Cartuxos em casa, apóstolos nas aldeias: a espiritualidade lazarista e a reforma católica no bispado de Mariana (1820 -1890)

Abstract

Created in the XVII century by Saint Vincent de Paul, the Congregation of the Mission become one of the most important forces of the catholic reform in France. Using the impersonal system of circulation of ideas, typical of the rhetoric-theological regime in which they were inserted, the membres this comunity desenvolved one piety which contemplated at the same time one ascetic moral rigorism and one strong sense of to preach missions, how was common in others religious comunitys in its times. Once they had organized and systematized these principles into the Common Rules or Constitutions of the Congregation of the Mission, the Lazarists consolidated a spirituality that lasted for several centuries. In the year 1820, from Portugal, arrived in brazilian lands the first vincentians fathers which were established in the Serra do Caraça, where they founded one school and one advanced post to the missions. While here, the lazarists performed activities very similar to those carried out in France in the 17th century, that is the missions and the formation of the clerics. To help them in thes affairs the lazarists appropriated to their secular spiritual corpus impressing on their actions: the morally rigid and ascetic vocation and at the same time developing zeal for the preaching of the gospel in the rural communities in the Province of Minas. Due to the historical gap that separates the lazarists of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it is to be expected that we find not only continuities, but also many discontinuities between the practices of the foundation and those of nineteenth-century Brazil. An example of this is the greater attention given by the "brazilian" Lazarists to the formation of national youth and also a project by these missionaries to implement, together with their other religious offices, the notion of a Catholic civilization in the molds of ultramontanism. Thus, the present work, in addition to performing an analysis of the lazarist spirituality, intends to understand how the re-readings and appropriations of the same were mobilized in the scenario of Catholic reform in the Empire of Brazil during the period in which these religious were here.