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Taking as its starting point the definition of faith as given by the Dei Verbum, this article explores some of the fundamental elements of the condition of the believer, related to an understanding of it as a human act (fides qua) and as a content in which to believe (fides quae). On the first plane, to have faith is to accept life and its meaning as a freely given gift; on the second, to be a Christian believer is to comprehend existence as being coming from the other and being for the other, as a nucleus of relationships of real/personal differences lived by a corporeal or incarnate human being. All of these aspects are bound up with specific challenges in a culture that has sought to be self-sufficient and self-constructing, that stresses the value of individual self-realisation, that has a tendency to dissolve personal differences in global systemic holisms, and that manifests a certain mistrust in relation to corporeal existence, through its potentialising transfiguration.

The end of the Constantinian epoch was marked by the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, but the persistence of this model of Christendom is analysed from the perspective of four topics: the first studies the problems of the relations between the Catholic Church and the lay State, with the decisive step from religious freedom to the discovery of the value of contemporary secular law; the second describes the impact of the imperial model on the authority type within the Church; the third is dedicated to religion reduced to worship, an element of enormous pastoral impact; finally comes a conclusive reflection on the force of faith unprotected by power.

The present volume of the periodical Didaskalia presents an interdisciplinary study of the question “Religious identities in Portugal: representations, values and practices”. This falls into two parts, oriented by a unifying research topic: the presentday problem of the articulation between belief and belonging in the recomposing of religious identities.

In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in people ‘of no religion’ in Portugal. In quantitative terms, those ‘of no religion’ constitute the second largest group within the Portuguese population, and this increase confirms a general trend observable in the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, there has been a certain hesitancy in academic circles to describe this group in qualitative terms. Furthermore, behind this designation ‘of no religion’ is hidden an enormous variety of worldviews or social attitudes that can only be explained in systematic terms with some difficulties. In this article, I seek to present a numerical framework for this group, a terminological classification of people ‘of no religion’ and a first attempt to broach the question in qualitative terms. Given that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, hovering between something visible quantitatively but invisible qualitatively, this attempt may, however, prove to be just provisional.

The concept of secularisation is far from unanimous and uncontested. In the current debate on the theme, three aspects would seem to stand out: that of differentiation between the secular sphere and the sphere of religious institutions and norms, that of the decline of the religious as belief and practice, and that of the privatisation of the religious. An analysis of the debate and of the great diversity of situations regarding the presence of religion in modern life points to the need for a complex analysis. The same applies to modernity, or rather various modernities, as would seem to be more applicable nowadays. This text constitutes a reflection on the viability of applying certain theories on secularisation to the Portuguese reality, taking as a point of departure certain data from the study on “Religious identities in Portugal: representations, values and practices”. It concludes that Portuguese society may be considered secularised in certain respects, but not in all, which would seem to confirm the thesis of the existence of multiple modernities.

Portugal continues to be a country with a largely Catholic population, with high indicators of religious belief and practice when compared with the majority of European countries. In recent decades, however, a new panorama has arisen in relation to which the study “Religious identities in Portugal: representations, values and practices” has added useful information. As well as a multiplication of the indicators of secularisation and consequently of the increase of those ‘of no religion’, there has also been a steady rise in the population of those whose religion is not Catholic. It is these that form the object of the present article, which seeks to delineate the sociological features of the religious minorities and to reflect on the new theoretical challenges to the understanding of a reality that is ever increasingly European and global: new economy, market, media and migrations constitute central elements for an understanding of the emerging landscape.

Taking as a starting point the data from the survey “Religious identities in Portugal: representations, values and practices”, the present study seeks to characterise the Catholic population from a dual perspective: how it differs from other religious positions, and its internal plurality, considering the rhythms of Sunday practice and the forms of involvement in the communities. Constituting an ‘ecclesiosphere’ – from the innermost circles to those on the periphery of identification – Portuguese Catholicism reveals a strong cultural involvement in Portuguese society. This involvement does not come across in the figure of a compact Catholicism, but reveals itself in a plurality of modes of belonging – socially visible, but often invisible in the logic of the pastoral action of Catholic institutions.

The present article analyses representations, values and practices relating to religious identities among the populations of the Azores islands and Madeira, establishing certain comparisons with a similar study undertaken in mainland Portugal. We begin, taking an overall view of religious positions, with a scrutiny of socio-demographic variables such as gender, level of education and socio-professional situation together with a series of other indicators that constitute the believer’s profile: parental transmission, fulfilling of religious precepts, factors leading to distancing or approximation, daily interchanges, practices of prayer, participation in services, configuration of beliefs, attitudes and values. Roughly 90% of residents living on the islands consider themselves Catholics. It is precisely on this believing population that we subsequently focus, taking as a starting point a graduated typological classification according to practice: Catholics that are nominally so, occasional, irregular, regular, practising and militant.

This text analyses the articles that appeared in Portuguese newspapers in relation to the presentation of the study Religious Identities in Portugal by the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference in April 2012. Of the fifteen articles published, almost half were reports, in which journalists obtained information from the Catholic institution that was behind the study and sought statements and opinions from specialists in religion and those responsible for other religious faiths in order to establish other perspectives, complementary but not antagonistic. Many of the texts are signed by journalists, who carried out a very rigorous portrait of the results of the study. From the same analysis it may be concluded that other journalistic texts on the Catholic Church, publicising other activities and other leaders, also contributed to the ‘news bubble’: the intersection of events, results and social agents in the news, as if these constituted the only possible narrative.

