Continuing research begun for his earlier book (1966) on Dom Vital and the Religious Question (1872-1875), Nilo Pereira searches the newspapers of Recife to elucidate the historical setting of the church-state crisis. The author does more than provide a précis of intellectual trends; he enunciates his own notion of how the Brazilian relates to religion. For him the Brazilian is unique to the degree that belief and unbelief may coexist harmoniously within a single person. While conceding that authentic religious expression alters as life experiences alter, Pereira believes that D. Vital continues to have a large Brazilian following because the fidelity, the heroism and the authenticity of his stand, for his time, has a timeless appeal.
The view of some Liberals that Dom Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira, bishop of Olinda-Recife, was un-Brazilian in his conception of the church and of Catholicism is unacceptable to Pereira. In his view the Jesuit missionaries of colonial Brazil impregnated Brazilian culture with Catholicism. Vital asked only that the two jurisdictions operative in Catholic Brazil, the civil and the episcopal, be clarified and that the frontiers be respected.
For Pereira the church-state problem grew out of the anachronistic Article 5 of the Brazilian constitution that envisioned a Portuguese-type of church-state union. In civil affairs the Brazilian rulers repudiated all subservience, yet arrogated to themselves the right to discipline the religious sentiments of citizens. The official stand resulted in the formation of a state Catholicism that took no account of the religious sentiments of the people, nor of the official church. Thanks to prelates like Dom Antônio de Macedo Costa, the emperor and his Council of State could not remain ignorant of the religious anachronism, even though they took no steps to alter it.
Besides presenting a careful analysis of newspaper opinion running the gamut from ultra-liberal to ultramontane, the author makes use of Dom Vital’s summary of the Religious Question prepared for the Holy See and published in Rome (1875). This valuable document is rare; hence the treatment given here is most useful.
