Igreja Católica Romana em Curitiba (PR): estruturas da territorialidade sob o pluralismo religioso

Abstract

In the transformation process of Brazilian Catholicism, the regional focus links with the analysis of the local and global scale as extremely articulated dimensions. This articulation characterizes the local Church of Curitiba (PR) with a territoriality of two instances, influenced by scale tensions of global character peculiar to the head of the universal hierarchy of the Church and regional tensions specific of the local Church. Beyond these forces of endogenous character of the ecclesiastical structure, we also verified exogenous tensions of the Church itself, represented by non-catholic institutions and even secular institutions. The last quarter of the 20th century demonstrates a crisis of the dominant representation of the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil. The secular conjuncture of the cities and the retraction of the missionary spirit of the Church motivated the diagnosis of a certain stagnation of the symbolic domain of the Church. Moreover, the religious pluralism of the great urban centers coined a new reality, based on the growing questionableness of the myth of Catholic Brazil. The growth of pentecostal and neopentecostal religious movements represented in the decades of 1980 and 1990 a considerable impact on the way by which popular religiosity makes a second definition of the religious identity.