Structures of catholic territoriality in Brazil

Abstract

This essay, under the title "Structures of Catholic Territoriality in Brazil" was built on the premise that the Roman Catholic Church maintains expansion and preservation strategies which are led by certain structures of the territoriality of the sacred. The presence of the Catholic Church in gradually more urban and cosmopolitan realities demonstrates several institutional arrangements in the maintenance of the territorial hegemony of the sacred before the secularization process and the diversity of no-Catholic religious identities. The present Brazilian city is the realization of a secularized world which once was eminently ecclesiastical. Although, the secularization of the territory of social practices is evident, the spaces of the representation of the sacred and the religious practices are among the social dynamics of the city. In this sense, the secularization is much more the process of loss of the ecclesiastical authority in the contemporaneous culture than a proper exile of the sacred. We relate the discursive plan with the symbolic interpretation of the spatial practice of the Church which is galvanized by the relationships of power.