Brazil, Religion in

German immigration challenged Brazil’s established Catholic religion. Until 1808 the country had been closed to foreigners, all European people with the exception of Por- tugues people.

Portuguese were considered indigenous people. The arrival of European immigrants resulted in a discussion about the status of the Catholic religion as the state religion. Article 5 of the 1824 Constitution established that “the Roman Apostolic Catholic religion will continue to be the Empire’s religion. All other religions will be allowed with their domestic or private worship service, in houses designed for this purpose, without any appearance of a temple.” Congressmen, senators, and public servants had to swear an oath to defend the state religion.

The advent of the republic in 1889 resulted in the separation of church and state. This represented a profound change for the Catholic Church: its issues would no longer be settled by the state but in civil society and mainly within the religious community itself. After the proclamation of the republic and the influx of nonCatholic immigrants from Europe, the Catholic Church needed to learn how to coexist with other religions, since there was at least theoretically equality and freedom for all cults. However, there were more changes. Under slavery, the catechesis and baptism of slaves had been entrusted to slave owners. Religion was a matter of tutelage. The arrival of immigrants fostered resistance to this tutelage, particularly where the immigrants replaced slave labor: these immigrants did not accept the religion of the planters. In Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, the Catholic Church was forced to accept that small farmers could establish their own religious organization by choosing their own religious leaders and religious calendar.

Immigration and new political conditions forced the Catholic Church in Brazil to choose new forms of action.

Immigration ended religious exclusiveness. Although Brazil in 1808 had opened its ports to “friendly nations,” religion was not influenced by this economic move. When in 1819 King Joao VI invited Swiss settlers to come to Nova Friburgo, he limited his invitation to Catholics. However, some of the Catholic immigrants had been Protestants who, immediately after the arrival of the first Protestant minister in 1824, returned to the Protestant congregation. In the constituent assembly of 1823, some of its members proposed the separation of church and state and freedom of religion. It certainly was on the basis of this trend that the Brazilian government’s agent promised full freedom of religion to Germans who were willing to emigrate to Brazil. After the constituent assembly was dissolved, Emperor Pedro I promulgated the constitution, which stated in article 5 that the Roman Apostolic Catholic Church would remain the state religion.

Thus, Protestants were tolerated but could not be elected to public office and were subject to imprisonment if they attempted to propagate their beliefs. As such, they faced a situation in which they were actually second-class citizens. How could they obtain an identity card if only Catholicism was an official religion and only baptisms performed by a Catholic priest were recognized? Often the simplest solution was for the government to pressure them to convert. When larger groups of Protestant settlers were concentrated in the same area, however, the imperial government provided pastors for them, although in insufficient numbers.

Nonetheless, there were problems. In 1864 Pastor Hermann Georg Borchard was arrested in Sao Leopoldo because he had led a funeral procession wearing his clerical robe. According to the government official in charge of the case, he was trying to propagate his Protestant religion and thus violated the constitution. The situation of Protestant marriages was even worse since there was no registry office for them.

The only valid marriage was a Catholic one. Those who did not want a Catholic ceremony lived in concubinage and had illegitimate children, who were not allowed to inherit the property of their non-Catholic parents. When the marriage of Protestants was at last legally regulated, a decree dated October 21, 1865, demanded that the children of mixed marriages be baptized in the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, this decree was a step forward, since it allowed non-Catholics to legally marry in the presence of a pastor and ensured that their marriage had the same legal standing as a Catholic marriage.

Other problems remained, however. For example, all cemeteries belonged to the Catholic Church. Dissident Christians could not be buried in them. Only the first republican constitution of 1891 changed this situation by declaring the cemeteries to be public. For this reason, Rio Grande do Sul created cemeteries next to chapels, and in Sao Paulo field cemeteries were established.

The immigrants profoundly altered the physiognomy of religion in Brazil. Aside from the Protestant episodes that occurred in the sixteenth century (in Rio de Janeiro) and the seventeenth century (Dutchmen in the northeast), the nineteenth century brought to Brazil for the first time on a permanent basis Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Muslims, Buddhists, and social and political dissidents such as Carbonari, Liberals, Socialists, Anarchists. Catholics who came from Switzerland, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Veneto, Tyrol, or Poland barely acknowledged Brazilian Catholics as their equals in faith. The church they found in Brazil had been formed in the struggles with the Moors. It was a church of tournaments, in which Iberian, Azorean, and Jewish Christian traditions had been mixed with African and indigenous traditions. The mass of the Catholic population was made up of slaves, who, as such, had never had the right to legitimately constitute a family. The only sacrament they knew was baptism.

Because they could not form families, they also did not see the family as the place where religion is conveyed and prayers and devotions are practiced. This Catholicism knew another kind of family, which emerged on the basis of the baptism of infants. The unwed mother who brought the child to baptism was the “co-mother” of her master, if he had fathered the child, or other slaves. The godfather and godmother replaced the nonexistent family or, rather, constituted a new family. A spiritual kinship was created. Thus, the “co-father” did not marry the “co-mother.” To become the “co-father” of a former enemy was a way of sealing the reconciliation. Such an alliance and reconciliation was sealed and ratified by the church. To German Catholic and non-Catholic immigrants, these customs seem mysterious.

Throughout the first four decades of the nineteenth century, none of the German territorial churches showed any concern for German immigrants in Brazil. It was only in the wake of Prussian economic expansion—the search for markets—that such concern emerged, although it was motivated by economic interests and not by religious concern. In the 1860s German missionary societies sent pastors and missionaries not only to preach the gospel to the immigrants but also to preserve their German character. In this respect the intervention of consular authorities, particularly of Prussia and Switzerland, was important.

The Holy See and the Brazilian episcopate hoped to use German and Italian Roman Catholic immigrants to reform Brazilian Catholicism according to the restoration model by subjecting it to a romanization process. This project was challenged by the parishes that were already occupied, it failed to obtain the resources to maintain the priests involved in it, and individual foreign priests were entering the settlements, partly as immigrants. The solution was to completely entrust the parishes in colonization areas to missionaries (German Jesuits and Franciscans).

Although the settlers welcomed the clergy, conflicts emerged quickly. How should the self-organization be combined with the instructions given by the parson or bishop? What should be done about the ecclesial practices that often were unorthodox in the eyes of the priest who had an absolutely clerical view of the church? What about the “lay priests”? Soon repression set in, and the original church experience was destroyed. Lutheran immigrants had similar experiences. When ordained pastors arrived from Germany, the people who had led the congregations were dismissed as “pseudo-pastors.”

The immigrants, both Lutherans and Catholics, experienced simultaneously the Europeanizing of their religious beliefs and ways of worship. Among the Lutherans there was also an effort at “Germanizing” the immigrant population. Pseudo-pastors and pseudo-priests were dismissed. In the case of Catholics, the “empires of the divine,” which were places of worship associated with the Feast of the Eternal Divine Father of Jewish-Christian origin, were transformed into parsonages or schools. All property was registered as belonging to the parish and later the curia. The new congregations and apostolates began to shape the new form of the church: a sacramental one. The process of romanization and reform of Catholicism and the struggle for equal rights started with the arrival of German immigrants. It resulted in a significant change in the physiognomy of Brazilian Catholicism.

Martin Noberto Dreher

Brazil, Religion in

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