AFRO-BRAZILIAN PASTORAL CARE AND THE 1988 FRATERNITY CAMPAIGN: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS ON RACIAL ISSUES IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Abstract

 This article aims at reflecting on the relationship between the black people and the church in the Afro-Brazilian Pastoral Care and its unfoldings to the racial discussion inside the Catholic Church. For doing so, we first present the origin of this Pastoral, considering its national and international contexts. In a second moment, we develop a discursive analysis of fragments of the 1988 Fraternity Campaign text. As theoretical basis, we follow Bakhtin (1992, 2003) and his dialogical perspective on language, and the French Discourse Analysis, in its enunciative basis (Maingueneau, 1990; 2011). In relation to the issues about the Church, specifically, we follow Beozzo (1991; 1993) and Boff (2012) perspectives. In a Catholic Church which reflects the prejudices of the society in which it is embedded, our results point to a critical positioning of the Brazil Bishops National Conference (CNBB) in relation to racial issues, as well as to the 1988 Fraternity Campaign which can be understood as an important tool in the struggle for the rights of Brazilian black people.