Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira

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Styles of Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira


Reference style	His Eminence
Spoken style	Your Eminence
Informal style	Cardinal
See	Lisbon

His Most Reverend Eminence Dom Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, GCC (November 29, 1888, Santa Marinha de Lousado, Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal – August 2, 1977, Buraca, Amadora, Portugal) was a Portuguese cardinal, who served as cardinal-patriarch of Lisbon, from 1929 to 1971. He was the last surviving cardinal elevated by Pope Pius XI, and his cardinalate of almost forty-eight years is the longest since the fifty-eight year cardinlate of Henry Benedict Mary Clement Stuart of York from 1747 to 1805. He took part in three conclaves, in 1939, 1958 and 1963. Although there were seven other cardinals elevated by Pius XI who participated in the 1963 conclave, Cerejeira was the longest-serving living cardinal from the death of Jozef-Ernest van Roey on August 6, 1961 until his own death almost exactly sixteen years later.

The eldest of five children of Avelino Gonçalves Cerejeira and wife Joaquina Gonçalves Rebelo, he was educated at the seminary in Braga from a young age and became a priest in 1911. Following his ordination he became a faculty member of the University of Coimbra during which time he became a respected and revered intellectual and religious figure.

In 1928 he became a bishop and was elevated to the patriarchate of Lisbon the following year at the tender age of forty-one, replacing António Mendes Bello, who had seen through anti-Church hostility in Portugal over his twenty-year reign to a military coup that promised to - and eventually did - temporarily end this hostility. He was elevated to the cardinalate a month after his appointment as Patriarch. In being so elevated, he became the youngest cardinal since Rafael Merry del Val in 1903 and there have been no younger cardinals since. The closest approach, ironically, has proven to be his successor as Patriarch of Lisbon, António Ribeiro, who was made a cardinal in 1973 three months before his forty-fifth birthday.

During his extraordinarily long reign as Patriarch, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira became often associated with the fascist Estado Novo due to his friendship with university colleague António de Oliveira Salazar and his endorsement of many of his policies. He signed the Concordat of 1940, between Portugal and the Catholic Church. However, even though a conservative, he accepted the Vatican Council II reforms.