A construção da Santa Lôla: materialidade do sagrado e catolicismo devocional

Abstract

How saints are made? It’s not something done, falled from the sky, like a lighting from God. This question was the started-point to investigate the construction of holiness of Floripes Dornelas de Jesus – Lôla, a lay woman from a small town of Minas Gerais that is halfway to the altars. In devotional catholicism, the power of the materiality of the sacred – objects, relics, novenas, processions, rosaries – has not been the subject of much analysis in the bookkeeping process of a saint, who leaves earthly history and enters the mythological skies. The hypothesis is that, in devotional Catholicism, the sacred manifest in material culture is one of the central elements in the construction, although alongside other factors – the hagiography, the virtue - of the aura of mythical holiness that lead a person to be sanctified to the altars. As methodology, the dissertation combined qualitative methodologies, i.e, documentation survey (online and physical) and partial bibliographic survey (catholicism and materiality of the sacred), fieldwork in the places where the saint walked and lived, open interviews with her devotees, cataloging of sacred objects or those that have become so. A simple white woman, single, from Minas Gerais, and her aura of sanctity, amalgamate within devotional Catholicism and, together with the concrete materiality, become, in the current narratives of the devotees, a powerful religious myth. The place of the Catholic myth is on the altar, to be sung and praised as an example of another myth, even greater, that of the Christian life, Christ and His Church. Another small star is born and joins other sparkling ones to compose the huge mythical-historical galaxy of devotional Catholicism.