Needs of the Heart: A Social and Cultural History of Brazil's Clergy and Seminaries (Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development) - Hardcover

Serbin, Kenneth P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268041199 ISBN 13: 9780268041199

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006

Synopsis

Serbin also describes the conservative modernization of the clergy, effected through seminary education, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emphasizing discipline, the seminaries aimed to mold a new kind of priest-moral, isolated from politics and social entanglements, and, above all, obedient and celibate. However, the social, cultural, and religious upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s led students to reject the seminary. Seminarians worked to form a national union, and many left seminaries to establish greater contact with the people. The seminarians' movement sparked the practice of liberation theology; it also reflected the quest for professional and individual development, including optional celibacy. Seminaries necessarily dealt in the psychology of sexuality, friendship, and other basic human tendencies-what historian Marc Bloch has called the "secret needs of the heart." Serbin argues that the "needs of the heart" were a cause of the political transformation of the Brazilian Church, a transformation catalyzed by the profound identity crisis experienced by clergymen and seminarians in the 1960s and 1970s. The story of this generation of seminarians and priests is intermingled with the challenges and fears present during Brazil's repressive military dictatorship (1964 to 1985) and its aftermath.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Selected as the best book in English for 2005-2007 given by the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association

From the Inside Flap:

"Needs of the Heart, Kenneth P. Serbin examines the rise and crisis of a model of priestly vocation that was not 'traditional' but rather a new discipline, institutionalized in the mid-nineteenth century. Its intimate, splendidly documented analysis of men's responses to that model can give us a constructive perspective on the coverups of sexual misconduct within the American clergy. Needs of the Heart is also an extraordinary history of the Sixties in Latin America. The countercultural and experimental movements within Brazil's seminaries, ranging from psychoanalysis to 'living alongside the people,' offer us a touchstone for judging the promise and contradictions in the post-1945 Christian quest for individual fulfillment and social justice." —Dain Borges, University of Chicago

"Kenneth Serbin’s Needs of the Heart, extraordinary in its breadth, depth, and compelling analysis, unveils the triumphs and tragedies of Brazil’s priests and the seminaries that formed them. The current world-wide tensions and scandals engulfing the priesthood are reflected in this study—a study that needs to be replicated throughout the Catholic world." —Donald Cozzens, John Carroll University, author of The Changing Face of the Priesthood

"This innovative analysis places the formation of a Brazilian priesthood at the center of a preeminently historical examination of the Catholic Church in Latin America's largest country, giving us a new understanding of the forces within and without that have uniquely and universally explained the controversial efforts of seminarians, priests, and bishops to redefine clerical identity in a a national context lying "between Europe and America." Serbin brings an impressive amount of fresh evidence to reveal Brazil's Catholic Church from the inside, and his reliance on the voices of seminarians, priests, and religious [brothers] for dissecting the post-Vatican II debate over a priestly vocation goes to the heart of the future of the church in a twenty-first century world. This superb study takes church history in a new direction, appropriately recasting a Europe-centered ecclesia within its largest field of Third-World congregants." —Linda Lewin, University of California, Berkeley

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0268041199
• ISBN 13: 9780268041199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496