page_title: Empire of Brazil
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: Empire of Brazil / Society / Religion
caption_attribution_description: Brazilian friars, c.1875.
context_page_description: The Empire of Brazil was a 19th-century state that broadly comprised the territories which form modern Brazil and Uruguay. Its government was a representative parliamentary constitutional monarchy under the rule of Emperors Dom Pedro I and his son Dom Pedro II. A colony of the Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil became the seat of the Portuguese colonial Empire in 1808, when the Portuguese Prince regent, later King Dom João VI, fled from Napoleon's invasion of Portugal and established himself and his government in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. João VI later returned to Portugal, leaving his eldest son and heir, Pedro, to rule the Kingdom of Brazil as regent. On 7 September 1822, Pedro declared the independence of Brazil and, after waging a successful war against his father's kingdom, was acclaimed on 12 October as Pedro I, the first Emperor of Brazil. The new country was huge, sparsely populated and ethnically diverse.
context_section_description: Article five of the Constitution declared Catholicism to be the state religion. However, the clergy had long been understaffed, undisciplined and poorly educated, all of which led to a general loss of respect for the Catholic Church. During Pedro II's reign, the Imperial government embarked upon a program of reform designed to address these deficiencies. As Catholicism was the official religion, the Emperor exercised a great deal of control over Church affairs and paid clerical salaries, appointed parish priests, nominated bishops, ratified papal bulls and supervised seminaries. In pursuing reform, the government selected bishops whose moral fitness, stance on education and support for reform met with their approval. However, as more capable men began to fill the clerical ranks, resentment of government control over the Church increased. Catholic clerics moved closer to the Pope and his doctrines. This resulted in the Religious Question, a series of clashes during the 1870s between the clergy and the government, since the former wanted a more direct relationship with Rome and the latter sought to maintain its oversight of church affairs.
  The Constitution did allow followers of other, non-Catholic, faiths to practice their religious beliefs, albeit only in private. The construction of non-Catholic religious buildings was forbidden. From the outset these restrictions were ignored by both the citizenry and authorities. In Belém, Pará's capital, the first synagogue was built in 1824. Jews migrated to Brazil soon after its independence and settled mainly in the northeastern provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco and in the northern provinces of Amazonas and Pará. Other Jewish groups came from the Alsace-Lorraine region of Germany and from Russia. By the 1880s, there were several Jewish communities and synagogues scattered throughout Brazil.
  The Protestants were another group that began settling in Brazil at the beginning of the 19th century. The first Protestants were English, and an Anglican church was opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1820. Others were established afterwards in São Paulo, Pernambuco and Bahia provinces. They were followed by German and Swiss Lutherans who settled in the South and Southwest regions and built their own houses of worship. Following the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, immigrants from the southern United States seeking to escape Reconstruction settled in São Paulo. Several American churches sponsored missionary activities, including Baptists, Lutherans, Congregationalists and Methodists.
  Among African slaves, Catholicism was the religion of the majority. Most slaves came originally from the midwestern and southwestern portions of the African coast. For over four centuries this region had been the subject of Christian mission activities. Some Africans and their descendants, however, held onto elements of polytheistic religious traditions by merging them with Catholicism. This resulted in the creation of syncretic creeds such as Candomblé. Islam was also practiced among a small minority of African slaves, although it was harshly repressed and by the end of the 19th century had been completely extinguished. By the beginning of the 19th century, the Indians in most of eastern Brazil had been either assimilated or decimated. Some tribes resisted assimilation and either fled farther west, where they were able to maintain their diverse polytheistic beliefs, or were restricted to aldeamentos (reservations), where they eventually converted to Catholicism.
caption: A trio of Brazilian friars, c. 1875
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