Religious Culture and Political Culture: political and religious conflicts between Freemasons, Jansenists and the movement of Catholic Reaction in Pernambuco, Brazil, between 1910 and 1930

Abstract

This paper is based on historical and sociological research that we carried out in the PhD course in Social History of Political Relations. The main challenge of our theme was the historical study of the confluence between religious culture and political culture in the northeast of Brazil – specifically in Pernambuco: one of the largest action centers of the Catholic Reaction Movement in Brazil. We investigated political and religious conflicts between Jansenists, Freemasons and Jesuits for hegemony in the educational field in the northeast, in the first decades of the 20th century, between 1910 and 1930. Thus, we highlighted the political effects of the field dispute in illustrated Catholicism and in the intellectual production of Professor Alfredo Freyre – father of the Brazilian writer and social scientist Gilberto Freyre – as well as the action of the Roman Church with the traditional catholic families in the region.