O reinado nas encruzilhadas do catolicismo: a dinâmica das comunidades congadeiras em Itaúna/MG

Abstract

The festivities in honor to Our Lady of the Rosary had constituted the main devotional event organized by black friaries in Colonial Brazil. The friaries were dynamizing axes of a peculiar way of catholic living – of a layman Catholicism that has marked the religious background of Minas Gerais indelibly. At the time of festivities, in these friaries black kings and black queens were enshrined and celebrated to the sound of music, songs and dances performed by the "brothers of the Rosary". This kind of religious experience has remained rooted in the life of the devotees of the "Mother of the Rosary" which still peculiarly praising in various parts of Brazil. However, this africanised catholicism performed by the congadeiros not rarely had caused tensions and disputes between Catholic hierarchy and congadeiros. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Dom Cabral, the Belo Horizonte´s bishop, decreed the abolition of Reinado throughout the diocese. This interdiction taken by Dom Cabral is located within the so called Ultramontane Reform, which started to being implemented in Brazil in the midnineteenth century and reached the first half of the twentieth century. In this contexture, we intend to map the action of groups and specific individuals involved in this process in order to delineate the diversity of experiences and the peculiarities involved in the implementation of Ultramontanism guidelines, specifically in the ambit of chapelry in Itaúna/MG and in what concerns to the Reinado´s prohibition. We had emphasized the ways of Reinado´s insertion in Catholic Church during the twentieth century and the ways of redrawing catholicism by the congadeiro´s experience.