Dom Emanuel Gomes de Oliveira e a educação em Goiás (1923-1947): Entre a Igreja e o Estado

Abstract

This thesis has as a central proposal to analyze the relations between Church and State in Goiás (Brazil) during the bishopric of Dom Emanuel Gomes de Oliveira, in order to think about the way the Education became the main way through which the Catholic Church in Goiás demarcated its space in relation to the State, consolidating itself as a necessary agent for the maintenance of the modernizing political project of Goiás, whose role of public education was fundamental. In this sense, the research presented here is inserted in the History of Brazilian Education, whose spatial cut is delimited in the History of Education in Goiás; a field of research still little explored, especially in the context of disputes between the State and the Catholic Church as the present research is inserted. In order to do so, we take as a central research problem the following question: how the Education became a fundamental part of a political and religious project during Bishop Emanuel Gomes de Oliveira's bishopric in the diocese of Goiás (Brazil) between 1923 and 1947? From this question, our central thesis for the present research was the argument that the Bishop Dom Emanuel, unlike the prelates who preceded him, had a Churchs project whose core was an economically independent diocese and with a consolidated space of power before the State. The path to this was internally passed through a financial revitalization of the diocese, as well as the centralization of religious power in the hands of the bishop, and externally through the demarcation of political space in relation to the state, so that the Church would could be not more a mere arm of temporal power, but could become - albeit independent of it - one of its most vital organs, with education as its main political and social support. For the development of this argument, an important set of sources was analyzed, among which three periodicals stand out: Santuário da Trindade, published in Campinas-GO between 1922 and 1931, Brasil Central, founded by Dom Emanuel and edited between 1931 and 1942, and A Informação Goyana, published in Rio de Janeiro, then federal capital, between 1917 and 1935. In addition to these, the present thesis also analyze personal and official letters of Dom Emanuel Gomes de Oliveira and the missionaries of the German Redemptorist Congregation present in Goiás, as well as dispatches, reports, etc., of the bishop in his daily work and government of his diocese . In this sense, the present research proposes a historical and critical analysis not only of the historical processes, tensions, conflicts, strategies and struggles lived and promoted by the bishop in question, but - above all - the way in which Dom Emanuel Gomes de Oliveira was linked to education in Goiás through a hagiographie speech, the result of which was his epithet "Archbishop of Instruction." In this sense, therefore, the present thesis understands that the interests surrounding Dom Emanuel's strategies and projects for education in Goiás should not be understood solely by the religious or philanthropic prism, but, above all, by the prisms of power relations between Church and State and, in this, by the political interests involved in the dynamics between both. It is in this direction, therefore, that this research intends to have contributed to the historiography of education in Goiás, by demonstrating through arguments, data and sources the way in which the unquestionable importance of Dom Emanuel Gomes de Oliveira towards the development of education must be reread from the critical analysis of the interests and political achievements of the Catholic Church which, from the figure of the bishop, remained practically hegemonic throughout the twentieth century in the most important sectors of Goian society, especially in education.