FESTAS RELIGIOSAS E IDENTIDADE CULTURAL DOS IMIGRANTES CATÓLICOS DO MUNICÍPIO DE SANTA TERESA-ES

Abstract

This research of the Sciences of the Religions in the line of research of religion and public sphere aims to analyze the religious festivals of the popular Catholicism of Santa Teresa, municipality Espírito Santo strongly marked by European immigration in the nineteenth century. It was sought to answer the problematic of how the religiosity of the Catholic holidays affected the process of population of the municipality of Santa Teresa? For this, it was decided to carry out a field research complemented in the foundation of the bibliographical revision on the relation between sacred and profane, proposed by Mircea Eliade in the religious culture of Santa Teresa. The present work was divided into three chapters. The first presents a conceptual discussion about religion, culture and the presence of the sacred and the profane. In the second, it briefly discusses the history of the foundation of Santa Teresa, in order to highlight the religious element of immigrants as a constitutive factor of that society. In the third chapter, we analyze three cycles of religious festivals of the Catholic communities of Santa Teresa, namely: the Feast of Kings, the Saints June - St. Anthony and St. John - and the Feast of Our Lady Aparecida. We intend to demonstrate the presence of the sacred and the profane represented in the religious festivals, from the beginning of the colonization of Santa Teresa to the present day, as a factor of cultural and religious identity of that community. It was possible to observe this relation of the sacred with the profane in the religious festivals of the mentioned municipality of the Capixaba, the sacredness of temporality as a way of entering into the eternal, to the Kairos, that is to the time of grace, in which miracles, who manifest the action of the divine through the saints. Although unconsciously, without the presuppositions of the sociology of Religion, those simple people were affirming with their religious manifestations that they superimposed the spiritual to the temporal, the sacred to the profane when walking with the saint's andor on the shoulders on the day of the festivity, through the Catholic faith and its manifest practice in religious festivals throughout the liturgical and devotional cycle, Italianity was established in Brazil, based on family, land, the value of work and Catholic religiosity.