About A Voz do Crente

A Voz do Crente

A Voz do Crente was a Portuguese-language religious weekly newspaper published in Macau from 1887 to 1893. Its title meant "The Voice of the Believer." It was the newspaper of Macau's Catholic establishment: scholarship on the religious history of Macau records its foundation by the priests of the Royal College of Missions who had taken charge of the Macau seminary, and a later study of Timor's separation from Macau identifies it, from the Historical Archive of Macao, as the organ of the Diocese of Macau and Timor. The Macao Public Library's Senado Library preserved a run of more than 360 issues, from number 1 in 1887 to number 367 in 1893, in eight bound volumes. In the 1890s the paper was drawn into the defining controversy of its diocese — the cost of Portugal's wars in Timor — defending the governor of Timor against the attacks of the Echo Macaense in a polemic that Lisbon's republican press followed as a proxy for the politics of the governor of Macau himself.

Foundation and the seminary priests

The foundation of A Voz do Crente is recorded in António Rodrigues Baptista's study of the religious linkages between Macau and the Philippines, published in Macau's Review of Culture. That account describes how, after earlier arrangements collapsed, teaching at the Seminary of Macau passed in the 1870s to priests of the Real Colégio das Missões — the Royal College of Missions at Cernache do Bonjardim — who arrived in successive groups from 1872 and prepared the ground for a new era of the Timor missions. Among the two most important achievements credited to that generation, the study records, were the foundation of the weekly A Voz do Crente, dated there to 1886–1895, and the return of the Jesuit priests to direct and teach at the Seminary of Macau, where they arrived in March 1890 and remained for twenty years, until the revolution of 1910. The Senado Library catalogue gives the preserved run as 1887 to 1893, beginning with number 1 of 1887; the slight difference between the study's dates and the catalogue's holdings is a common feature of Macau newspaper records, where a paper's first or final years may not survive in the bound collection. The same study records that Bishop António de Medeiros, the diocesan bishop whose governance in Macau and Timor the mission priests supported, on one occasion had to come out in defence of himself in the pages of A Voz do Crente, over the support in clothing and food that he was giving in Macau — an early sign of the paper's role as the diocese's public voice.

The Senado record: a weekly of 367 numbers

The Senado Library catalogue of bound foreign-language newspapers recorded A Voz do Crente, 1887–1893, as a weekly publication, held under shelfmark P1-(A2) No. 2 and microfilmed on rolls 4 to 6 and 629 to 632, in eight bound volumes. Its holdings were enumerated year by year: numbers 1 to 54 in 1887, 55 to 106 in 1888, 107 to 158 in 1889, 159 to 210 in 1890, 211 to 262 in 1891, 263 to 314 in 1892, and, in the final year, numbers 316 to 325, 345 to 347, 349 to 360 and 363 to 367 in 1893. The regularity of the sequence — fifty-two numbers a year, the rhythm of an unbroken weekly — shows a disciplined publication sustained for six full years, and the gaps in the final year, where stretches of numbers are missing from the binding, mark the point at which the preserved run frays. A run of more than 360 weekly issues made A Voz do Crente one of the substantial religious newspapers of nineteenth-century Macau, and its eight bound volumes form part of the Senado collection of 101 foreign-language titles, 88 of them preserved in binding in some 1,839 volumes.

An organ of the Diocese of Macau and Timor

The diocese whose organ A Voz do Crente became was the Diocese of Macau and Timor: until the end of the nineteenth century, Portuguese Timor was administered ecclesiastically — and for much of the period administratively as well — from Macau. That structure defined the paper's world. Its founding generation of seminary priests was simultaneously the recruiting ground of the Timor missions; men formed at Cernache do Bonjardim passed through Macau to Timor, where some served as parish priests of Dili, and one of them, Jaime Garcia Goulart, later became the first bishop of Dili. A diocesan weekly in Macau therefore spoke to two territories at once, and its pages carried the affairs of Timor — its missions, its governors and its wars — to a Macau readership that paid, through the colonial budget, a significant part of Timor's costs. It was that financial and political entanglement that brought A Voz do Crente its defining controversy.

The Timor polemic: against the Echo Macaense

In the mid-1890s, Timor became the most contentious question in Macau's public life. The governor of Timor, José Celestino da Silva, who governed from 1894, conducted military "pacification" campaigns against rebellious Timorese rulers, and one of his first operations ended bloodily, with Portuguese soldiers killed in an ambush. The influential Macau newspaper Echo Macaense attacked the financial support Macau gave to Timor's government and criticised Celestino da Silva sharply, insinuating that he was "the true person responsible for all the recent misfortunes," given the lives lost, the discredit to the Portuguese flag and the weapons lost. A Voz do Crente took the opposite side. The historian Carlos Gomes Bessa, in a study of Celestino da Silva's government presented in 1993, established from the Historical Archive of Macao that A Voz do Crente, organ of the Diocese of Macau and Timor, systematically defended Governor Celestino da Silva, developing a fierce polemic with the Echo Macaense. The Echo's position, set out in its issue of 7 June 1896, was that Macau's taxpayers' money should be spent first on Macau's most urgent local needs; the diocesan paper's defence of the Timor governor aligned it with the governor of Macau, José Maria de Sousa Horta e Costa, who likewise opposed the diversion of large sums from Macau's budget to Timor's, yet whose administration the Echo Macaense's campaign embarrassed. The quarrel was, in form, about Timor; in substance it was about who governed Macau and in whose interest.

