ABSTRACT

The exemplar adopted in modified or syncretized form by all of Brazil’s religious groups in their efforts to attract followers in a country in which Roman Catholicism was once the official religion is Catholicism—not as presented by the official church in Rome and its appointees in Brazil, but in the way it was practiced when first brought to the Western Hemisphere by the early colonists and settlers from the Iberian Peninsula. It is to this pre-Reformation Catholicism—characterized by processions, vows to the saints, and pilgrimages to shrines taking place outside the church edifice—that I turn first.