Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0012/00129.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00129}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Brazil
Chapter 2E.   Religion}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{P. A. Kluck}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{clergy
church
percent
religious
hierarchy
rural
catholic
social

}
$Date{1982}
$Log{}
Title:       Brazil
Book:        Brazil, A Country Study
Author:      P. A. Kluck
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 2E.   Religion

     Some 90 percent of all Brazilians are Roman Catholics; they are the
single largest national group of Catholics in the world. Beyond the sheer
numbers the country is Catholic in culture as well as in traditional mores.
Catholicism has long been integral to Brazilian society. Religious festivals
were major public celebrations and a significant form of entertainment for the
colonial populace. At their most elaborate they might have lasted fully a week
and included not only processions but also bullfights, jousting, and dancing
in the streets. Scores of chapels and churches dotted the countryside and
city. They were far more imposing than the public buildings and private
residences of the era; the ecclesiastical architecture earned even the
grudging respect of Protestant travelers. Religious brotherhoods were the
typical forms of association; they functioned as guilds and professional
associations as well as the primary means of dispensing charity and
maintaining churches.

     This particular form of Catholicism was linked to grants of patronage
given to the Portuguese crown in a series of papal bulls. The crown exercised
extensive control over the church because of its role in expelling the Moors
and spreading the faith. The arrangement was intended to ensure the church's
protection; in Brazil it contributed to the Catholic church's extremely weak
organization. Although an essential part of culture and social life,
Catholicism was from the early colonial period institutionally handicapped.
Educating and ordaining priests was a low priority; the formation of dioceses
and parishes lagged; the church is tithe found its way into the royal coffers.

     The royal prerogatives were continued under the empire. Dom (title used
by nobility and members of the church hierarchy) Pedro II (1841-89), educated
in the tradition of French rationalism, found little use for religion or
clergy. The Catholic Church functioned as an agency of the state and was
subject to detailed governmental regulation. The arrangement effectively
limited the number and influence of the clergy. By 1889 there were a scant 700
priests to minister to some 14 million souls. Order priests maintained a slim
measure of autonomy. The secular clergy were largely untrained; the literature
of the period is rife with references to their defects. They were, as one
historian put it, "conspicuous neither for their celibacy, erudition nor
personal dignity."

     The situation improved dramatically in the twentieth century. The church
had autonomy in the Old Republic and enjoyed substantial influence during the
dictatorship of Getulio Vargas (see The Vargas Era, 1930-45, ch. 1). The
number of dioceses, parishes, and seminaries grew astronomically. Nonetheless,
understaffing was a continuing and growing problem. In the mid-1970s the
official figures noted that there were more than 12,000 Catholics for every
priest. Further, about half the clergy were foreigners. Of nearly 6,000
parishes, roughly 95 prevent were urban. Most Brazilian clergy came from large
(seven or more children) rural families; the priesthood represented an avenue
of upward mobility. Many candidates came from the Italian and German immigrant
communities in the south; the number of seminarians was continuing to fall in
both absolute and relative numbers.

     The dearth of trained clergy limited the possibilities for religious
orthodoxy. Rural neighborhoods might be visited by a priest once a year. The
clergy who were in rural residence were typically attached to a plantation;
often being the owner's son, the rural priest's theological training was
minimal. In the absence of qualified religious practitioners, the populace
improvised both in practice and in doctrine.

     Neighborhood Catholicism (Catolicismo de bairro) is replete with local
saints' festivals and pilgrimages to sundry shrines. Indeed, personal saints
and household shrines are the mainstays of the average Brazilian's worship.
Saints mediate for the individual, who, in return, professes unswerving
loyalty to the saint's cult. The poor believe that however difficult divine
Providence may have willed their lot in life to be, a saint to whom one is
devoted cant still ameliorate some of the harsher conditions. Religious lore
is disseminated by itinerant troubadours who travel from market to market;
their songs can be bought in pamphlet form. The songs emphasize  the
importance of devotion to specific saints. A deep sense of personal belief and
devotion combines with relative laxity in formal religious practices. Most men
believe that religion is the domain and duty of women, attending Mass only on
special occasions. Much of their adherence is nominal and pro forma: the
ideal is to be baptized, married, and buried in church. There is as well a
strain of anticlericalism that is particularly pronounced among
Luso-Brazilians.

