António Vasconcelos went to live with his uncle in São Martinho do Bispo where he continued his first studies, or ‘started’ them as he put it in 1937, and maybe rightly so. According to him, he had begun to study Latin with his uncle but he perfected it with the priest from Oliveira de Hospital. Nor did he prepare the other subjects at the liceu (high school) as his name does not appear in the yearly registers as an internal student. However, he did sit his exams there at a time when the high school regime that was organized according to subject (regime liceal por disciplinas) was still in force. His name appears as a student who was awarded distinction in Geography and Introduction to Natural History in the 1877-78 school year. He finished his preparatory studies with Philosophy (1st and 2nd part), which was obligatory to enrol in Theology. He matriculated in the Theology course as an ordinary student in the academic year 1878-79, and so moved to Coimbra and went to live in a private house like so many other students. He lived first in Rua dos Anjos, nº 6, moving the following year to Estrela, a healthy area with stunning views. He did not finish the first year because of illness (typhoid fever) but he did the next five years of the course as normal and was awarded the “prize” or honour of “accessit” (or runner-up) in the 2nd year. He graduated with a mark of 17 out of 20 (the same mark as for his bachelor’s) in 1885, the year when he also celebrated his first mass, and finished his doctorate in 1886 (with a grade of 18). He lived an academic life about which he wrote some delicious sketches in 1936. He obtained his first nomination as a lecturer on 26 May 1887, thus starting his career as a professor at the Faculty of Theology.

António Vasconcelos, who showed the serenity and goodness so characteristic of priests, was marked by the landscape and environment of where he had been born (and even of where he lived as a young man in São Martinho do Bispo and Estrela), having inhaled “the ancestral purity of a villager’s blood” (Maurício Santos) since childhood. He was a lover of simplicity, although delighted by liturgical splendour, sensitive to the landscape of the serra and to the tranquillity of the August nights, nature and the sky he observed with an astronomical telescope in search of “knowledge of the creator, of the visible rising up to the invisible”; he was a priest who celebrated an open-air mass in the very heart of the Serra da Estrela at sunrise one day in 1888; he was a man of faith, with an artistic sensitivity and possessing a shrewd intelligence and a ready and retentive memory; he was also a fount of knowledge which he expressed in class in a well-timbred voice. He cultivated friendship, truth, rectitude and obedience to his prelate, which also provided the subject matter for the ‘Special Christian Ethics’ course he taught. He was the calendarist for the diocese (and beyond) and for the University itself; he was a sacerdotal and academic liturgist, and no-one knew better than he did, or could mark with greater precision or detail, the ceremonial and everyday rites. This gave him a huge advantage in the interpretation and understanding of the historical themes he devoted himself to.

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