Against general blogging rules, this one goes a bit long. We beg your indulgence; it references a great PHPC publication and recognizes the great work of a well known community writer, Father Jose Ferreira – aka Ferreira Moreno.

A review of the publication “Power of the Spirit” authored by  Santos Narciso and translated by Jose Luis da Silva, recognizes  our award winning publication and its authors namely Father Jose Ferreira:

“Sent to me by my old and dear friend from writing endeavors, Ferreira Moreno, postmarked in California, I received some time ago the thick and heavy volume entitled Power of the Spirit, written by Ferreira Moreno himself and by Joe Machado and José do Couto Rodrigues, which offers us a marvelous voyage through the Portuguese temples and clergy in California. In a deluxe edition of the Portuguese Heritage Publications of California, with support from FLAD and the Azorean Regional Government Office for Communities, with 1,500 copies, it has a rather successful and imaginative preface from the then President of the Azorean Regional Government, Carlos César, who highlights the religiosity and the sentiment of Faith which characterize the Azorean people, in the islands or wherever they needed or wanted to go to, California in this case. Carlos César cites Daniel Sá himself when he wrote that “leaving the island is the worst way of staying on it”.

Divided by zones and cities, the book is a a marvelous collection of the history of the various constructions of temples in vast California where so many Azorean priests offered all their knowledge and enthusiasm to maintain in the emigrant community the original traditions and faith of its people. It is an edition in English which is well worthy of a translation and the distribution here in the Azores for those who enjoy and feel this wave of Azorianness throughout the world and who, often confined here to small insular horizons, don’t have a precise idea of what it is.

Father Joe Ferreira, Ferreira Moreno, a proud native of Ribeira Grande, who was never truly recognized for his great work of many decades in the gathering of ethnography and the history of Azorean personalities and facts that he has been spreading in tens of publications for which he writes, has been an enthusiast in the preservation of Azorean culture in California and his participation in this book is the corollary of this merit which can’t be overstated. For that reason, here, in these Leituras do Atlântico, I want to offer, in the person of Ferreira Moreno, my appreciation and respect to all the authors and collaborators of such deserving work which gathers and perpetuates a precious piece of our history spread throughout the world. I thank them for the knowledge that they afforded me and for the marvelous moments that I have had understanding the greatness of the Azorean soul whose brightness grows even more in proportion to the distance that it finds itself from its roots in time and space.”

Santos Narciso

(translated by José Luís da Silva)

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Portuguese Heritage Publications of California, Inc. is a non-profit organization created to research, preserve and disseminate for educational purposes, vanishing memories and current relevant events about the Portuguese presence in California.
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