Lay Catholic brotherhoods constituted important religious, social, and civic associations among African-origin and African-descended people in Portugal, West Central Africa, and Portuguese America in the early modern period (1450–1850). Lay Catholic brotherhoods (irmandades), also known as confraternities (confrarias) and sodalities, functioned as spaces of devotion oriented around one or more patron saints. In the Portuguese Atlantic world, free and enslaved people of African origin and descent utilized the associations to prioritize collective devotion, mutual aid, and burial rites for members. Mutual aid could include small payments during illness, assistance with manumission process completion, and internment of deceased members under the auspices of the sodality.
Lay Catholic brotherhoods functioned as critical sites of transculturation and belonging for people of African origin and descent in the 1490s in Portugal, by the early 1500s in areas of West Central Africa with an entrenched Portuguese presence, and in Brazil beginning in the colonial period (1500–1822). Confraternities became a common facet of lived experience and religiosity for African and African-descended Catholic devotees across the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic world. Associations were governed by organizational charters generated by founding or elected directorate members that required approval from Catholic Church leaders, the Crown, and provincial-level state authorities. Confraternities had juridical personality and recognition from ecclesial and state officials as semi-autonomous entities or corporate bodies. Members could exercise and experience limited levels of autonomy, even in slave-holding colonial environments. Within brotherhoods in Portugal and in its overseas imperial territories, ethnic and racial stratification was predominant, but not absolute. Confraternities acted as institutional sites where West, West Central, and Southeastern African ethnic group identities held importance and deep social meaning across several centuries. Confraternity participants engaged baroque Catholicism, which emphasized collective action including celebration of the saints and related rites relying on music, movement, and festivities. Brotherhoods functioned as critical sites of proselytization, but also came to serve as spaces for local member imperatives that incorporated African cultural expression, esthetics, and worldviews.
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Black Brotherhoods in the Portuguese Atlantic
Alicia L. Monroe
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Ecclesiastical Geography of Colonial Brazil
Evergton Sales Souza
For many years Brazil was a mission land, a space for evangelization mostly occupied by non-Christian peoples and targets of the conversion work of Catholic missionaries. Furthermore, the slowness of the colonizing—and missionary—advance toward the vast sertões of Portuguese America meant that a large part of the territory remained outside the principal organizing institutions of the colonial space, among which was the diocesan church. However, by confusing the space effectively occupied by colonization with what would eventually form the extension of the territorial possessions of the Portuguese monarchy, the field was opened to mistaken perceptions about the presence and importance of the diocesan Church in colonial Brazil. Since 2000, the proliferation of studies about the episcopacy and different aspects of the structures and actions related to episcopal power has contributed to a change in the understanding of its role and relevance in the development of the Church and the Luso-American colony. Contemporary historians, more attentive to documentary sources related to diocesan administration, have sought to show that the diocesan geography of Portuguese America had greater complexity and importance than has been attributed to it by incautious researchers convinced they were aware of the limitations of the role played by secular clergy in the construction of the Church and Catholicism. Emerging out of recent 21st-century studies is a better knowledge of diocesan structures—bishoprics, ecclesiastic administrations, parishes, chapels—and the functioning of the mechanisms of pastoral vigilance and the punishment of deviants, whether they were clerics or simple believers. This demystifies the idea that the royal Padroado was a nefarious obstacle to the development of the diocesan church in Brazil and shows the importance of the study of diocesan geography not only for the understanding of the history of the Church and Catholicism but also for the development of colonial society.
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Heresies, Religious Persecution, and Intolerance in Colonial Brazil
Bruno Feitler
Portuguese America, or colonial Brazil, was a world of multiple cultures and peoples, integrating Amerindians, Europeans and enslaved Africans. However, this integration was carried out under the exclusive dominion of the Portuguese, for whom religious unity within Roman Catholicism was a political necessity. This fact was not apparent in the early decades of the 16th century when they first landed in what would become Brazil; however, with the beginning of effective colonization and the presence of missionaries in the 1540s, while religious strife in Europe was in ascension, there was no doubt. Although a local Inquisition tribunal was never established, intolerance was the norm, and religious persecution of acts and beliefs deemed heretical (or associated with them) was a reality. This search for Catholic orthodoxy and exclusivism was ensured in colonial Brazil mainly by three ecclesiastic institutes or organizations: Inquisition representatives, members of the secular clergy, and missionaries (Jesuits, but also Capuchins, Carmelites, and members of other regular orders). While not all had the primary objective of persecuting heretics, they considered religious homogeneity as essential and thus struggled to uncover and punish potential Protestants or crypto-Jews. They also confronted practices and beliefs of local origin on a much more regular basis, such as the santidade of Jaguaripe and the mandinga pouches and calundus of African origin, associating them with devilish customs and calling those practices and beliefs “inventions,” “abuses,” or “errors” rather than a more theologically established “heresy.”
