Entre Deus e o grande arquiteto do universo : relações conflituosas entre a igreja católica e a maçonaria em Pernambuco (final do século XIX início do XX)

Abstract

The change of the country's political regime, from the Monarchy to the Republic, shook the relations between Freemasonry and the Catholic Church, at the same time that a valorization of the liberal discourse and a depreciation of the conservatism was found, this was due a lot to the secularization of the society and the "separation" between Church and State. Amid the political turmoil were: the Freemasons who defended a liberal and scientistic ideology; and Catholic intellectuals who valued a Christian culture, focused on traditionalism and conservatism. With this in mind, our objective is to analyze the conflicts between Freemasons and Catholics in Pernambuco during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in order to understand how the relations of political-social ideological disputes, in the social field. This study also deals with the relations of conservative versus liberal conflicts in the city of Garanhuns, represented respectively by Integralists and Freemasons. The conflict of the two institutions in the city exemplified a fraction of the disputes that took place in the country between the followers of Plinio Salgado (the integralist leader) and the Freemasons. These conflicts, apart from being related to their divergent ideologies, were also linked to the political party choices of the period, which was limited in the presidential elections of 1938. For this study, we analyze discourses of Masonic and Catholic newspapers to observe their conflicts of intolerance, as well as their debates on politics, morals and philosophy. Still in these forms, we realized that the writing and publication of the newspapers themselves were strategies to fight the "enemy" who were fighting in the stories.