Das terras baixas da Holanda às montanhas de Minas. Uma contribuição à história das missões redentoristas, durante os primeiros trinta anos de trabalho em Minas Gerais

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to offer a contribution to the history of the Redemptorist missions, during the first thirty years of their work in Minas Gerais, Brazil. The Dutch Redemptorists Fathers arrived in Brazil on Sunday, the second of July eighteen ninety-three. The religious situation that they found in Brazil was marked by what usually called “popular Catholicism”, a religious trait noted by devotionalism laic and social , which becames target of a movement towards the reform of the Catholic Church in Brazil and came to be known as “Romanization”. In such a notion, the coming of the European missionaries to Brazil, in that end of the century, came to be regarded by the Sociology of Contemporary Catholicism as a mission led by Rome, the missionaries being “agents of Rome”. A generalization of the notion of “Romanization” placed the missions as a mere chain of transmission commanded by Romam Curia. Based on several documents and testimonials about that time, this thesis intends to demonstrate that the coming of the Redemptorist missionaries did not suggest that connotation and, on the contrary, their missionary work was permeated by hesitations, particularities and dynamics inspired by the charisma of their founder, Aphonhus Maria of Ligory, as well as by the ideals and projects of the Congregation, at that end of a century marked by the missionary expansion. Another relevant aspect to be highlighted is the fact that the popular religious expression was not extirpated by the missionary work, whose main purpose was the indoctrination and regeneration of the custums. The confrontation between popular and renovated Catholicism was not marked only by impositions and resistances but also, by flexibilization, porosity and mutual changes. In the Conclusion, the thesis tries to demonstrate that the missionary work of the Redemptorists, during those first thirty years, left important marks in the renewal of the custums and on the formation of a social conscience in the Brazilian Catholicism of those days.