Religious Issue

The Religious Issue (Portuguese: Questão Religiosa) was a crisis that took place in the Empire of Brazil in the 1870s, which, having started on 3 March 1872 as a confrontation between the Catholic Church and Freemasonry, ended up becoming a serious state issue. Its causes can be traced back a long time, based on irreconcilable divergences between ultramontanism, liberalism and the padroado regime, and on complex aspects of Brazilian culture. It led to the imprisonment of two bishops and contributed to the fall of the cabinet of Prime Minister José Paranhos, the Viscount of Rio Branco.

The issue evolved centered on the actions of bishops Dom Vital and Dom Macedo Costa, ardent defenders of ultramontane Catholicism. Based on papal ordinances not approved by the Brazilian Empire, they interdicted brotherhoods under their jurisdiction for keeping Freemason members in their circles, and refused to lift the interdicts after express order from the government, since such associations were also governed by the secular power. It was then judged that they violated the Constitution of the Empire and incurred the guilt of civil disobedience, being arrested and sentenced to forced labor.

A short time later they were granted amnesty, but that did not quell the fierce public debate that broke out regarding the union between Church and State, on the contrary, the problem remained under discussion, adding other ideological and social elements and increasingly extreme factions, weakening the authority and the prestige of the monarchy in Brazil. For this reason, the religious issue is considered one of the most striking moments of the Second Reign and one of the factors that precipitated the fall of the monarchy in Brazil, but its analysis remains controversial. With the advent of the First Brazilian Republic, the separation between religious and secular powers was formalized.

Although usually circumscribed in the bibliography to the episode of the bishops, the religious issue in its broadest sense, an expression of a complex and dynamic social and cultural reality, resurfaced with force during the Vargas Era, with the Church regaining great political influence and constitutionally reacquiring several of its former privileges. According to some authors, its effects also reverberated throughout the second half of the 20th century.