Religious Issue

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.

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.

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.

If we now descend to the uncultured strata of our society, which certainly constitute four-fifths of the population [...], excluding the slave population that is totally fetishistic, despite the Catholic label that covers it, we are left with a large fraction that lives engulfed in the deepest primitive polytheism".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.

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.

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.

[6][7][8] 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 (1869-1870).

"[13] 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.

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.

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.

[19] 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[20] 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.

For liberals, Protestant immigrants should be preferred because they were more "modern" and far above Catholics in love of work, education, industriousness and morality,[23][24][25][26] but the Church saw the introduction of Protestantism as a threat to Brazilian traditions and a potential source of social conflict.

Outraged, Freemasonry, uniting the two Grand Orients, one under the aegis of Rio Branco and the other directed by Saldanha Marinho, asserted its strong presence in the Senate and in the Chamber of Deputies to unleash a war in the press against the episcopate.

The prelate also began publishing a series of measures and decrees censuring brotherhoods that had Mason members and punishing recalcitrant priests, including some who were prominent political figures.

Intensely pressured by the Freemasons, and with the government fearing that it would take the conservative cabinet with it, the appeal was accepted and forwarded to the president of the province, Henrique Pereira de Lucena, who questioned the bishop and asked him for an explanation.

[30][32] Dom Vital did not retract, but in his defense he claimed that the imperial approval — which authorized the functioning of Freemasonry in Brazil, repelling the condemnation of the Church — was a doctrine condemned by Rome; that even if it were an accepted doctrine, it would not cover the period in which the bulls In Eminenti (1738), by Clement XII, and Provida Romanorum Pontificum (1751), by Benedict XIV, were published, recognized throughout the kingdom of Portugal and its colonies when the consent was suspended there; and finally that even the defenders of the imperial approval recognized that it did not apply to ecclesiastical censures and penalties.

Only on 20 December did the report from Penedo reach Caravelas, but on 27 September an order had already been issued for the Crown prosecutor, Francisco Baltazar de Oliveira, to file a formal complaint against Dom Vital, accusing him of disobedience and to make war on the government, the Criminal Code and the Constitution.

[42] On 29 April 1876, the pope addressed the encyclical Exortae in ista ditione to the bishops, warning that the lifting of interdicts in no way meant a tolerance for Freemasonry, on the contrary, it remained punished with excommunication.

[41] Contrary to the emperor's prediction, the amnesty, despite officially ending the religious issue, not only did not solve the problem the crisis had raised, but also aggravated it, weakening the position of the monarchy in the eyes of public opinion.

[28][44][45] For Luiz Eugênio Véscio, the incompatibility between Church and State, explained by the religious issue, intensified the desire for the opening of independent channels of expression in many people, specific to each sphere.

[46] And little by little the old padroado regime was being dismantled: the decree of 19 April 1879 on free education exempted from the oath of allegiance to Catholicism — or to any creed — public servants in primary and secondary schools; the electoral reform instituted by the Saraiva Law, of 9 January 1881, authorized people of any religion to become eligible.

In fact, the previously disunited republicans, worsening the crisis, as José Ramos Tinhorão picturesquely described,[49] took advantage of the moment of confusion to join forces and unfurl their flags: the immediate separation between Church and State, the full freedom of worship and perfect statutory equality between them all, the separation of secular teaching from religious teaching, the secularization of cemeteries, the institution of civil marriage and civil registration of births and deaths, and, of course, the adoption of the republican regime.

In the words of Cesar Vieira, "other ingredients would be added to the conflict, increasing the degree of dissatisfaction and raising the spirits of Freemasons, republicans, positivists and the military themselves, who, led by marshal Deodoro da Fonseca, overthrew the 36th Cabinet of the Empire and proclaimed the Republic on 15 November 1889".

[44] Among these "other ingredients" were, as Cristiano Ottoni observed at the time, the natural evolution of the idea of republic and the massive rejection of monarchy by slaveholders, who saw themselves stripped of their main workforce with the abolition of 1888.

It is significant, in this sense, that Pope Leo XIII stated to president Campos Sales in 1898 that "the Church feels better today in Brazil with its republican institutions than under the fallen regime".

[52] Pope Pius IX's successors issued several other documents condemning Freemasons; the same Leo XIII in the bull Humanus genus persisted saying that Freemasonry was the "incarnation of the Devil", which came to cast a heavy shadow on the popular imagination and create a conspiracy theory, largely because the organization continued to be a secret society, claiming that what its members preached about patriotism, solidarity, beneficence, religious tolerance, equality and fraternity, were nothing but decoys that concealed dangers and subversion and sought the destruction of humanity.

Again invoking principles of ultramontanism, direct reference was made to the basic problem that had not been resolved in the Empire and that until then under the Republic had remained dormant, insisting, as Schallenmueller said, "on the return of that ancient symbiosis with temporal power".

Several intellectuals, such as Jackson de Figueiredo and Alceu Amoroso Lima, embraced the Catholic cause, and countless lay societies dedicated to militancy emerged.

During this period, the activism of Cardinal Leme stood out, who in 1921 approved the foundation, among others, of an association symptomatically called Centro Dom Vital, conservative and right-wing, which was supposed to expand the penetration of the intellectual apostolate in the country.

In 1937, still on Leme's advice, in the wake of rapprochement with integralism and fascism and the fight against communism, another of his Catholic projects, Vargas did not resume commercial relations with the Soviet Union.