This talk aims to analyze transnational relations between the European Catholic Church and the Brazilian working-class in the context of the military dictatorship in the 1960s and late-1970s. During the first half of the 1960s, there was an expressive international movement of Catholic priests engaged in social issues. Some of them decided to work as laborers in industrial plants and acted in working-class communities. They were known as workers-priests. This movement was particularly strong in countries like France and Belgium. This study analyzes the forms of clerical aggiornamento outlined during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and how these foreign priests arrived in Brazil, as well as their expectations, goals, and challenges. In addition, this study seeks to understand the relationship between the worker-priests and the working-class communities and their methods of collective organization.
Speaker: Larissa Rosa Corrêa, Associate Professor of History, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)
Moderated by Sidney Chalhoub, Chair, Department of History; David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies; Faculty Affiliate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.
About the Speaker
Larissa Rosa Corrêa is an Associate Professor of History at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), and a research fellow of the Brazilian Scientific Research Council (CNPq). She also conducts research with the support of Rio de Janeiro’s Science Foundation (FAPERJ). She is a Brazilian labor historian with interests in trade union movements, U.S labor movement in Latin America, labor corporatist systems, Catholic Church and women labor organizations in Brazil and Southern Cone during the Cold War. She received her PhD in Social History at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. Her most recent book is entitled “Anti-Communist Solidarity. US-Brazilian Labor Relations During the Dictatorship in Cold War Brazil (1964-1985)”, published by The Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022.
About the Moderator
Sidney Chalhoub taught history at the University of Campinas, Brazil, for thirty years. He moved to Harvard in July 2015. A social historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil, his first monograph, Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), is a study on working-class culture in Rio de Janeiro, based mostly on the analysis of homicide trial records. Visões da liberdade (1990) explores enslaved people’s petitions for freedom and other judicial cases to understand the role of the enslaved in bringing about the demise of slavery in Brazil. Cidade febril (1996) is a history of epidemics in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, focusing on public health policies regarding housing for the poor, on how race informed medical thinking, and on popular resistance to smallpox vaccination. Machado de Assis, historiador (2003) analyzes slavery, race, and the politics of literature in the work of the most important Brazilian novelist of all times. A força da escravidão (2012) investigates the practices of illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil.
This event is part of the workshop "Slavery & Its Afterlives: Brazil and the Atlantic World," organized by Prof. Sidney Chalhoub as well as several PhD candidates and current fellows across Harvard.
LOCATION:Warren Center Conference Room (B21), Robinson Hall STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241030T160000Z DTEND:20241030T173000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR