The Station the State Never Took

Radio Renascença began in 1934 as Monsignor Manuel Lopes da Cruz's project to give the Portuguese Catholic Church its own voice on the air, an organ of Catholic Action from the start rather than a commercial venture that happened to carry religious content. Trial broadcasts began in June 1936, and by New Year's Day of 1937 the station was transmitting regularly, jointly owned by the Patriarchate of Lisbon and the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, an ownership structure it has kept, through the modern holding company Grupo Renascença Multimédia, ever since.

That continuity survived a genuine threat. Portugal's 1974 revolution did not simply end four decades of authoritarian rule, it also brought a turbulent period of nationalizations and worker takeovers across Portuguese media and industry, and in 1975, during what Portuguese history remembers as the revolutionary "Hot Summer," a workers' committee occupied Radio Renascença itself. The occupation did not last. By December 1975 the station had been returned to the Catholic Church, making Radio Renascença the only major Portuguese radio broadcaster of its era that the state, even at the height of revolutionary upheaval, never permanently took from the institution that built it.