     Messianic movements are a periodic feature of popular religion. Most
center on a charismatic leader who denounces present corruption and foretells
future destruction for all but his or her followers. The leader seeks to found
the "New Jerusalem"-a veritable paradise on earth where the evils of the
present social order will have no sway. Small utopian communities periodically
spring up in the Northeast and the mountainous regions of Santa Catarina. The
fate of these movements at the hands of the local and regional authorities has
varied. Most end in open confrontation with the forces of law and order, their
adherents forcibly dispersed, often with loss of life. This was the lot of
perhaps the most famous messianic movement, that of the followers of Antonio
Conselheiro, who settled in Canudos in the Northeast. Like most adherents of
messianic movements, the followers a were ragtag lot of the rural poor, in
this case mostly Nordestinos displaced by droughts. Conselheiro fell out with
the local landowners and ecclesiastical authorities, and it took four armed
expeditions over a period of years to defeat his community. A few movements
have been more fortunate and were gradually integrated into the political and
economic life of the surrounding communities.

     A host of syncretic Afro-Catholic cults are also common. Although only
1.4 percent list their formal religious affiliation as spiritualist, something
in the order of one-third of the population is influenced to some degree by
spiritualist beliefs and rituals. Most of them, however, consider themselves
ardent Catholics. The cults typically link a West African god with a Catholic
saint. Leaders are commonly women; rituals run the gamut from those as staid
as a High Mass to others that have more in common with a revival meeting.
Spiritualism was formerly confined to the northeastern coast: now it can be
found everywhere from Amazonas to Porto Alegre.

     The tremendous expansion in church organization in the first half of the
twentieth century was geared to the middle sectors of society. The church
was largely a middle-class organization. It drew its personnel from the middle
and lower middle classes. It was supported by those groups and geared to their
needs. Education is a case in point. In the late 1960s Catholic schools
represented one-third of the institutions of higher education and nearly
30 percent of the country's secondary schools; at the same time, they
accounted for a scant 2 percent of the primary schools.

     The Second Vatican Council and the general tumult of the 1950s and early
1960s had a great impact on the clergy and hierarchy. There was a sense
that the New Testament might be seen as justification for social involvement.
Clergy were active in rural unionization efforts, particularly in the
Northeast. The Movement for Basic Education (Movimento de Educacao de
Base-MEB) was an extensive adult literacy program that aimed not only at
literacy but also at general political and social awakening.

     Significant aspects of the church's activist programs were dismantled,
and the more radical elements of the clergy were purged in the years following
the 1964 coup. Within the priestly hierarchy criticism was muted in the
midst of a general willingness to "wait and see." The hierarchy was split;
there was a substantial majority of moderates, flanked by conservatives and
activists. Since the late 1960s the hierarchy as a whole has been increasingly
critical of the social costs of Brazil's economic growth and the regime's
continued political repression. The nadir was in the mid-1970s when numbers of
the clergy were imprisoned and tried for subverting national security, and
bishops were pilloried in the press. By the end of the decade the Brazilian
hierarchy ranked as perhaps the most socially activist in Latin America. In
1980 the president of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, Dom Ivo
Lorscheiter, promised Pope John Paul II that his visit to Brazil would give
him "a good look at the thorns as well as the flowers."

     In the late 1970s and early 1980s there remained points of conflict. The
support of bishops for striking workers rankled the military rulers. The
Pastoral Land Commission cataloged land disputes in the countryside and
publicized information on the deteriorating position of the small landholders.
Likewise, the Pastoral Office on Indigenous People and the Indigenous
Missionary Council publicized the problems the Amerindians faced as national
expansion into the tropical forest continued. Meanwhile, the MEB had evolved
into a potentially important grass-roots force consisting of tens of thousands
of ecclesiastically based communities (see Liberal Groups, ch. 4).

     In the early 1980s over 6 percent of all Brazilians were Protestants-up
from a scant half-percent in the late 1930s. The Protestant community
contained a variety of mainline denominations as well as a proliferation of
fundamentalists and Pentacostal sects of more recent origin. Most of the
mainline adherents were descendants of the German immigrants who came in the
nineteenth century. Fundamentalists accounted for the precipitous rise in the
number of Protestants in the 1940s and 1950s. The first Pentacostals arrived
in Brazil soon after the sect got started in the United States; they
consolidated their tenuous position in the 1910s and 1920s. In the 1930s they
were less than 10 percent of all Protestants, by the mid-1970s more than 75
percent. The principal converts come from the urban lower and lower middle
classes. The conversion experience is associated with upward mobility. The
popular view attributes this to the fundamentalists' emphasis on hard work,
moral living, and abstention from alcohol and gambling.