Espíritas de todo o Brasil, uni-vos! Meandros da unificação espírita na primeira metade do século XX

Abstract

In this article I analyze the process of institutional densification of Spiritism in the first half of the 20th century. The disputes over institutional and theoretical unification were driven, on the one hand, by the spiritists themselves, who embraced different visions of what they understood to be Spiritism and, consequently, their possible forms of organization and institutional legitimacy; on the other hand, responded to developments in the process of redefining relations between the State and religions in Brazil. The agitations, especially in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which resulted in the signing of the Aureus Pact, allow us to understand that, far from an apparently incomplete process, they have contributed, finally, to the preservation of the plurality of conceptions as a form of resistance to certain bureaucratic and doctrinal rigidity.