Tradicionalismo maquiado de progressismo: análise semiótica dos discursos do Padre Fábio de Melo

Abstract

Catholicism in Brazilian lands, still endowed with a certain socialhistorical prestige, has sought to reform its discourses, elaborating new strategies of communication, especially in the media. This article proposes to
examine the new strategies of communication adopted by the Catholic religious discourse, starting from the analysis of the discourse of Father Fábio de Melo in the television program “Spiritual Guiding”. The research aimed to examine the discursive strategies adopted by Father Fábio de Melo in his exhortation
– prioritizing verbal language, the contractual relations between enunciator and enunciatee were evaluated–, as well as to analyze the thematic-figurative covering of his counsels, to understand the semantic values underlying them, the axiological qualification that guides them. For the analysis of the content
of the selected video, we use the theoretical-methodological tools offered by the Greimasian semiotics, which aims to describe and explain, through the generative path of meaning, how texts say what they say, that is, how meaning is constructed in a given discourse. Based on one of the programs whose
theme was abortion, we show how the discourse delivered by one of the most celebrated priests in the Brazilian Catholic context tends to constitute implicit values that seek to respond to the needs of the Church in recovering the lost faith, disengaging from explicitly punitive sanctions, since after the Second Vatican Council the Church has experienced changes in the very structure of its way of thinking, approaching daily realities and, consequently, adopting a more pastoral and less normative approach. Being, therefore, a
change of mentalitywhich, although not in arevolutionary way, ispertinentto the socio-institutional contextualization of the Catholicism.