In May, tens of thousands attended open-air masses in Lisbon, Porto and Fátima when Pope Benedict XVI made a four-day visit to Portugal, a country in which more than 80 per cent of people identify themselves as Catholics.
In June, thousands of mourners lined the streets of Lisbon to pay their last respects to José Saramago, the Nobel prize-winning novelist, who months before his death at the age of 87 described the Bible as “a catalogue of cruelties and of the worst of human nature”.
