T - GIL FILHO, SYLVIO FAUSTO.pdf - Universidade Federal do Paraná

ABSTRACT
The work under the title "Roman Catholic Church: Borders of the Discourse and
Territoriality of the Sacred" was built upon the observation that the Church maintains
expansion and preservation strategies which configure specific territorialities of the
sacred. Our analysis takes as reference the Vatican II Council (1962-1965) and the
repercussions in the last quarter of the 20th century. Thus, we start from the
deconstruction of the official discourse of the Roman Catholic Church in four
escalating levels: Roman Sé, the Latin-American Episcopal Council (CELAM), the
Brazilian National Conference of Bishops (CNBB) and the Local Church of the
Archdiocese of Curitiba. We related the discursive plan with the symbolic
interpretation of the spatial practice of the Church galvanized by relationships of
power. Under this theoretical approach we redimensioned the analytic category
territoriality of the sacred that represents the key to the dynamics interpretation of the
institutional action of the Church. The dialectics between the discursive plan and the
spatial practice of the Church justifies our conception of a history of the space and
representations. According to the adopted procedures we concluded that two borders
of the Catholic territoriality settle down: the ecumenical, represented by the search of
the unit restoration of Christians under the shield of the Roman Catholic Church
before the impact of the religious pluralism and the missionary and evangelization
border which aims at the expansion and restructuring of the catholic practice. All
these forms demonstrate their own strategies of catholic territoriality after Vatican II
Council and the late reverberations in the Brazilian context. The impact of the
neopentecostal progress in the 1980's and 1990's and the crisis in the catholic
hegemony contributed to the new territorialities of the sacred in Brazil.
Key-words: History of the Roman Catholic Church; Religious Discourse;
Territoriality of the Sacred.
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