The Diocese of Beja is committed to mobilizing civil society to defend a national monument that the State voted to abandon, the parish church of Santiago do Cacém. For this reason, the Department of Heritage of the Diocese of Beja, in association with the Parish, promotes an evening of religiously inspired fado.
The unprecedented show, called Oração so Pequenina, will take place on the 24th of August, at 21 pm.
It has the participation of a plethora of fado singers who are friends of the monument: Maria da Graça de Noronha, Maria do Amparo Cid, Teresa Brum Pinheiro, Eduardo Falcão, Carlos Guedes de Amorim, Nuno Siqueira and José Lebre.
They are joined by guitarists Edmundo Albergaria and José Burnay, violas Rui Silveira and Joaquim Coutinho and bass guitar Manuel de Mello Gomes.
The main church of Santiago do Cacém, visible from a distance, half-walls with the castle of this city, is one of the most beautiful testimonies of Portuguese Gothic.
Dedicated to the Apostle Santiago Maior and built at the start of the XNUMXth century, on the initiative of the Byzantine princess D. Vataça Lescaris, it stands out for its austerity, characteristic of the architecture of the Military Order of Santiago, but has a wide and diversified ornamental load, alluding to the Way of pilgrimage to Compostela, which had here one of its references in Alentejo soil.
It was the seat of a rich collegiate and housed outstanding confraternities, brotherhoods and third orders.
Despite the heritage value of the temple, history has been a stepmother to it. Beaten by the 1755 earthquake, which practically wiped out Santiago do Cacém, it was rebuilt, little by little, over almost half a century.
In 1895 he lost the altarpiece of the main altar, destroyed by an incendiary bomb, when the anarchist rage had turned against the churches.
Classified as a National Monument in 1910, the building was once again the target of attacks in the First Republic.
In 1922, it received a new classification as a National Monument, to prevent the City Council from demolishing it under the pretext of expanding the cemetery.
"This wave of vandalism passed, but new challenges awaited the parish church, which ceased to have permanent worship from the mid-twentieth century and, despite being State property, came to ruin in the 1980s," stresses the Diocese of Beja .
Around 1990, a series of robberies caused significant damage. Faced with the starvation of local institutions, unable to respond to the abandonment, the Bishop of Beja, D. Manuel Falcão, entrusted the building's fate to the Department of Historical and Artistic Heritage of the Diocese of Beja.
In 1993, a Safeguarding Commission, with the collaboration of the Directorate-General for National Buildings and Monuments, promoted the requalification work, which lasted for a decade.
Reborn from its ashes, the old monument needs, today, great attention. There are security issues in the surrounding area.
The Diocese emphasizes that «the hermitage of São Pedro, on the hillside of the castle, a site suitable for satanic cults and other heterodox practices, which endanger sacred art and alarm the few residents, was recently vandalized for the third time in a few years. from the historic center of Santiago do Cacém, a territory facing problems of desertification».
This forces the Church's Safeguarding Commission to have to gather funds and mobilize goodwill to preserve the building.
“The situation does not look easy. The Ministry of Finance, owner of the property, is an absentee owner. The Parish, struggling with the maintenance of various places of worship, finds it difficult to disperse its meager resources. The Chamber regularly collaborates in the opening of the church, but this year it did not support any conservation work. On the other hand, as it is celebrated sporadically in the building, there are no entrance fees, despite being in the most visited monument in the county», explains José António Falcão, director of the Heritage Department of the Diocese of Beja.
And he adds: "it will be necessary, here as in other similar cases, to redesign a sustainability strategy between cultural and cultural use."
But this is "a precarious balance, as the parish church of Santiago Maior is a sensitive building, which requires permanent care," stresses the Diocese.
For now, we are betting on the mobilization of civil society and – an unprecedented initiative – this show of religiously inspired fado is now emerging.
The Diocese of Beja has been bringing music closer to heritage and biodiversity conservation, whose highlight is the Festival Terras sem Sombra, which has one of its privileged spaces in the parish church of Santiago.
“This building has beautiful acoustic conditions, especially for the voice and string instruments, and has already been used for historical recordings”, stresses José António Falcão.
By opening the doors of such a unique church, for the first time, to fado, the Department of Historical and Artistic Heritage does not forget the need to build bridges between spirituality and art.
"The objective, as it could not fail to happen in an aristocratic land that prides itself on its past, is noble: to gather the necessary funds for the restoration of the more than double centenary doors of a national monument that the public purse leaves to rot." ends the Diocese.
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