Mabel Salgado Pereira Dom Helvécio Gomes de Oliveira, um ...

Abstract
This work is dedicated to the historical study of the religious Helvécio
Gomes de Oliveira’s trajectory, member of the St. Francis de Sales
Association, and his actions inside the Catholic Church, from 1888 to
1952. The religious developed a significant role in the Brazilian
Catholicism’s dimension, especially in the movement known as neo-
Christianity, in other words, the approximation between the State and
the Catholic Church. Dom Helvécio was ahead of one of the most
important Episcopal Sees of the country in the first decades of the
twentieth century, in Mariana/MG, occupying the position during the
longest Minas Gerais’ episcopate, 37 years of government. The thesis
tries to understand the transformations which the Brazilian Catholic
Church pass through since the initiation of the boy Helvécio, held in the
first Salesian educational institution established in the country, the
school Santa Rosa in Niterói/RJ, until his achievement to the national
episcopate. This work follows his entire trajectory and analyses his
actions with the aim to demonstrate the link between individual –
religious - society, the constant search for the efficiency in the project of
neochristianity.
Keywords: Dom Helvécio, Brazilian Catholicism, Salesians,
Ultramontane Reform, neochristianity, institutional biography.
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