MATRIZ DE SANTA TEREZINHA DO MENINO JESUS: IDEAL DE PROGRESSO E MODERNIZAÇÃO EM UBERLÂNDIA (1888-1941)

Abstract

Unveiling the historical plot woven about the local and regional leads us to find of the minutiae that makes us understand a range of issues related to an even broader field. When we look at the history of the city of Uberlândia, in the state of Minas Gerais, we observe a range of objects, facts and issues. It’s from this reality that we proposed here to understand the course taken by the Roman Catholic Church, and within it, its action in the political, social and economic environment under the aegis of modernization. From this perspective, the purpose is to understand the process of overthrowing the old main church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the construction of the new main church of Saint Thérèse of Child Jesus and the Holy Face, that happens between the years of 1930 and 1941 under the sign of the new (progress). From the building of the Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, the point is to visualize the greater context of history between the macro and the micro, which imposes on the Catholic Church institution a new posture in the social environment. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the conjuncture of modernity (steamroller) brings to society new experiences that will make the Church, at first sight, to see them as strange, but with the passage of time they settle themselves like a new vision in the practice of this Institution. Our discussions go through the theoretical-methodological perspective in the field of cultural history, in the discussions about the history and city proposed by Leonardo Benevolo and José Evaldo de Mello Doin. The documentation used in this work, newspapers, minutes and books of tombo was found mostly in the public archive of Uberlândia and in the collections of the Diocese of Uberlândia.From the discussions made, it’s perceived that the ideal of progress that permeates the Uberlandian society in the proposed period, makes the Catholic Church to follow the same, collaborating with the erasure and forgetting of its own history, intending to modernize itself. It’s also verified that the Catholic Church established a dialogical relation with the political instance in order to demarcate its space in the center of the city of Uberlândia.