With five Portuguese cardinals, and at least one future papabile – Cardinal Américo Aguiar, who was responsible for World Youth Day 2023, is still only 50 – Lisbon has become a new spiritual axis of the world, an outward-facing port city that has become something of a focus for Pope Francis’s progressive spiritual mission.
In 1998, the then Prince Charles visited the newly-constructed Vasco da Gama Bridge – at the time the longest in Europe – finished just in time to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the famous 15th-century Portuguese explorer’s discovery of a new sea route between Europe and India. Today, the six-lane cable bridge, spanning 17.8 km across the Tagus River, stands as a confident architectural symbol of how Lisbon has long been – ever since the pioneering Jesuit missionaries of the 17th century – a critical trading and spiritual link between Old Catholic Europe, Asia and the New World.
