PEREIRA DE FIGUEIREDO, ANTONIO. - Portuguese theologian, man of letters, and musician, b. at Macao (Portugal) on 14 Feb. 1725, d. at Lisbon on 14 Aug. 1797.
He studied with the Jesuits at Villa Vicosa and in 1744 entered the Fathers of the Oratory at Lisbon. His opposition to the Jesuits on the question of education won him the favour of the minister Pombal, whose policy, hostile to the rights of the Holy See, he supported in his numerous writings after laying aside the habit, which he resumed at death. A member (1774) and dean
(1792) of the Royal Academy of Lisbon, he was a distinguished man of letters and speaker. His principal work had a pernicious circulation throughout Europe: Tentamen theologicum (Lisbon 1766; 1769), the doctrines of which, denounced as heretical by F. A. Zaccaria, he reaffirmed in Defensio tentaminis theologici (ibid. 1770). P. supported the establishment of national Churches, defending the right of bishops (whose appointment and consecration he claimed for the metropolitan of the region) to act independently of the Holy See, granting dispensations from pontifical law when recourse to the Apostolic See was impossible.
Other writings: Rerum Lusitanorum ephemerides usque ad jesuitarum expulsionem (Lisbon 1761); Doctrina veteris Ecclesiae de suprema regum etiam in clericis potestate (ibid. 1765); Demonstração theol. canon. e histor. do direito dos metropolitanos de Portugal (ibid. 1767); Testamento novo e velho em portuguese (23 vols., ibid. 1778-90; 3rd ed., 1804-19, 7 vols.), a version based on that of the Jansenists of Mons (1667), is not always orthodox, either in its introductions or in its notes.