Religious Issue
The Religious Issue was a crisis that took place in the Empire of Brazil in the 1870s, which, having started on 3 March 1872 as a confrontation between the Catholic Church and Freemasonry, ended up becoming a serious state issue. Its causes can be traced back a long time, based on irreconcilable divergences between ultramontanism, liberalism and the padroado regime, and on complex aspects of Brazilian culture. It led to the imprisonment of two bishops and contributed to the fall of the cabinet of Prime Minister José Paranhos, the Viscount of Rio Branco.
The issue evolved centered on the actions of bishops Dom Vital and Dom Macedo Costa, ardent defenders of ultramontane Catholicism. Based on papal ordinances not approved by the Brazilian Empire, they interdicted brotherhoods under their jurisdiction for keeping Freemason members in their circles, and refused to lift the interdicts after express order from the government, since such associations were also governed by the secular power. It was then judged that they violated the Constitution of the Empire and incurred the guilt of civil disobedience, being arrested and sentenced to forced labor.
A short time later they were granted amnesty, but that did not quell the fierce public debate that broke out regarding the union between Church and State, on the contrary, the problem remained under discussion, adding other ideological and social elements and increasingly extreme factions, weakening the authority and the prestige of the monarchy in Brazil. For this reason, the religious issue is considered one of the most striking moments of the Second Reign and one of the factors that precipitated the fall of the monarchy in Brazil, but its analysis remains controversial. With the advent of the First Brazilian Republic, the separation between religious and secular powers was formalized.
Although usually circumscribed in the bibliography to the episode of the bishops, the religious issue in its broadest sense, an expression of a complex and dynamic social and cultural reality, resurfaced with force during the Vargas Era, with the Church regaining great political influence and constitutionally reacquiring several of its former privileges. According to some authors, its effects also reverberated throughout the second half of the 20th century.
Background
In a tradition that had been inherited from the Portuguese Empire, the padroado regime was still in force in Brazil. It was a legal instrument by which the Holy See attributed to the State the responsibility for building temples, organizing brotherhoods, appointing priests and bishops to their respective jurisdictions and providing for their material needs, in such a way that the church members became State employees. This transfer of attributions was justified by the Church as being a privilege granted to civil administrations that demonstrated dedication "to spreading the religion and as a stimulus to future good works". If the padroado imposed important commitments and costs on the State, it also brought advantages, not only political, due to ecclesial support for the reigning dynasty and government programs, but also administrative, since the Brazilian Church had been assuming virtually all of public education, assistance and public services such as registration of births, marriages, baptisms and deaths for centuries.Reinforcing the connection between the two powers, the Brazilian Empire had defined Catholicism as its official state religion, as expressed in Article 5 of the 1824 Constitution. Although other religions were authorized in domestic worship and persecution for reasons of conscience was prohibited by the same Charter, in practice, the officialization of the Catholic cult excluded those who had not previously sworn allegiance to it from access to public offices. At the same time, the State reserved the right to exercise control over ritual prescriptions and canonical norms emanating from the Holy See if they invaded the secular sphere, if it considered them offensive against the principle of national sovereignty, if they violated Brazilian laws and if they limited autonomy of monarchical power, being able to declare them null and void within Brazilian territory, which was known as the privilege of approval.
Harmony reigned for a long time, albeit at times somewhat tense, between the civil and religious spheres, despite the implicit inconsistencies between Brazilian culture and legislation and the orthodox practice of Catholicism, a harmony that, according to Roque de Barros, can be explained by the looseness of religious customs in the country. For the historian, even if the overwhelming majority of Brazilians declared themselves to be Catholics, what was observed was a high degree of freedom and arbitrary interpretations of the religious canon, freedoms that were not only tolerated but also practiced by the national clergy. An observer at the time, Pereira Barreto, described the situation in the following terms:
While the people continued with their religious practices tinged with folklore and syncretism, and, uneducated, remained very far from the avant-garde thinking of the time, the elites immersed themselves in a sea of new concepts, doctrines and ideologies, such as the Enlightenment, Freemasonry, scientism, and others that marked the transition from the 18th to the 19th century and still remained influential, bundled in the broad denomination of liberalism. This multiform liberalism was characterized, as a whole, by a spirit of progress, and expressed a deep desire for social, political, religious and humanistic renewal, where freedom of conscience was valued above all. Even a large part of the clergy was imbued with these doctrines, without perceiving any contradiction with the dictates of Catholicism or protesting against the regalist orientation of the institutional system. The discrepancies in relation to Rome reached the point where influential clerics such as priest Diogo Antônio Feijó, one of the regents during the regency period, preached the end of ecclesiastical celibacy, openly embraced liberal ideals and joined Freemasonry, which had been expressly condemned by apostolic constitutions with the penalty of excommunication. In short, strictly speaking, few people in Brazil were in fact Catholic at that time, even though they declared themselves to be; and therefore there was peace between the State and the Church.
Image:Pius IX.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|Pope Pius IX|left
This peace was illusory and precarious, and it would only be necessary for orthodoxy to stand up for it to be broken. And so it was when Pope Pius IX, continuing the trend of his predecessor Gregory XVI, began an aggressive campaign in favor of a return to the medieval way of life and the strict observance of the religious canon from 1848 onwards, condemning modern society on account of an alleged multitude of errors and vices, mainly all forms of "abominable" liberalism, nicknamed "the work of Satan", and claiming the absolute leadership of Rome in the conduct of all matters, whether religious or profane, in the doctrine known as ultramontanism, systematized in the encyclical Quanta cura and its annex, the famous Syllabus.
