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Liturgical Science, as a subject in university Theology courses, was only included in the Theology curriculum in the 18th century. This article is concerned with the process of creation and structuring of the first chairs in Liturgy, namely the Schola Sacrorum Rituum of the Roman College, the chair in Sacred Rites of the Pontifical Liturgical Academy at Coimbra. Both of these chairs were linked to the figure of the Jesuit Manuel de Azevedo. Indirectly, the chair in ‘Liturgical Theology’ of the University of Coimbra, created in 1772 by the Pombaline reform of the University, was also influenced by him. After Manuel de Azevedo, other chairs in Liturgy arose, but it is thanks to this Jesuit that the movement came about: he was the first to insist explicitly that Liturgical Science should have a place among theological disciplines and it was through his intervention that Liturgical Science became a university subject.

The parish church of Santo António, at Moscavide, dedicated on 9 December 1956 by Cardinal Cerejeira, is characterised by being a building that marks a break, a manifesto of opposition to revivalist churches that were then being opened in Lisbon, which left no-one indifferent and led to a heated controversy, involving the most varied shades of opinion, in favour and against the new church. Designed by the architects João de Almeida and António de Freitas Leal, it appeared as a building linked to a modern and essentially functional style, with marked influence from German Swiss architecture. Inside, the organisation of the liturgical space by giving priority to the altar, by distancing it from the far wall and by placing the congregation in three arms in the form of a T, represented a potential route which was ultimately not followed in Portugal.

This brief essay presents two pieces of music – one mediaeval, the other contemporary – that occur as interstitial additions to a consolidated liturgical practice: the first having recourse to a new text, the second reusing traditional texts. These are the two possibilities mentioned by Tertulian, in the 3rd century, when describing the spontaneous praise of God that concluded typical Christian meetings at that time. In both instances, separated by 900 years, music enables a deeper affective appropriation and an expression of the theological sensibility of its protagonists, placing the accent on aspects that otherwise are little stressed in the celebration.

This article seeks to show that in the work of Adília Lopes, frequent autobiographical contractualisation produces the double effect of a form of writing that uses its unarmed condition to become completely disarming. In this context certain features of Adília’s writing are stressed, namely hybridism, prosaism and the ‘grammatical view’, as instruments for the denunciation of violence and of the cruelty present in our daily lives.

João Luís Carrilho da Graça (Portalegre, 1952) is the architect of the church inaugurated on 13 June 2008 and dedicated to St. Anthony, in the Assentos area of Portalegre. He is responsible for some of the leading projects in contemporary Portuguese architecture, whose value has justly been recognised through the award of the Pessoa Prize. In Portalegre he drew up his first design within this specific typology, creating a building that is overtly contemporary with simple lines and white surfaces that make up an elemental structure close to traditional Alentejo architecture. If the attention to the exterior revealed by the architect is incontrovertible, it gains equal if not greater interest in the care – unusual in this country – given to the organisation of the liturgical space. There is particular concern to understand and manifest the ecclesiological and liturgical spirit renewed through the 2nd Vatican Council, which results in a church that is, taken as a whole, one of the most important and significant steps in present-day Portuguese religious architecture.

With the Motu proprio “Omnium in mentem”, the Pope altered the wording of 5 canons of the Code of Canon Law. In 2 canons, concerning the sacrament of the Order, the norm, now with greater clarity, formulates the ministerial function of deacons. In 3 canons, concerning the sacrament of Matrimony, the incisive ‘formal defection from the Catholic Church’ was withdrawn, considered neither necessary nor appropriate. This commentary clarifies in detail what the said formal act of defection is and what process should be gone through.

The new situation for the institutions of consecrated life, characterised by the difficulties arising from the aging of its members and the shortage of new vocations, demands deep reflection as to the causes and path to tread to bring about renovation. New roads will open when the causes of difficulty have been isolated and eliminated.This study seeks new models for the institutions of consecrated life centred fundamentally on the aspects of the administration of their worldly goods and in the running of the various works that they currently possess, putting forward proposals for solutions to the problem, according to the rules of Church law.

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The Codex Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium legislates on the ordinary (and extraordinary) process for the designation of bishops in the oriental Churches and on the respective method, which is twofold: by list or by direct election. By expressing personal opinions and reflections, felt to be useful and opportune, the author makes himself an echo of observations, complaints, demands and protests in oriental Churches with regard to this canonical process.

H. U. von Balthasar in his work Theology of History formulates a fundamental problem in theology: the question of the universale concretum. The answer is to be found in the mystery of the Incarnation, the contingent case in history, whose universalisation is given through the action of the divine Pneuma, in the sacramental kairos. In this brief note the author seeks to show how right Balthasar’s position was, by illustrating through the history of sacramental theology the route that Balthasar’s thesis presupposes and confirms.

Very often Jesus has been presented and preached as someone who lived against the law of Israel, as someone that only loved. The message of the gospel was reduced in the liberal protestant exegesis of the nineteenth century to a message of pure love viewed merely as a feeling. Unfortunately this still continues today. This small exercise tries to show exactly the opposite, tries to evidence how Jesus did not deny the law, how Jesus interprets the law (the torah), assuming the different meanings the word bears and applying them to his fellows to his generation of the Judea Province of the first century. This gives the message of Jesus a public, social and political incidence.

‘Justice’ is a central idea in the Hebrew Bible, in which abound a wealth of parallels and contexts. In some of these it is not distinguished very much from mercy and from love: it is an aspect of both. A concept rich in meanings, it needs to be expressed through at least three nouns: mišpāţ, şedeq and şedāqāh.Mišpāţ is objective and subjective ‘right’, which does the person concerned justice. Şedeq is created order, which establishes how just relationships between human beings are. Şedāqāh expresses just behaviour with regard to this order and as ‘saving action’. The three seek to promote the good of the one in need: they go beyond strict justice and form part of liberating justice.

