Abstract:
The objective of this research is to establish a direct relationship between the
imaginary of Brazilian people in the colonial period and their behavior in the
contemporary, that is, nine generations after the official end of the Portuguese-
Brazilian Inquisition. It starts from the principle that this relationship is directly linked
to the state-religious model imposed by the Holy Inquisition, ruled by the imposition
of fear and terror, leaving deep marks in Brazilian society which resist until the
current days. For lack of popular visibility on the subject, well exemplified in the
absence of the theme in all of the curricular levels of Brazilian education, this work
tries to draw a line of the entire inquisitorial process on the world since its
appearance in the 13th Century. After all, we are emerging subject of history.
Brazilian people were born from Native-American, African and European
miscegenation. Their art of thinking was build by the cultures of those three people;
however, there was a direction imposed by European, captained by Portuguese
aristocratic politics allied to the Roman Catholic clergy. In the beginning of the
colonization, the Roman Catholic Church was under strong pressure of the
Protestant Reform; the Portuguese State was living an extreme political division
between the new and the old Christians, defined by a prejudiced form sustained on
the statute of blood purity. The colony had a strong presence of the converted new
white Christian who looked for a safe place to live far away from inquisitorial
persecution in Brazil-colony. Many were vanished to the exile in the New World. In
reality, the tentacles of the Inquisition reached, in an incisive way, all of the cities and
towns of the colony. Those new Christians were forced to the conversion to the
Christianity; however, many maintained their Jewish, Moorish and Protestant faiths,
pretending to be a devotee Christian in society and continuing to believe in their
faiths in intimate and family, originating, in that way, a divided man. Many became
crypto-Jewish and, because the need of a great economical and intellectual
development, they were tenaciously pursued by the Inquisition in the entire Kingdom
of Portugal. That picture of submission of the Native-American and African and the
double personality of the new white Christian produce a society characterized by the
fragility of collective values in ethical and moral terms. Exposing that scenery, in
general terms, this research tries to visualize a contemporary situation in that the
corruption is passively accepted, the privileges of a few are institutionalized, the
social claims don't solidify and the people don't commit, on the contrary .
