The Religious Parties of Popular Catholicism of the Immigrants of the city of Santa Teresa

Abstract

This research was carried out with the objective of analyzing the effect of religious festivals of the popular catholicism of Santa Teresa in the religious development of the municipality, located in the highland region of Espírito Santo, strongly marked by European immigration in the 19th century. The field research was complemented on grounds tion of the literature review on the relationship between sacred and profane, the religious culture of St. Teresa. The search It presents a conceptual discussion of religion, culture and the presence of the sacred and profane, highlights ing the religious element of immigrants as a constitutive factor of that society. Three cycles of religious feasts of the Catholic communities of Santa Teresa were analyzed, namely: the Feast of Kings, the June Saints, St. Anthony and St. John, and the Feast of Our Lady Aparecida. The presence of the sacred and the profane represented in the religious festivals, from the beginning of the colonization of Santa Teresa until the present day, constituted as a factor of cultural and religious identity of the community. It was possible to observe this relationship in the religious festivals of the city, the sacralization of temporality as a way of entering the eternal, the Kairós, that is, the time of grace, in which the miracles, the healings that manifest the action of the divine happen. through the saints. Although unconsciously, without the presuppositions of the sociology of religion, these simple people were affirming with their religious manifestations that they overlapped the spiritual and the temporal, walking with the saint's andor on their shoulders on the day of festivity, through the Catholic faith and Its practice manifests itself in religious festivals throughout the liturgical and devotional cycle, constituting Italianity in Brazil, based on family, land, the value of work and Catholic religiosity.