No shortcuts to revolution: the Catholic Church in Brazil and the conformation of the left-wing Catholic intelligentsia (1950-1985)

Abstract

The historical course of the Catholic Church in Brazil allows to observe the original characteristics that acquired as a Latin-American Church from the decade of 1950. Since in this period it begun to be formed a catholic intellectuality of left, that in 1970 linked with the Theology of the Liberation. The analysis of the institutional trajectory and of the religious intellectuality in Brazil shows a continuity in certain religious intellectual practices recovered by the liberation theologians and re-formulated in view of the new historical conjuncture. The present article explores the relation between the Catholic Church and the Brazilian State in its diverse stages, considering the precedents of priests linked with movements of political emancipation, to study in depth the constitution and radicalization of this intellectuality during the military dictatorship of 1964; that reverberated in the shape of vast social movements that last at present.