A liberdade de ensino defendida pela Igreja Católica no contexto da Constituinte 1933-1934

Abstract

The present doctoral research is situated within the field of History and Historiography of Education, part of the Postgraduate Program in Education, at the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia. The primary focus of this research revolves around the principle of academic freedom, as advocated by the Catholic Church in Brazil, in the context of the debate surrounding the drafting and the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1934. The temporal framework is delimited through the years 1930 to 1934, a period known in historiography as the Provisional Government. This delimitation is justified as it represents a period of renewed, in new forms, relations between the Catholic Church and the State. The research subject demanded a historical analysis, requiring a step back in time to understand the historical process of the Catholic Church in defending its freedoms and maintaining prerogatives, particularly in the educational field. The research question emerged: why did academic freedom become a theme for the Catholic Church in the Brazilian Republic? Furthermore, it also questions if, during the First Republic, the defense of individual freedoms and their implications is linked to the secularization of the society and of the State. Under what circumstances did religious education re-enter the constitutional text of 1934 as an aspect of academic freedom and as a victory for the demands of the Catholic Church? Methodologically, in conducting the research, we utilized documentary and bibliographic research involving continuous reviews and analysis of written sources, such as educational legislation, parliamentary documents, texts printed in magazines, books, articles, dissertations, theses, as well as material available on the internet, defining the hypertextual dimension. The selected research sources include ecclesiastical documents (letters, encyclicals, and decrees); texts from specialized Catholic press, specifically, the magazine A Ordem, during the period under the administration of Tristão de Athayde (pseudonym of Alceu de Amoroso Lima), from January 1929 to July 1934; minutes of the National Constituent Assembly of 1933 and 1934. For the treatment of parliamentary texts, we adopted the analysis of social and political discourse, following the theories of Norman Fairclough (2016) and Patrick Charaudeau (2018), respectively. As a way of perceiving, the theory that underpins the relationship between the object, the foundational problem, the theoretical framework, and the research modalities is Marxist dialectics. The analysis of Catholic educational thought and its conflicts with liberalism was guided by Lucien Goldmann's work (1979; 1986) on the main worldviews of modern thought, including the tragic (Christian) and liberal perspectives. The results of the research demonstrate that the principle of academic freedom carries the contradiction inherent in capitalist society and its form of the State, manifested in the challenging task of balancing the foundations and banners of liberalism with Catholic interests in national education in the Federal Constitution of 1934. Therefore, the thesis argues that the Catholic Church, in defending academic freedom in the secular state, aimed to materialize its evangelizing function with religious education in the norms. The analysis of parliamentary speeches and guiding research documents led to the conclusion that academic freedom for Catholics was a conciliatory liberal formula for the Catholic Church to ensure paths for Christian restoration in education, especially in primary education, through which the new generations would be formed based on Christian principles and duties.