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Pentecostalism in Brazil
R. Andrew Chesnut and Kate Kingsbury
Brazil was colonized by the Portuguese in the 1500s, and an integral part of conquest and colonization was missionary activity by Catholic clergy. Brazil, like all of Latin America, was Catholic for over four hundred years. However, in the early 1900s, missionaries from overseas came to Brazil extolling a new faith, known as Pentecostalism, that had its origins in the United States. This creed consisted of a charismatic Protestant movement that focused on baptism in the Holy Spirit. Pentecostal churches, originally founded by outsiders, soon began to burgeon under Brazilian leaders. Pentecostalism mushroomed in a brief span of time, proliferating across the nation and gaining popularity among immiserated urban dwellers. It has proven so popular among Brazilians that it has resulted in the pentecostalization of Christianity, in which the Charismatic Renewal has become the predominant form of Catholicism as the Church has struggled to compete with Pentecostalism over the past few decades.
There are numerous notable denominations that boast millions of members, such as the Four-Square Gospel, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and Assemblies of God. These churches proffer a range of religious products to the urban poor, ranging from Prosperity Theology to faith healing. Impoverished city dwellers, faced with limited opportunities and denied access to basic human needs, nevertheless seek to navigate the difficulties of their daily lives. Faced with somatic diseases and social distress, many seek sacred succor to surmount their troubles. This may lead them to the door of a Pentecostal church, where they are promised miracles and healing in exchange for steadfast piety and generous tithing. Many find empowerment through conversion and catharsis during spirited services, where they imagine that through sacred power they might be freed from material deprivation. Pentecostal leaders, such as Edir Macedo, a billionaire bishop, have acquired not only significant capital but also great influence over their congregants. Such is their sway on the vox populi that political leaders have sought the support of Pentecostal clergy to further their ambitions, such as the recently elected president Jair Bolsonaro, who won thanks to the Evangelical vote.
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Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil
Laura de Mello e Souza
Popular religiosity in colonial Brazil was marked by the process of colonization, which placed populations of differing ethnic and cultural origins together in dynamic and conflicting ways. On the one hand, the lived experiences of these various populations reflected the beliefs of their continent of origin: Europe, Africa, and America. On the other hand, they were unavoidably intertwined, giving rise to novel forms of religious practice. Heterodox behaviors were notable from the beginning of colonization, adding to the peculiarities of the slave system that constituted colonial life and defined its social relations. In a vast territory over which the surveillance and control of religious institutions—both ecclesiastical and inquisitorial—proved unworkable, daily experiences of religiosity became increasingly distinct from the more dogmatic and “official” traits sustained by the Catholic Church. A particular type of religiosity, as heterodox and mixed as the population itself, took shape within the limits of Catholicism while continuously escaping its confines. Catholicism endured from the earliest times as the guiding orientation of Brazil, supported by the Crown as well as regular and secular clergy alike. The education of the elites was Catholic, and many of the earliest writings about the new land of Brazil came from the quills of the pious, producing foundational images marked by religious metaphors. For these reasons, popular religiosity reveals a great deal about the nature of Brazilian culture, and it is necessary to analyze it within the context of broader dynamics that define popular beliefs that do not always fit within the orthodox guidelines of official Catholicism and erudition.
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Portuguese America and the Vocabulary of Colonial Poverty (1500–1750)
Renato Franco
At the beginning of the modern era, in Catholic spaces, the lexicon of poverty was linked to a vast semantic repertoire related to scarcity, impotence, and inferiority that was reorganized in theological and judicial sources after intellectual debates in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the 16th century, when it was possible to observe another moment of change in reflections on the poor in Europe, the political incorporation of the natives of the New World and the advance of the enslavement of Africans added new challenges to governing the “poor.” Not only because it was necessary to extend the use of the vocabulary of poverty to populations that were little or not at all known, but also because the experience of the Americas presented an ethnical dimension of previously unexperienced proportions. In this way, whether in the Iberian peninsula or in the Americas, references to the poor assumed political perspectives that sought to intervene in the daily life of communities and which organized themselves under the ethical and moral precepts of second scholasticism.
