Catholics Who Celebrate Passover

The town of Belmonte, perched atop a rocky hilltop in northern Portugal, is dominated by a giant stone cross, a ruined castle and the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Family. On each Holy Thursday, Father Jose Marins Registo brings from the church an image of Jesus bearing the cross to Calvary. Followed by children dressed as angels, he parades through the streets to the main square, where he meets a second procession displaying an image of the Virgin Mary. On Good Friday there is another procession and a symbolic burial, after which the priest carries a cross from house to house for the people to kiss. On Easter Sunday, as on the days before, the whole town goes to Mass and most of the 6,000 inhabitants hang their best embroidered bedspreads or tablecloths from their balconies.

Eat Secretly. There will be other religious rites in Belmonte this week, observed not in church and public square but behind the closed doors of private homes. About 100 families who are officially parishioners at Holy Family will secretly eat pao azimo (unleavened bread), but only beginning on the third day of Passover so that no neighbor can see them baking it on the traditional day of preparation. One morning before the other villagers are awake, to avoid detection, the secret worshipers will steal down to the bank of the Zezere River. There they will beat the waters with olive branches to commemorate the parting of the Red Sea.

Such is the underground Passover of the people traditionally known as Marranos (secret Jews), a word that originally meant pigs. They live not only in Belmonte but also in many other mountain towns in northern Portugal. Forced to convert to Christianity in the 15th century, they still follow Jewish customs that have been passed on by word of mouth across nearly five centuries. Though they have had virtually no contact with the rest of the world's Jews, many authentic prayers have survived in their ritual, alongside such Christian accretions as the Lord's Prayer.

Most Marranos are publicly married and buried as Catholics--"to cover up," as one of them puts it. During Holy Week and throughout the year, many of them attend Mass. But as they go into the church they pray to themselves: "When I enter here I adore neither wood nor stone but only the God of Israel who rules all." Each Friday they light a Sabbath oil lamp, which is hidden inside an earthen pot lest other villagers see it. They prepare a menu consisting only of fish and vegetables because at one time it was dangerous for them to buy kosher meat for the Sabbath; now they consider mainstream Jews sinful because they eat meat on the seventh day. The Marranos shun all Saturday work, a telltale sign of their identity, but paradoxically, most of the men have not been circumcised because that could disclose their secret.

The secrecy is senseless, in a way. since most of their neighbors know that the Marranos are Jews. But their hideous history explains why they remain a people in hiding. In the 15th century, Portugal's 200,000 Jews made up one-fifth of the population. Many of them were refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and they came to play an important role in finance and scholarship. When King Manuel I sought to marry the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, however, Spain's fervently Catholic monarchs told Manuel that he would have to get rid of the Jews in return.

Manuel's solution, ordered in 1497, , was to close the ports and force the Jews to be baptized or die. Thousands were ' herded into a Lisbon camp to face starvation and violence. Many committed suicide rather than convert; others were dragged by their hair or beards to the baptismal font. All Jewish children from ages two to ten were taken from their parents and placed in Catholic homes. Only after ten years were some Jews permitted to escape to Amsterdam or the Americas.

Public Burnings. Those who converted were designated "New Christians," but they continued to be hounded for 2 1/2 centuries by the Inquisition, installed in 1536, and by zealot neighbors. In one Lisbon riot alone, in 1506, between 2,000 and 4,000 of the New Christians were slaughtered. The auto-da-fe--the parade and ritual sentencing of Jews and heretics, sometimes followed by spectacular public burnings --was not abolished in Lisbon until 1765.

In the 1920s, Army Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, a descendant of Marranos, converted to Judaism and helped establish a synagogue and seminary in Oporto. He toured rural areas telling the Jews that there was no longer reason to be afraid. During the early years under Salazar, the right-wing Catholic Action movement started a smear campaign against Barros Basto. His seminary was closed down, and he was court-martialed for immorality because he promoted circumcision. He died a broken man in 1961.

Today Portugal enjoys official freedom of religion, and the 400 members of Lisbon's openly Jewish community are prominent in business and the professions. In the northern villages, however, cruel memories persist. The priests are nearly as powerful--and many of them as backward and anti-Semitic--as in the Middle Ages. The current priest in Belmonte is a "good man," says a prosperous Marrano housewife, but the previous one "said in church that the Jews should be hanged." The Marranos claim that when they did not attend Mass they were denounced to the secret police as suspected Communists. "My father was stoned in the streets," recalls another Marrano. The furtive believers shun photographers and almost never talk of their religion to outsiders. Suspicion, like fear, has become a way of life.

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