Catholic church and social modernization: the crisis of Catholicism as from the missionary experience of a group of young Italians in Belo Horizonte in the1960\'s

Author(s)

Massimo Bonato

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2014-08-25

Examining board members

Jose Reginaldo Prandi; Alexandre Antonio Cardoso; Ricardo Mariano; Heloisa Helena Teixeira de Souza Martins; Maria José Fontelas Rosado Nunes

• Advisor: Jose Reginaldo Prandi

Abstract

The subject of the present research is the aggravation of the institutional crisis of the Catholic Church during the second half of the XXth Century. Based upon documentary sources and field work that includes interviews and histories of life, the research tries to reconstruct the experiences of an Italian group of lay catholic missionaries, who acted in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, in the 1960s. These young men and women belonged to the so called Gioventù Studentesca from Milan, Italy. Their trajectories of life and their religious and political motivations were rebuilt from these days to the present moment. That is the empirical subject of the research. On a second but not secondary frame, the present thesis seeks to contribute for the sociological understanding of the complex relations of mutual penetration and chaining between the catolicismo internalizado, the formation of catholic active minorities and the process of social and cultural modernization of the Catholic Church (AU)