In debates on the death penalty, the position of Saint Augustin is often invoked by way of legitimisation. It has been so for centuries. In fact, various of his writings and indeed some of the most important and influential take this line. They do not question current Roman law. However, if we take his writings as a whole, certain texts stand out, especially letters addressed to the judicial authorities, in which he expressly appeals for the death penalty not to be applied. And this for Gospel-related reasons and as a matter of coherence with the faith. The intercessio episcopalis is situated in this position, between civil penal law, which admits of it, and the Gospel of pardon, of mercy and of the opportunity for repentance.

This article seeks to clarify five points – each of them combining reflections of principle with aspects of a more practical-pastoral kind – the implications of reading the ‘signs of the times’ for the life of the Church. As a point of departure we take the Church’s need to assume an attitude of permanently listening to the ‘Word of God’. Secondly, this believing sensibility is placed in the context of the indispensible incarnation of Christian existence. A reading of the ‘signs of the times’ is only possible in the recognition and promotion of the ‘sensus fidei’ of the members of the Church. As a consequence, what is involved here is the understanding and practice of the Church as a dialogical community, while interpellations emerge with the aim of bringing about paths to Christian and ecclesial conversion.

The former juridical regulations of the Church, the Code of Canon Law issued in 1917 (CIC 17), in legislating on the right of the clergy to sustenance did not shift from traditional doctrine. The Church has established norms: it has fought for the right of clergy to property; it has constituted the beneficium ecclesiasticum to guarantee them an honest life: it has confirmed their control over the goods that constitute the portio congrua; it has affirmed that someone who owns some patrimony may nevertheless live from beneficial goods; it even accepts that the rights of the stole may constitute part of quasi-patrimonial assets, it has legislated that a minister merits sustenance sufficient to provide a mode of living that is dignified and comfortable, in accordance with the economic conditions in which he works and the obligations of the clerical state, but it has never ceased to underline and defend, in doctrinal terms, that the clergy only have the right to what is necessary and that there is never a justification for a style of living that is luxurious, ostensive, for what they receive should not remove them from the evangelical path of a simple, frugal life.

It was Walter Benjamin who identified the figure of the narrator as the one who is just. But can the same be said of the reader? And following the same line of thinking, can we risk proposing the term justice to classify the practice of reading? It is this possibility that the present article tests, in the first part, sounding out the various modes of what might be called a ‘just reading’ – knowing that a reading that sets itself up as a ‘doing (of ) justice’ to the text will always be an open hermeneutic, a hermeneutic that accepts what is implicit in the sentence by the writer Maria Gabriela Llansol: “understanding a text is like understanding a dog”. The second part presents the development of narratology, in the course of the 20th century, seeing the creation of this methodological tool as an attempt at justice in relation to the text.

The emergence of humankind in the chain of the evolution of species marks an ontological leap. While Biblical anthropology underlines the difference between Man in relation to matter and the other animals (since he is in the image of God), evolutionary theories, on the other hand, show the relationship of Man to Animal, in the phylum of primates. The present article seeks to establish a dialogue with evolutionary theories, without the need to compromise the specificity of Christian anthropology. Within the context of evolutionary continuity occurs an ontological discontinuity, expressed traditionally through the concept of ‘soul’ (the ontological moment that configures material in human form). While still animal, Man is God’s personal creation, a relational happening. He is, after all, the only animal capable of giving a name to things and of trying to decipher the enigma of his life and his origin.

During the Dutch invasion and occupation of Brazilian soil Father António Vieira preached several sermons of great religious and patriotic ardour. He celebrated victories (1638), warned against inappropriate euphoria (1639), comforted men and cried to God for help after noisy defeats (1640). He joined sound realism and intrepid faith in this mission. Peace shall come only from war. However only in God is the key to victory, because he is the lord of history. Philosophy of history turns theology of history.

This brief article seeks to evoke the Jesuit Manuel Pinto and his contribution to the European Liturgical Movement. Though Portuguese, he actually worked more in Granada and in Rome. He presented his doctoral thesis in Theology at the Granada Faculty of Theology in 1951, on the theme of “the theological value of liturgy”. His aim in this, however, was not to present a real treatise, but merely to put forward a first sketch or essay of a work on Liturgy as a theological source, divided into two parts: firstly, the notions of Liturgy and of the theological process in the light of the Magisteriumand of theological thinking; secondly, the theological value of the Liturgy in a systematic study through investigation and verification of the Biblical, patristic and theological sources. The publication of his work was important, allying itself with so many other theologians and liturgists, such as the Benedictine Cipriano Vagaggini, who also succeeded him to the chair of Liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University, in that it constituted an emblematic work for liturgical science.

A Reactivação de Paulo deve ser lida, claramente, como uma expressão cifrada, que procura descrever um fenómeno específico: a recente viragem politica na abordagem de Paulo que tem sido liderada não já pela teologia, mas pela filosofia e pela Teoria da Cultura. Poderíamos descrevê-lo como o impacto de um inusitado boom editorial que junta ateus e católicos, judeus e protestantes, e o extravagante lacaniano, em torno à reivindicação de Paulo. No interior deste heterogéneo e efervescente movimento, a obra de Giorgio Agamben, que Paul Ricoeur classifica como um «vigoroso trabalho», parece-nos ser a que coloca o desafio maior e mais original a uma reflexão contemporânea sobre Religião e Espaço Público.