Die Sklavenbefreiung in Brasilien, eine soziale Frage für die Kirche? Die Katholische Kirche und das Ende der Sklaverei in der Kaffeeprovinz São Paulo, 1871-1888

Abstract

This study is Katharina Bosl’s doctoral dissertation as submitted to the Catholic University Eichstätt in 1997. It asks “whether and how Catholicism influenced the debate over the abolition of slavery [in Brazil] and what position the church took vis-à-vis its own historical involvement with slavery” (p. 16). The church’s adoption of social causes since Vatican II inspired Bosl, who characterizes her approach as “church history motivated by liberation theology” (p. 23). The study is an historical search for a liberating church in the decades before the abolition of slavery in 1888.The subject proves elusive: Bosl concludes that the Brazilian church played at best a minor role in the abolitionist movement. Clerics and religious orders owned slaves, the church defended slavery (despite occasional condemnations of slave abuse), and church leaders lent no support to the abolitionist movement. Having failed to find the liberating church, Bosl struggles to find a clear analytical focus. The second chapter, for example, retells the familiar history of slavery in Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century and then jumps to an entirely separate survey of the state of the church in São Paulo around 1850. The fifth chapter offers interesting discussions of the role of caifazes (groups encouraging slave flight from plantations) and black brotherhoods in the abolitionist struggle in São Paulo. Although Bosl infers an influence of Catholic religion on these movements, she acknowledges that the evidence is inconclusive and then oddly proceeds to document religious influence for African cults and Islam. The study is strongest when it firmly establishes church agency in the development of African slavery in Brazil. The opening chapter surveys the church’s involvement and response to slavery during colonial times and the fourth places the abolition of slavery in convents in 1871 within a trajectory of the religious orders’ general economic decline.The two remaining chapters go to the core problem: the politics of the Brazilian church hierarchy. Bosl never anchors the discussion in the context of romanized church doctrine, however, and thus misses the opportunity to deepen the analysis. The short third chapter on the lack of clerical involvement in the liberation of slave children in 1871 contrasts the positions of bishops and prominent abolitionists on the church’s role in the genesis of the free-womb law. Bosl refers to the church’s conflict with Brazilian liberals over freemasonry and ultramontane reorientation, locates the question of abolition between these ideological fronts, and concludes that “[a]n objective recognition and a real interest in the situation of the enslaved population did not take place under these circumstances” (p. 335). This appears apologetic in light of her evidence, in particular Joaquim Nabuco’s disgust at the church’s decision to prioritize economic interest and self-preservation over humanistic ideals. Bosl touches upon the importance of neo-Thomism and identifies the “collision of interests between the right to freedom and the right to property (also in people) as a contradiction that is difficult for our modern sensibilities to resolve” (p. 156). She never attempts to solve this historical puzzle, however, despite the paramount importance of property doctrine in explaining the hierarchy’s silence. The sixth chapter covers the bishops’ late, opportunistic conversion to the abolitionist cause, and Bosl highlights the church’s failure to develop a “social consciousness” for the fate of the Afro-Brazilians after abolition. To assess the kind and extent of social consciousness one could expect the Catholic Church to display in the 1880s, it would have been indispensable to discuss the Roman context. The Vatican first addressed social questions in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Labor”), the fruit of a decade of debate among Catholic social reformers. The encyclical described the “yoke of the laboring poor as little better than that of slavery itself” (Art. 3), suggesting that Vatican politics played a role in the Brazilian hierarchy’s sudden shift on abolition.Bosl’s study provides a good introduction to the history and historiography of slavery in Brazil for German readers, although those familiar with Brazilian and U.S. scholarship will find her bibliography dated. The parts on the history of Catholic institutions in São Paulo are interesting, as is the conclusion that the church played hardly any role in the abolitionist movement. Still, to fully answer the title question would have required more context. Bosl’s study also illustrates why inspiration by liberation theology, common in recent historiography, is a problematic starting point for understanding the earlier history of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Portraying its history from 1850 to 1960 as a mere prelude to Vatican II downplays the romanized church’s deep-rooted social and political conservatism, often in alliance with the extreme political right, and obscures the origins of liberation theology.