ABSTRACT
Thanks to avoiding the Reformation and failing to experience an industrial revolution, Portugal remained in key respects a traditional country where the Catholic church avoided many of the challenges faced by its counterparts elsewhere in Europe. Portugal was the only country in the western half of the continent in which not a single case of Protestant activity was reported in the Reformation period and where mass parties of the Left only began to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. But the Church was not immune from the anticlerical attacks which the Catholic religious establishment faced after the seventeenthcentury age of the Enlightenment. Indeed the early timing and subsequent scale of the challenge of secularism would appear to make Portugal noteworthy compared even to countries like Spain and France. The absence of parallel challenges to other bastions of the traditional order should also be taken into account.