Pius IX launched a voluminous series of other encyclicals, bulls, briefs and other documents defending his point of view, reinforcing it with the conquest of the prerogative of infallibility for the papacy, erected in dogma in the First Vatican Council. The ultramontane doctrine soon found an echo in some prominent Brazilian clerics, such as bishops Dom Antônio de Melo, Dom Antônio Viçoso and Dom Pedro Maria de Lacerda, and in the more conservative sectors of civil society, including some higher schools. This group, by endorsing the pope's dictum through pronouncements, pastoral letters and intense publicity, began to contest the very constitutive bases of the Empire of Brazil by defending the supremacy of the Church over all other powers, although at no time was there any question of a formal separation between State and Church. Not only that; defending a radical moralization of society and the clergy and a rigorous religious orthodoxy, it clashed with deeply rooted habits in Brazilian culture. And as a corollary of their ideology, ecclesiastics recommended disobeying civil laws if they denied the primacy of religion or caused a problem of conscience in the devotee.
The newspaper O Romano, from Minas Gerais, since the 1850s already proclaimed:
Another example, by José Soriano de Souza: "There is no moral progress without the improvement of the spirit, and only Catholicism perfects it . It would be too much to wish for the formation of a Catholic party, which took to heart the defense of Catholic doctrines, and tried to pass them on to all acts of the political and social life of the nation, always in conformity with the rules and dictates of the Church". The reaction against ultramontanism was not expected either, given the strongly liberalizing context at the time, in the voices, for example, of Tavares Bastos and Barros Leite. Bastos said: "Let us rise, my friend, and let us hasten to fight the invisible and silent enemy that pursues us in the darkness. He is called the clerical spirit, that is, the corpse of the past; and we are the liberal spirit, that is is, the worker of the future". The other, speaking in the Senate, chastised the behavior of the clergy by saying: "Formerly the bishops among us took an oath to obey the King and not to do anything that could disturb the tranquility of the Empire; today they take no other oath than to the Holy See."
Image:Pedro Américo - D. Pedro II na abertura da Assembléia Geral.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|Emperor Pedro II in his "Throne Speech", painting by Victor Meirelles
Another fact relevant to the issue was the principle of monarchy by divine right, which gave the State a powerful support, invested it with a mythical aura and justified that religion was protected and given prestige through the official union between both, but placed it at the in an ambiguous position at the same time, as the tendency towards the secularization of society was unstoppable and liberalism was gaining force even in the legal and institutional spheres. Furthermore, the country's legislation was fundamentally contradictory and did not provide for a coherent legal solution to an open conflict over precedence should it arise, all the more so since emperor Pedro II was on the one hand jealous of his imperial prerogatives and, on the other hand, did not wish to absolutely break with the Church. Freemason Saldanha Marinho analyzed the dilemma as follows:
Completing the picture, other elements came into play shortly before the religious issue presented itself. Many liberals, including parliamentarians, took a radical approach, in which, faced with the contradictions that were proving to be increasingly insoluble within the current institutional framework, they began to defend the republican regime and openly demand the separation of Church and State, which had previously rarely been suggested in public, as it meant an offense to the Constitution. For researcher Antonio Carlos Ribeiro, "the confrontation was accentuated as the traditional, conservative and Romanist wings of the Church had difficulties with the advance of liberal ideas, and the Empire's liberal intellectuals and politicians were unconcerned, since without the placet of the Emperor no decision or instruction of Rome would come into force".
The progressive ideas of positivism, evolutionism, materialism and scientism also influenced the matter, which at this time became particularly important. The very conservative office of the Viscount of Rio Branco was preparing some far-reaching reforms, long demanded by the liberals, in the judiciary, public administration, party organization, education and the electoral system. The campaign in favor of the abolition of slavery in the 1870s also gained momentum with the enactment of the Free Womb Law in 1871. It was predicted that soon there would be no more slaves in Brazil, and with that the problem of where finding cheap labor became urgent, being the subject of constant debate in parliament and throughout society.
The Church contributed with important ideological elements for the legitimization of slavery, since slaves were private property and the right to property was an article of faith since the papacy of John XXII. Since the beginning of the century, programs had been tried to bring immigrants from Europe, who, in addition to lending their arms to farming, would colonize uninhabited regions, and since then thousands of settlers from Germanic, Slavic and other regions had immigrated, mostly Protestants, but preferred by the Catholic government, who regarded them as industrious, moral, and trustworthy. However, in the 1860s-70s, resistance developed to the idea of settling in a country where non-Catholics were in an unfavorable situation, a reality recognized by influential politicians and journalists such as the deputy Baron of Paranapiacaba, the minister of Justice Nabuco de Araújo and Tavares Bastos, exponent of the Liberal Party and being notorious for the difficulties that the first Prussians, English, Swiss and Ukrainians faced in adapting and integrating into Brazilian society and in guaranteeing their freedom of worship, despite official protection to immigrants.
On the other hand, liberals and Freemasons saw in the encouraged spread of Protestantism one of the ways to fight the influence of the Catholic Church, being a period in which several Protestant missionaries and educators from the United States worked in Brazil, creating a large number of followers and students and influencing in the country's politics through their links with powerful patrons. Also coming from there, many Protestant confederates and slaveholders sought a refuge in Brazil from the afflictions they experienced in the American Civil War. The government itself encouraged immigration to get soldiers for the Paraguayan War, specialized labor and farmers. For liberals, Protestant immigrants should be preferred because they were more "modern" and far above Catholics in love of work, education, industriousness and morality, but the Church saw the introduction of Protestantism as a threat to Brazilian traditions and a potential source of social conflict. In this way, with so many contradictions getting worse, in the Brazilian context, the system of "State religion" was patent as an anachronism, and the ground was prepared for the outbreak of crisis.