In the work of Marcel Gauchet an unusual category emerges that has not yet received the critical attention that it warrants: the notion of Remnant. While making explicit the dialectic between the decline of religion as a social function, and its persistence on a social level, the author speaks of “a perhaps inalienable remnant”. And what may be still more surprising is that what Gauchet says of contemporary society, has already been made explicit at key moments of the Biblical tradition itself: Religion has always been understood as the Remainder of Religion.

The text reflects on the conditions in which ecclesial communities respond to the demands of a plural integration of those that present themselves as being Catholics, but whose degree of relationship with concrete ecclesial reality is varied. With this in mind, in the light of a Conciliar ecclesiological vision, certain criteria need to be received and made explicit at a deeper level, in theological terms, in ecclesial consciousness and in creative practical attitudes. In other words, it is a matter of refining the consciousness of the Catholicity of the Church, of concretising the sense of sacramentality of the same Church and of finding more suitable means of putting forward and affirming faith. In the final analysis, at issue is a profound pastoral renovation of Christian communities, on the basis of criteria for action and of pastoral structures more in tune with central aspects of the identity and mission of the Church.

The recent survey on religious identities in Portugal provides data that show a strengthening of the tendency towards the individualisation of belief that latterly has become increasingly evident. It is important to gather from these data what relates concretely to Catholics and to submit the configurations of belief that they indicate to critical theological enquiry. It is a matter of understanding what in them is in accordance with the truth of Christian faith and what appears to be strange to it. It is an exercise that requires dialogue between the ‘I’ of faith and the ecclesial ‘we’. The latter should open up space so as to let the former find expression in the first person singular. But it has also to check if this ‘I’ provides indications of affiliation in the faith that the Church lives and proclaims. It is possible that the ‘I’ of faith may surprise the ecclesial ‘we’ in certain respects, in a positive sense. But it may equally prove necessary to point out faults that need particular attention.

The arrival of democracy as a hegemonic form of government has led to an updating of the issues surrounding the relationship between religion and politics. There are particular aspects of this relationship in a democratic context that need to be articulated with traditional narratives with regard to modernity as ‘secularisation’, and also with the most recent criticisms to which these historical narratives have been subjected. The original promise of democracy consisted in overcoming once and for all the tensions that the relationship between religion and politics aroused. But since an early stage it was realised that this promise would not be met so easily, as the current discussion in various Western democracies on the presence of the religious in public spaces well demonstrates. The difficulties begin straight away in the disappointing self-evidence of the borderline between the ‘public space’ and the ‘private domain’. But they do not end there.

Within the framework of a dual statement, that of the dissemination of an urban model in the villages and the pursuit of a style of living belonging to the urban context (desertification of the villages), this article describes common trajectories of believers in an urban environment. In eight interrelated entries, it takes as a starting point current emerging values as formulated by Grand’Maison, confronts the main features of present-day cities (making a practical distinction between megacities and average-sized cities), recognises the identites of youth in effervescence to some extent everywhere in current society, reformulates the decline of Catholic hegemony as a form of sociability par excellence, puts forwards a possible heuristic mode of identifying trajectories of identification today on a religious plane and ends by programming pastoral targets that are both suitable and realisable. The text, which is deliberately functional, opts for a pragmatic and heuristic methodology, permitting possible future surveys in urban contexts of greater dimension. It is completely exploratory, refining a great variety of types of religious identification that mark paths among the Portuguese in the urban context.

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Starting from the definitions of myth, anti-myth and demythification, this article focuses on the undeniable and long-since recognised mythical features of the narratives of creation, origin and the Flood (Gn 1-11). Equally undeniable are the different forms of demythification in all narratives that have a mythological basis, such as the passing of a myth to literature and to a historical event.

The Jewish reading of Scripture permitted by recent documents from the Pontifical Bible Commission opens new perspectives for exegetes, provided they accept retranslation of the Greek text to Hebrew. Recourse to gematrias, which play with the numerical value of the letters, is frequent. Recourse to notarikon is also known and used in Jewish hermeneutics. This is what my own research has shown and once again in the present article, in both instances with an awareness that a text should always be read in its historical and cultural context.

Modern translations of the Bible in the West cross with Western history itself: this chapter has done it proud in furnishing the basis for its Christian matrix, for democracy, liberty and human fraternity. They have produced culture and literature, they have enriched the tradition of painting, with miniatures and illuminations of rare beauty. They have been a determining factor in the Bible’s reaching those thirsting for its inspiring message and for the latter to survive in the present for each people. Through them, the Bible has continued to speak for more than a millennium. Leaving aside other aspects that could be taken into account in the difficult act of translating (criteria of a literary, hermeneutical, theological, liturgical or whatever kind), this article takes a historical approach to translation for the most widely spoken Western languages (French, Italian, German, English, Spanish, Portuguese), accompanying the circumstances in which each arose and influenced the religiosity of the peoples that produced and received it. A phenomenon that this adventure fell foul of was that of prohibitions on translating and reading. While, on the one hand, this would seem to be incomprehensible, on the other, it demonstrates the height of concern about preserving the Bible’s precious contents unaltered, trying to prevent its adulteration. If certain prohibitions were somewhat dramatic, others were tainted with persecution and blood, which reveals all too clearly the ardent desire to make it available for reading.

The article discusses the issue of so-called “canonical reading” and its role in the theological understanding of the biblical text. After the contextualization of the question, there will be an analysis of the expression "canonical reading” and the very closely related expressions “canonical approach”, “canonical criticism” and “canonical exegesis”. Following this, the canon concept will be considered in its exclusive, inclusive and intrinsic dimensions, so that, finally, the issue in the title of this article can be explored.