This brief account is eleventh in a series sponsored by Brazil’s Pastoral Institute, a division of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), which, however, bestows no recommendation. In a straightforward way chapters treat the cross, the oratory, the hermitage and chapel, the shrine, the pilgrimage, the brotherhood, the festival, and the procession. Much of the descriptive material is drawn directly from secondary sources (Vivaldo Coaracy, Heliodoro Pires, Walter Spalding, Oliveira Torres, Serafim Leite, Maynard Araujo, Francisco Rolim) as well as primary ones (Manuel Nóbrega, the 1707 Constituições da Bahia, Loureto Couto, Auguste Saint-Hilaire, Euclides da Cunha, José Lins do Rego).
Popular Catholicism was dominant until a century ago. With evident sympathy, Azzi distinguishes traditional from reformed Catholicism, which has been making headway in the city. He makes five points. Reformed Catholicism is medieval, not Tridentine; the cult of saints, the place of miracles, the making of vows attest extrasacramentalist behavior. Conversely, it is Lusitanian not Roman; as much as Renaissance churchmen, Portuguese colonists put their devotional stamp on Catholicism. Its lay side outweighs the clerical; within the Padroado, laymen were not mere attending worshippers, but active proponents whose brotherhoods initiated Catholic enterprises. By the same token, it is familiar as against sacramental; the family erected oratory, shrine, and chapel where devotions were observed. It is social as against individual; processions, pilgrimages, and saints’ days all work to socialize a heterogeneous populace.
Azzi’s study can be understood as the lay complement to, but without the radical slant of, his long section, “A Instituição eclesiástica durante a primeira época colonial,” in História da Igreja no Brasil (1977), by Eduardo Hoonaert et al.