In Portuguese America, as colonization advanced, religious orders, ecclesiastic institutions, establishments that provided care and welfare, municipal councils, and administrative bodies formulated their own uses of this vocabulary through an intellectual heritage which added new forms of identification of shortage and necessity. Initially, this did not involve recognizing the material penury of city populations. Rather, it was concerned with developing justifications for governing free populations—whether Portuguese, Indigenous, African, or mestizo—which composed the political vocabulary of colonial spaces. In turn, enslaved Africans and indigenous people were integrated into specific social groups, defined by their judicial status and their moral minority, which excluded them from the civic language that characterized reflections on poverty in the Western tradition.
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Sexuality and Black Magic in Brazil
Kelly E. Hayes
Belief in the power of feitiçaria or black magic has both endured and continually changed over time in Brazil. However, black magic is a peculiar and protean thing. Rather than defining a specific set of ideas, practices, and objects, or a systematic body of knowledge, black magic is better understood as a type of discourse the social function of which is to stigmatize its referent as maleficent, immoral, or evil. Because of its negative connotations, black magic typically is a discourse of accusation rather than self-affirmation: People accuse others of practicing black magic rather than describing their own practices this way. Nevertheless, the dangerous potential attributed to black magic means that some people openly claim it as a source of power in certain circumstances.
Focusing on the various intersections of black magic and sexuality in Brazilian history reveals aspects of social life and categories of persons that elite authorities, in the effort to civilize and reform Brazil, identified as problematic. Because these shifted over time, different constellations of black magic and sexuality emerge as especially salient in different historical periods. In the colonial period (1549–1822), women’s love magic troubled ecclesiastical authorities as the Catholic Church struggled to establish its patriarchal vision of social and moral order over an unruly colony. Under the empire (1822–1889), black magic was associated particularly with the threat of black sorcerers whose perceived promiscuity and primitivity threatened the civilized society that elites envisioned. During the first Republican period (1889–1930), public officials used black magic as a catchall designation for a broad range of popular spiritual practices deemed illicit by the state in its struggle against social degeneracy and other ills.
The first few decades of the 20th century saw the consolidation of the Afro-Brazilian spirit entities Exu and Pombagira as distinctive apotheoses of black magic and sexuality in the Brazilian cultural imagination. Forged in the conjuncture of African and European traditions, these controversial yet extremely popular entities are said to work with both the “right hand” and the “left hand” and are called upon in situations marked by moral ambiguity. Their prominence in Candomblé and Umbanda is one reason that evangelical Protestant churches like the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD) consider Afro-Brazilian religions to be instruments of the devil and target Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners, objects, and spaces in their campaigns of spiritual warfare. More recently, discourse about black magic among evangelical Christians has centered on the violence and sexual immorality associated with the drug trade that has flourished in many Brazilian cities.
As a moral discourse that defines the licit by identifying the illicit, black magic is used in situations marked by struggles for social legitimacy and the access to resources and influence that such legitimacy enables. The protean nature of black magic means that it is endlessly adaptable to different social realities, from the struggles of Portuguese colonists in a new land to the urban violence associated with contemporary drug trafficking. And because questions of power are deeply embedded within the term, accusations of black magic seem to burgeon precisely in moments of social transformation when the status quo is in flux, centers of influence are being formed, and new patterns of social division or alignment are being established.
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Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil
Carole A. Myscofski
Women in colonial Brazil (1500–1822) were affected by the presence of the Portuguese Roman Catholic Church in nearly every dimension of their lives. The Catholic Church dominated the colonial religious and social world and, with the imperial government of Portugal, set and transmitted gender expectations for girls and women, regulated marriage and sexuality, and directed appropriate education and work lives. Even with the harshest restrictions, women were able to develop an independent sense of self and religious expression both within the Catholic Church and outside its reach.
Native Brazilian women felt the impact of the new faith from the earliest days of conquest, when their opportunities for religious influence expanded among the early colonists and missionaries. After the 1550s, however, new rules for belief and behavior gradually replaced indigenous culture. Offering the Virgin Mary as the ideal woman, the Church expected that indigenous women convert to Catholicism, work for the colonists, and marry according to traditional canon law. Portuguese immigrant women also faced the constraints of the early modern gender roles, with chastity, modesty, and submission deemed essential to their feminine nature, and marriage, domestic labor, and childcare their fate. Enslaved African women were compelled to accept Catholic teachings alongside the expectations of servile work and marginalization in colonial society. For each segment of colonial society, religious rules barely acknowledged the real abuses that afflicted women through the personal and sexual domination of colonial men, and women found little consolation in the ideals set for elite women.
Religion itself presented women with opportunities for personal development, and women found spiritual expression through votive prayers, cloistered convents, membership in religious brotherhoods, and covert religious and magical practices. European women used magical rites in defiance of Catholic teachings, while indigenous women preserved elements of their own healing traditions, and African women and their descendants created charms and celebrations that secured their separate religious identity.
