In 1926, having already shown a certain religious disquiet as well as a profound interest in sacred art and liturgy, he formally converted to Catholicism, which implied his abandonment of the socialist movement and of his partisan activity, but not of his social concerns: he became aligned with Christian democratic sectors that espoused the modern Catholic social teachingofPope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, he never denounced the labour movement, and denounced fascism.[1] In 1932, he started publishing Era Nova, a religious and political weekly openly opposed to Salazar's ideology, that is soon after labelled as radical propaganda and shut down.[2]
His literary works, particularly his "social trilogy" consisting of A Catedral ("The Cathedral", 1920), O Deserto ("The Desert", 1922), and A Ressureição ("The Resurrection", 1923), made Manuel Ribeiro one of the most widely-read novelists in Portugal in the 1920s, but were deliberately obscured in the following decades by the authoritarian conservative Estado Novo regime.[3]
^Silva, Gabriel Rui (2011). "Entre o trabalho e a cruz: vida, romance e fé de Manuel Ribeiro" [Between labour and the cross: the life, novels, and faith of Manuel Ribeiro] (PDF). A Ideia: Revista Libertária (in Portuguese). 14 (69): 9–25. Retrieved 12 December 2020.
