A Devoção nas CEBs: Entre o Catolicismo Tradicional Popular e a Teologia da Libertação

• Autor(a) principal: Domezi, Maria Cecilia
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_SP
• Texto Completo: https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/1986
• topic: CEBs; devoção tradicional; internalização; cultura popular brasileira; realidade histórica; Comunidades Eclesiais de Base; Devocao; CEBs; traditional devotion; internalization; brazilian popular culture; historical reality; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::SOCIOLOGIA

The force of devotion lived on the dividing line between traditional and popular catholicism and basic christian communities (CEBs), within the plurality of different forms of brazilian catholicism is the central point of this study. The empirical research limits itself to some networks of brazilian CEBs in the state of São Paulo. The starting point was a suspicion that allowing for the necessity to make credible certain existential situations, many of the members of the CEBs would preserve fragments of the old devotions in a parallelism with the theology of liberation. One questions the possibilities of this theology recovering and resignifying in its rational coherency, these fragments of belief and traditional rituals. In the CEBs persists a devotional "continuum" from early popular traditional catholicism. This "continuum" transmits itself from generation to generation, in a selective and recreative manner through rearrangements, translations, resignifications and constant reelaborations of images and concepts. The subjects preserve traditional religious values, the sacredness of images and a complex web of relations with the saints, crediting them with cultural recourses of the popular universe such as indetermination, ambiguity and ambivalence. The devotion to the Virgin Mary, resignified in the obligation with the praxis of the transformation of society, guards the mythical space of intimacy with the "Great Mother", clement, compassionate, and almost goddess, in equality with God the Father. The form of intelligibility of these subjects is more situated in "concrete thoughts" that are made up and remade through bricolage. The evidence that the devotional "continuum" preserves the central part of it's meaning, wherein the new attitudes encounter vital nourishment, turns the question in reverse: What is the force of the CEBs, looking from the central part of it's meaning, that preserve the mythical universe, the sacred cosmic order and the dynamic interventions of the saints? It is the very members of the CEBs, from within the brazilian popular culture, while being social and ecclesiastical subjects, assume the fragments of being "libertarians" of the theology of liberation, and the projects of a new sociaty defended by the social movements, and resignify them. Mythical space and historical reality are complemented, opening new perspectives when faced with contemporary problems in the encounter between tradition and modernity.