A Voz do Crente in the eyes of Lisbon

The polemic was visible from Portugal. Célia Reis's study of the Lisbon republican newspaper A Vanguarda (1894–1900), published in the Review of Culture, examined how Macau appeared in the metropolitan republican press, and found that Macau's own newspapers were among A Vanguarda's sources of information. A Voz do Crente was one of the papers that earned references in those years, above all in 1895 and 1896, in contestation of events in Macau. The study situated the paper within the factional alignment around Governor Horta e Costa: on one side stood the governor, his secretary-general and a judge; on the other, a group associated with the newspaper A Voz do Crente — a configuration in which Horácio Poiares, a teacher at the Macau Lyceum and a collaborator on A Voz do Crente, stood out for his attacks on the governor's group, and in which the paper's protection by the administration's circle was itself a subject of republican irony as Horta e Costa's return approached. The paper thus appears in the metropolitan record not merely as a religious weekly but as a named actor in Macau's factional politics of the 1890s.

Religious press in a Catholic territory

A Voz do Crente belonged to the confessional strand of Macau's press. Macau was a Catholic city by foundation: seat of a diocese since the sixteenth century, home to the Seminary of St. Joseph, and the historic base of Catholic missions to China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Its Portuguese-language press was from the beginning entangled with the church, and a diocesan weekly of the 1880s and 1890s addressed a community for which the diocese was an employer, an educator and a political interest as well as a faith. The paper's title announced its stance — the voice of the believer — and its foundation by the seminary's mission priests, its defence of its bishop in its own columns, and its later identification as the diocesan organ all place it in that confessional line, which continued in Macau long after it closed: the Catholic weekly O Clarim, founded in 1948, later became the official newspaper of the Diocese of Macau and survives into the present century. A Voz do Crente also forms a counterpoint, within China's nineteenth-century press, to the Protestant missionary newspapers published elsewhere in the country in the same decades: where those papers served missions directed at Chinese readers, the Voz served a Portuguese-speaking Catholic establishment at the empire's edge.

Place in the Macau press of its time

Modern surveys of Portuguese thought and print in Macau list A Voz do Crente among the titles through which ideas circulated in the territory, in a sequence that runs from O Independente and the Echo Macaense through Oriente Portuguez, Lusitano, O Progresso and A Colónia to the twentieth-century papers. Its contemporaries in the Senado holdings included the Echo Macaense, the bilingual Chinese–Portuguese newspaper with which it polemicised, and the other Portuguese weeklies of the 1880s and 1890s that served the Macanese community and debated the territory's relations with Lisbon, with Hong Kong and with China. Within that company, A Voz do Crente was distinctive for the clarity of its institutional loyalty: founded by mission priests, owned in effect by the diocese's world, and remembered by historians precisely for the systematic character of its defence of the diocese's allies in Timor.

End of the run and afterlife

The Senado Library's holdings of A Voz do Crente end in 1893, at number 367, with the final year's sequence already incomplete in the binding; the religious-historical study that credits its foundation gives the paper's span as 1886 to 1895. On either dating, the paper ceased in the mid-1890s, in the same years in which its Timor controversy reached its height and in which Timor itself moved towards separation from Macau: at the end of the nineteenth century the district of Timor was made autonomous from the province of Macau and placed directly under the government in Lisbon, dissolving the joint structure — Diocese of Macau and Timor — of which A Voz do Crente had been the organ. The paper thereafter survived as an archival and historiographical presence: preserved in eight bound volumes and on microfilm in the Senado Library, and cited by name in studies of Macau's religious history, of Timor's autonomy, and of the metropolitan press's view of Macau.

Assessment

A Voz do Crente was a weekly that punched at the weight of its institution. Founded by the mission priests of the Macau seminary, sustained for more than 360 issues, and identified in the archive as the organ of the Diocese of Macau and Timor, it gave the Catholic establishment of Portuguese Macau a public voice at the moment when that establishment's furthest responsibility — Timor — became the territory's most divisive question. Its systematic defence of Governor Celestino da Silva against the Echo Macaense, and its visibility in Lisbon's republican press, lift it out of the anonymous mass of nineteenth-century confessional newspapers and make its preserved run in the Senado Library a working source for historians of Macau, of Timor and of the Portuguese colonial press.