicide and 1926 fascist Italy), it was with the assassination of the King Carlos I and the heir who became the republic.
But it emphasizes peculiar traits in the Portuguese town: “Mystical people but little metaphysical; lyric but not gregarious people; active but not very organized people; empirical people, but little pragmatic “(idem) and emphasize the most essential feature that differs from all of Europe:” coexistent people, but easily segregable by the arts of those who lead or propose (ibid.), but the privacy reserved as every European is pleasurable and joyful different from all of Europe and part of the world where indifference already prevails.
This Portuguese scholar priest, who died in 1985, did not see Portugal joining the European Community and the crisis that followed, but gave a fundamental sentence: “The lyrical hour is passing.”