Church of São Domingos

On 8 December 1967, Pope Paul VI made 1 January the World Day of Peace. On the night of 31 December 1968, after the Mass presided over by the Cardinal Patriarch Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, a group of lay people announced that they would stay on in this church in a vigil.¹ Four of them went to tell the cardinal and the prior, and among them was a young woman, Catalina Pestana: a lady had pointed out that women did half the things in the Church, but that when someone had to speak to the bishop, it was the men who went.³

The document they read out denounced the “political commitment of the Church towards the State” and condemned the bishops’ pastoral note on the Day of Peace, which treated the “overseas peoples” as part of the “Portuguese Nation”. More than a hundred people stayed until six in the morning of 1 January 1969, discussing the war in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.¹

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen wrote the “Cantata da Paz” (Cantata of Peace) for that night — “We see, we hear and we read / We cannot ignore” (Vemos, ouvimos e lemos / Não podemos ignorar) — sung by Francisco Fanhais. Those present included Nuno Teotónio Pereira, Francisco de Sousa Tavares, Vítor Wengorovius, Luís Moita and Catalina Pestana.¹ Sophia was there too, according to the testimonies gathered by the researcher Eloísa Aragão: Catalina Pestana remembers her and her husband, Francisco de Sousa Tavares, who argued with the prior; Nuno Teotónio Pereira says that “Sophia was there too”; Francisco Fanhais, who sang the cantata, insists that “of course Sophia was there”, although he admits he does not remember seeing her.³ According to the historian António de Araújo, the action had been planned at the home of Maria Natália and Nuno Teotónio Pereira.²

In the days that followed, the Patriarchate condemned the “tendentious character” of the vigil, and Nuno Teotónio Pereira was summoned by the PIDE. Four years later, the same Catholic circles would hold the vigil in the Capela do Rato.¹