Entre o Syllabus e a Constituição moderna: debates políticos em torno da questão religiosa (1872-1875) no Brasil

Abstract

This work is the result of a research about the relationship between the church and the state in Brazil during the nineteenth-century. The aim is to present an overview of the political debates around the Religious Question, which was the main event in the Brasilian Second Empire (1842-1889) when part of the clergy acted against the Brasilian imperial policy, whose discussions went through the Senate, the House of Representatives, the State Council, the Judiciary, and a society as a whole, especially in newspapers, between 1872 and 1875. The conflict arose from the attempt to bishops lined up with the ultramontanism who wanted to separate Catholic worship from Freemasonry practices. The Religious Question in Brazil actually is a real clash between the defense and extension of liberal principles of the Imperial Constitution of 1824 versus the global movement of the Catholic Church to condemn the liberalism, as prescribed in the Syllabus - a document released in 1864 by the Pope Pius IX with a list of 80 errors of the modern society. In this perspective the dissertation is divided into two parts. The first one deals with the concept of secularization and the policy framework across the Catholic religion in Europe. And the second is about the Religious Question in Brazil and four different positions on the relationship between political and religious power, which were expressed in the 1870s.