Leading editor and lay leader: culture, politics and Catholic journalism in Brazil in 1935
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4013/hist.2021.251.06Abstract
This article discusses the emergence and consolidation of a political-cultural project of the Catholic intellectual elite in Brazil that was based on Centro D. Vital, aimed at working with the so-called ‘Boa Imprensa’ as a form of mediation between the religious, the political and the social. The choice of this approach fits into a classic problem in historiography about the reorganization of Catholicism in Brazil: the engagement of Catholic intellectuals in the use of means dear to modernity – the Press –, which had been the target of their own criticism. We seek to highlight the specificities of the religious expressions and political attitudes of two Catholic periodicals, Revista A Ordem, from Centro D. Vital of Rio de Janeiro, and the daily A Ordem, the unofficial organ of the Diocese of Natal. The methodology used is the analysis of the editorials and articles of the periodicals, focusing on the examination of the contents on the topic of communism until the Communist uprising of 1935. The research seeks to explain the investment in Catholic editorial activity as a practice of aggregation and defense, which prepared religious ideals, created and shared a political culture integrating the various spatialities of Catholicism in the Brazilian territory. This interdependence in the Catholic field made possible the existence of an informal press network centered in Rio de Janeiro. The article advances the idea that the function of publishers and editor of the periodicals was linked to political action in such a way that it would end up being assigned a leadership role over the nascent Catholic laity.
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