Pastoral popular urbana: da contribuição ao desencantamento e reinvenção

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of research about the history, proposal and practice of the Pastoral Popular Urbana PPU [Popular Urban Ministry] organized on the periphery of the Caxias do Sul Diocese in 1984, but with initial roots in 1969. The research utilized was bibliographic, documental, field diaries, social research and personal experience. Its goal was to analyze the contributions of the PPU when it opted for the work world and for the worker s class, in the process of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the roots of its disenchantment, verifying the motives for this proposal not creating roots, in spite of it being a concrete church project. The birth process of a church concerned with the people and with the social-political problems, in the mid 1960s, is a result of a process which initially fructified through the initiative of the grassroots leadership, mainly the specialized Catholic Action, aware of the reality of the Latin American dependence and domination. The research does an analysis of the different ways in which the Popular Church influenced the goals, the methodology, the theology and ecclesiology of the PPU on the periphery of the cities of the Caxias do Sul Diocese. In this period the military dictatorships in Latin America were becoming increasingly violent against the population and the leaders of the liberation movement. In all of Brazil the military repression had deep implications in the liberation process. The union, student and popular movements were practically decimated and the political parties were closed. Any popular reaction was severely persecuted. The reaction to the dictatorship began to gain space through the reorganization of the popular, union and student movements and of the Christian Base Communities and the Centers for Human Rights in the struggle for amnesty and for democracy. The Catholic Church went from unconditional support to questioning the repressive practices used by the dictatorships. This time is characterized by great theoretical and practical creativity, and by the commitment of sectors of Christian churches to the process of Latin American liberation. In this scenario a more popular church sprouts forth which happens through the practice of the popular ministry. To consider this social and ecclesial effervescence is a condition for analyzing the proposal of the PPU as the fruit of a long period of accompaniment, participation and analysis of the transformations which were occurring in the world, more specifically in Latin America. In the memory of the history of the PPU, one recovers persons, practices, methodologies and a proposal of evangelization committed to the structural transformations of society, such as historical mediations of the kingdom of God, which have as sources the II Vatican Council, Theology of Liberation, the Popular Church, the Liberation Movement and the option for the poor. With the political opening and the process of democratization, at the end of the decade of 1980, one perceives a process of fatigue and depletion of the PPU practice, signaling a phase of transition which demands a review of the orientations and practices which were useful before but at this historical moment are not able to deal with the new complexity.