“Por mercê de Deus e da Santa Sé”: as representações do projeto de restruturação católica no bispado de Dom Antônio Manoel Castilho Brandão, Alagoas (1901-1910)

Abstract

On July 2, 1900, the papal bull Postremis hisce temporibus of Leo XIII dismembered the Alagoan territory of the diocese of Pernambuco, allowing the formation of its own bishopric. For the first bishop was appointed Antônio Manoel Castilho Brandão, until the time prelate responsible for the diocese of the state of Pará and heir of the priestly formation of the Seminary of Olinda, main agent of diffusion of ultramontane thought in the Northeast during the second half of the XIX century. The episcopal authority, by assuming the new ecclesiastical jurisdiction, began a process of ordering its institutional bases, aligned with the project of internal restructuring that the Catholic Church was going through, which in the academic productions was called "romanization", in allusion to the systematic centralization exercised by the Roman Curia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this way, the research aims to study this mechanisms related to Catholic structure in the diocese of Alagoas, through the analysis of the collections of the Metropolitan Court of Maceió (MCM) and the National Library Digital Periodicals (NLDP) in the conjuncture that corresponds to the government of the first bishop of Alagoas. Through them it's possible observe the discourses and positions of ecclesiastical authority in relation to matters of an administrative and patrimonial character, clerical framework and monitoring of services provided by religious confraternities. These actions make possible the insertion of the diocese of Alagoas in a greater conjuncture to understand that the first prelate sought to articulate its action with the guidelines of the Latin American Plenary Council, which took place in 1899, and whose guidelines would influence the Catholic institution to new imposed changes in the political and social field throughout Latin America, until the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, in the early 1960s.