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The Catholic Church in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Extract

The church in Brazil suffers many but by no means all of the ills usually ascribed to Catholicism in Spanish American countries. Concern over these problems has grown throughout the Catholic world, as well it might. One-third of the world's Roman Catholics live in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere. According to many churchmen a state of spiritual bankruptcy confronts the church in most of these countries. Basically it is a matter of the irrelevance of a system still rooted in hierarchic and paternalistic spiritual guardianship among people in transitional societies whose goals are modern, affluent egalitarianism. In simpler terms, more and more people in Latin America learn about widespread wealth among others, and fewer and fewer believe that their own disadvantages are preordained and can be changed for the better only in the next world—as the church has long taught.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1971

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References

1 Vallier, Ivan, “Religious Elites,” in Lipset, Seymour M. and Solari, Aldo, Elites in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

2 See the summary study of Brazilian Catholicism by the French sociologist Roger Bastide, “Religion and the Church in Brazil,” in Lynn Smith, T. and Marchant, Alexander, Brazil, Portrait of Half a Continent (New York, 1951)Google Scholar.

3 From “A Religião,” in Livro do Centenario, Rio de Janeiro, 1900, quoted in Costa, João Cruz, Panorama of the History of Philosophy in Brazil (Washington: Pan American Union, 1962)Google Scholar.

4 Data on the church hierarchy can be found in Winfredo Plagge, A. A., A Igreja no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: CERIS, 1965)Google Scholar. Current data is from Jornal do Brasil, 21 July 1968.

5 Vallier, , Religious Elites, pp. 204-6Google Scholar.

6 See David Mutchler, S. J., “Roman Catholicism in Brazil,” Studies in Comparative International Development (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1965), vol. I, no. 8,Google Scholar for a study made shortly after the 1964 revolution when the conflict between church and state first became apparent for all to see. Father Deelen's typology was printed in Jornal do Brasil, 21 July 1968.

7 Conferencia Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil, Plano de Pastoral de Conjunto, 1966-1970 (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Dom Bosco, Edit., 1967), p. 13 Google Scholar.

8 Mutchler, , “Roman Catholicism”, p. 109 Google Scholar.

9 The Washington Post, 14 February 1970.

10 Jornal do Brasil, 28 July 1968.

11 Sanders, Thomas G., “Catholicism and Development: The Catholic Left in Brazil,” in Silvert, Kalman M., ed., Churches and States: The Religious Institution and Modernization (New York: American Universities Field Staff, Inc., 1967)Google Scholar. Sanders gives sympathetic treatment to the Catholic Left, including the far-Left.

12 Many Brazilians and foreign observers believed Goulart was either a crypto-Communist or was under Communist control, a judgment which known facts did not support

13 Miami Herald, 22 November 1970.

14 La Prensa Libre (San José, Costa Rica), 2 October 1970.

15 Miami Herald, 11 October 1970.

16 La Nación (San José, Costa Rica), 20 October 1970.

17 La Nación (San José, Costa Rica), 1 November 1970.

18 La Nación (San José, Costa Rica), 18 October 1970.

19 La Nación (San José, Costa Rica), 5 November 1970.

20 As in other parts of the world, recruiting of priests in Brazil is still a serious problem, but the causes are related more to the universal than the Brazilian church.

21 Jornal do Brasil, 21 October 1969.

22 Ibid.

23 See Vallier, Religious Elites.

24 For some considerations on the size and importance of non-Catholic religious movements in Brazil, see Emilio Willems, “Religious Mass Movements and Social Changes in Brazil”, in Baklanoff, Eric, ed., New Perspectives in Brazil (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966)Google Scholar. Reliable statistics on the size of non-Catholic movements are not available. The count of Protestants in Anuario Estatístico was 2,484,968 at the end of 1965. However, Pentecosts estimated their numbers alone to be 2 million in 1961, of a total of more than 4 million Protestants in the country. It is possibly more difficult to estimate the number of Spiritualists, the other important religious movement. The “scientific spiritualists,” followers of Kardec, by official count numbered 732,784 at the end of 1965. Umbandista Spiritualists, who are an offshoot of the African Macumba (disowned by the Kardecists), were numbered at a little more than 100,000. Catholic sociologists, on the other hand, believe the number of Umbandistas to be much higher, since many of them (to the despair of the hierarchy) consider themselves to be Catholics practicing a variation on folk Catholicism, and they classify themselves accordingly to census takers.

The church has noted the rapid growth of Spiritualism in the backward Northeast states, where Catholic proselytising is least effective. (The Boletim Informativo of CERIS [July/September 1966, pp. 77-79] estimated that Spiritualists in Brazil had increased by 78 percent from 1940 to 1950, and Protestants by 62 percent. The total population increased only 26 percent, while Catholics increased by 24 percent.) However, Pentecostalism and Spiritualism are largely urban phenomena, explained principally by the failure of the Catholic church to fill the need of recent arrivals from the rural areas for a substitute family, community, and patrao for those that they left behind.