The political activism of Brazilian priests in the 1960s and 1970s renewed scholarly interest in the links between faith and politics in Latin America’s largest nation. In his most recent contribution to scholarship on the church in Brazil, Kenneth Serbin situates the actions of twentieth-century clergymen within a broad historical context. Needs of the Heart thus provides a rich analysis of the historical development of the Catholic Church in Brazil. Much more than an institutional history, this work examines how, over the course of five centuries, priests navigated the divide between Europe and America as they participated in shaping a Brazilian nation as well as a distinctly Brazilian church.
Evangelization, Serbin cogently argues, was from the very start inextricably tied to modernization. Portuguese clergy advanced the imperial mandate of bringing Amerindians and African slaves into a European, Christian fold. Although they embraced that mission, they also transformed the European church...
