O confronto da fé ante o escândalo da pobreza: a emergência da opção preferencial pelos pobres na diocese de Propriá/SE (1968-1979)

Abstract

The essay that follows aims to analyze the emergency of "preferential option for the poor" in the Diocese of Propriá, situated to the North of the State of Sergipe. The change of place of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Propriá and modification in its line, following the Ecclesiological movement of renewal of the Catholic Church started in the late 1950, reverberated substantively in the context marked by the stiffening of the military dictatorship. The research seeks to find the origins of the dawn of an unprecedented "option for the poor" through research of the institutional aspects of the Catholic Church added to elements outside the phenomenon highlighted, take the political, economic and cultural situation of the period as an example which scans between the publication of the social encyclicals of Pope John XXIII and the beginning of the reflux of the movement of liberation theology. That way, State-if responses to the new ecclesial posture catalysers, in addition to capturing the reasons for its historic descent. One of the importance in studying the particular case of the Diocese of Propriá is the revelation of specificities of the progressive Church and its opposition to the dictates of incisive military dictatorship and the economic order, giving new directions to national policy and forming fighting instruments that sought to give protagonism and turn into subject historically marginalized strata of the historical society. Still the dissertation has the relevance of unveiling the articulation of sectors of civil society with the "state of exception", which worked in numerous instances as an extension of the private power of political leaders and the dominant classes.