On Liberty and Order: Brazilian Catholic intellectuals 1960-1970

• In Event: Brazilian Identity in Development and Post-Development Contexts

Abstract

Can the Latin American Church be reduced to a reactionary right or revolutionary left? In order to show that the church articulates and negotiates a complex discourse and epistemology vis-à-vis modernity, I propose a revisionist history of the relationship between democracy, authoritarianism, and Catholicism in Brazil. The existing literature divides the Brazilian Church between radical collaborationist groups, the reactionaries were the Tradição, Família e Propiedade and integralist Plínio Salgado (Dutra, 1999, 2012) and the progressives were the Centro Dom Vital, which according to traditional historiography began as a center for reactionary thought and ended up as a voice for progress after their editor, Alceu Amoroso Lima, embraced Liberty as a concept in the struggle for human rights (Rodrigues, 2005;Costa, 2010; Carneiro Junior, 2011). In another string of development, radical priests embraced Liberation Theology after the failures of the dictatorship’s economic miracle (Dodson 1984). Such historiographies rely too heavily on ideas of rupture, and exclude from history efforts of Catholic newspapers to adjust to the early tensions brewing between the socially conscience Brazilian hierarchy and a dictatorship that appealed to middle-class interests in a time of economic crisis (O’Donnell, 2009). Through primary analysis of the daily newspaper O Diario de Belo Horizonte and the weekly O Lutador, both mainstays of the Catholic press in Brazil during the 1960s, this project will draw a complex picture in which anti-modernist Catholic philosophy both protected marginal left-wing Catholic groups and thinkers, and publicly supported the “cleaning operation” and market-friendly government policies.

Author

• Travis Knoll