Archdiocese of Funchal

Everyone knows that our Cathedral (Sé Catedral) was honoured as a metropolitan see and that it was the seat of an archdiocese. Its existence, however, was short-lived. Created in 1533, it had already been abolished by 1551. Our ever-growing colonial and maritime expansion from the beginning of the 15th century, together with the settlement and exploitation of the newly discovered lands, led first to the establishment of the bishopric of Funchal in 1514 and, twenty years later, to the creation of the dioceses of Angra, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Goa. Before these latter bishoprics were created, the idea arose of establishing an archdiocese to serve as the seat of an ecclesiastical province, with those dioceses, and any others that might later be created, as its suffragans. Funchal, as the first bishopric established outside mainland Portugal, was chosen as the seat of the new archdiocese, which comprised the aforementioned dioceses of Angra, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Goa. The Archbishop of Funchal extended his spiritual jurisdiction from the Madeiran archipelago to the farthest reaches of the East.

We do not know the date of the papal bull creating the archdiocese. In the ‘Portuguese Diplomatic Corpus’ (Corpo Diplomático Português) we find the consistorial schedules of 31 January and 11 February 1533: the first communicates to John III the establishment of the archdiocese, and the second concerns the appointment of the first archbishop, who was Dom Martinho de Portugal. The bull of creation is not included there. However, since the consistorial schedules announcing such an event generally bore the date of the creation itself, we shall not stray far from the truth in stating that the archdiocese was established by a bull of 31 January 1533 and that Dom Martinho de Portugal was appointed archbishop by a bull of 11 February of the same year.

Only six years after the archdiocese was established, a bull of 8 July 1539 stripped it of its four suffragan bishoprics, which passed to the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Lisbon. The first and only Archbishop of Funchal, Dom Martinho de Portugal, died in 1547, but the archbishopric was not filled. It was abolished in 1551, four years after his death, by the bull Super universis.

The circumstances surrounding the creation, dismemberment and later abolition of the archbishopric lead us to share the opinion of Dr Álvaro de Azevedo, who asserts that the elevation of the bishopric of Funchal to an archdiocese was a personal favour from John III to a close relative and friend, and perhaps a reward for the services that Dom Martinho de Portugal had rendered the monarch as his ambassador in Rome.

‘Dom Martinho de Portugal, by divine mercy Archbishop of Funchal, Primate of the Indies and of all the new lands discovered and yet to be discovered’: this was how the new archbishop styled himself in the documents he issued in the exercise of his office.

The four ‘maces’ that, even today, are carried by clerics before the prelate at great ceremonies in our Cathedral are the only trace that the archdiocese has left here. These ‘maces’ symbolised the four suffragan bishoprics that belonged to the archbishopric of Funchal. Once the archdiocese was abolished, Funchal reverted to the simple status of a bishopric. To its jurisdiction over the Madeira archipelago was added the castle of Arguin, on the coast of Senegal, which some years later ceased to belong to this diocese.

We shall deal with Archbishop Dom Martinho de Portugal in a separate article. The bull of 8 July 1539 cited above, which is of great interest to the ecclesiastical history of Madeira, was translated in full into Portuguese and published in several issues of the newspaper O Correio do Funchal (‘Funchal Courier’) in March 1898.