By FILIPE DE FREITAS GONÇALVES*

The Church has been in crisis for centuries, but it insists on dictating morality. Machado de Assis mocked this in the 19th century; today, Francis' legacy reveals: the problem is not the pope, but the papacy.

Francisco

With the death of Pope Francis, all that is discussed is his legacy, the meaning of the papacy and the Catholic Church, in permanent crisis since at least the 19th century, the choice of the future pontiff, the funeral rituals, the humble habits of the late pope, his most memorable moments, and so on. For an institution in crisis and decline for so long, it still has a lot of power to mobilize, to stir the affections of so many people.

In truth, this indicates that the crisis is not yet as intense as one might imagine, that the average mentality is possibly still more religious than the agnostic middle class imagines and that the cunning of history still has much to reveal to us about this institution that some say is one of the oldest on the planet.

For most people, the world's grandfather has died. And the collective mourning is that which is felt for these grandfathers who lived long productive lives: everyone is saddened by his passing, some crying more emphatically, but everyone is satisfied with a life well lived, remembering the deeds and good qualities that made him famous. There are many reports and many films about him, and also about other popes.

The platforms streaming They are already beginning to indicate the most recent and the oldest. For me, there were two miniseries from the early 2000s about John XVIII, which I watched with emotion, thinking that Francis was, in fact, the result of that Council and of that new approach to the papacy, whose historical significance, among other things, was to establish a new function for the institution in a world in which, strictly speaking, the pope has no power whatsoever.

Machado de Assis

That's when I remembered to look for some reference in the work of Machado de Assis. I didn't have to think much to find some very interesting things. The first thing that comes to mind is always that of Dom Casmurro, but let's leave it for last. The bulk of our Sorcerer's life (look at the heresy, boy!) was lived under the reign of Pius IX and Leo XIII. In fact, the word reign can already be a differentiation between them.

When Pius IX ascended the throne of Saint Peter, the Papal States still existed, lands in the center of Italy where the pope was, literally, the king. Once in possession of earthly power, Pius IX was the pope who lost it. During the wars of unification of Italy, which he strongly opposed, he ended up being defeated by the troops of the Risorgimento.[I]

Hence the figure of the State without territory and without people, without Armed Forces, without earthly power emerged. The Pope as a head of State without a State. But still existing. The problem was long-standing and was only fully resolved in its current version around the 1920s with the establishment of the Vatican.

Furthermore, Pius IX was the cudgel of the Catholic reaction in all the tendencies typical of the bourgeois modernity of the 18th and 19th centuries. His encyclical How Much Healing, next to Syllabus of Errors, condemned, strictly speaking, all modernity. Starting with rationalism and atheism and reaching the separation between State and Church, Pius IX makes the conservative Catholics of today and of all times happy.

The letter, published in 1864, when Machado de Assis was already working in the press, arrived in the country the following year, and was duly commented on by our chronicler, who frequently debated with the Brazil Cruise, a newspaper of ultramontane hue.[ii]

There, our liberal Machadinho, at the beginning of his career, combative to the point of no return, releases his ironic pen, still in development, on February 7, 1865: “I will not give up on matters of the political world without congratulating the Brazil Cruise, whose soul naturally now swims with joy at the publication of Pius IX's encyclical. I regret not having Sunday's issue at hand, which I have not yet read, but which must be priceless, more than usual. I do not know if I have credit in the spirit of Brazil Cruise; whether or not I have it, I will not keep to myself a prophecy that is coming to me from my pen: Pius IX will be canonized one day.”

“Popes, for some time now, have rarely been included in the list of saints. All the first pontiffs, however, enjoy this honor. Is this a kind of posthumous censure? I do not wish to investigate this point. I insist, however, on the belief that Pius IX will receive the crown of the elect. It is mainly to the bishops of Rome that these words apply: many will be called and few will be chosen. That the Holy Father deserves more than respect and adoration from the faithful, this seems to me incontestable.”

“In the midst of the dangers that surround him, with the powers against him, threatened with losing the last pieces of land, the weak old man is not frightened; he coldly takes up his pen and launches against the modern spirit the most peremptory condemnation. It is positively risking the tiara. I do not know what our bishops will do with the encyclical. The encyclical is the condemnation of the fundamental principles of our political organization. I want to believe that they will draw a veil over this document (…)”.[iii]

It is exactly about How Much Healing. On February 21 of the same year, commenting on Emperor Maximilian's policies, Machado had already explicitly linked liberal ties and the Pope's distancing: “We believe that he sincerely wishes to create a liberal government and plant an era of prosperity in Mexico. The modification of the Mexican cabinet and the break with the Pope's nuncio are the recent symptoms of Maximilian's liberal disposition.”[iv].

To be liberal is, on the one hand, to plant an era of prosperity and, on the other, to break with the papal nuncio, who comes to represent backwardness and the opposite of prosperity. Machado and Pius IX are on opposite sides. Our author is openly liberal.[v], and questions not only the Pope regarding the practical application of his encyclical, but also ridicules with the joke about canonization the supposed sanctity of those who sit in the chair of Saint Peter.

The fact that the last popes were not canonized is a debasement against their prerogative of divine power, which, ironically, Pius IX would have had, given his courage. Despite the courage of the “weak old man,” the end is explicit: the discursive power of the pope, no matter how Catholic and pious the country may be, cannot exercise power in a world that has simply changed.

What will the Brazilian bishops do with such a letter? The entire state is based on the principles that His Holiness explicitly condemns, which makes his condemnation innocuous and meaningless. The question reveals the materialistic acumen of the young writer, who, according to legend, was raised by a priest and denied extreme unction at the time of his death. Statements of principle must be linked to really existing social forces; otherwise, they are just innocuous statements of principle.

The fact that the world has changed so profoundly means that Pius IX’s statements are exactly and only that: statements of principle. The power of individual words, no matter how strong the positions of their speakers, is not enough to direct the order of things in the real world. Reality exists beyond words, and therein lies the materialist force of our chronicler’s brief commentary.

Strangely enough, this is where both the strength and weakness of the condemnations come from: although the movement of the 19th century is one of victorious liberal convictions, this is only a movement that, in itself, contained a good deal of reaction, within which the Catholic movement was certainly very strong. The power of the encyclical came from the fact that, seen in its time and not today, when all the dice have been cast, it represented a discourse that was, in fact, linked to real social practices. The Ultramontanes were a political force that lost ground over time, but it was there, it was alive and could very well have won.

Machado de Assis captures the contradictory movement of history with his materialist-inspired question: words need real ground to take hold and be valid, and it is precisely this real ground that moved in the opposite direction to that of the pope, which was, on the one hand, the innocuousness of those words (liberal power structures were widespread) and their strength (there was a dispute over all the issues that the pope decided to condemn). It is, in fact, “risking the tiara,” the 1865 chronicler tells us: betting one’s chips on the game of history. A history that, at the same time, attributes a sense of dispute to the words of the pope who lost his earthly power and deprives them of any prerogative to truly win the game in which he had gotten himself involved.

These problems also seem to be ridiculed in an 1884 short story entitled Ex cathedra. The text is apparently not about the pope, were it not for its title and the structure of its plot. An old man named Fulgencio goes mad from reading so much around 1873. The most obvious reference is Quixote, who is also an old man who goes mad for the same reason and goes out into the world as a knight errant. But Fulgencio's madness is different: it does not take him into the world and its contradictions, but leaves him holed up in his farmhouse in Tijuca, where he lives “from writing, from print, from doctrine, from the abstract, from principles and formulas.”

The narrator continues: “In time he arrived, not at superstition, but at the hallucination of theory. One of his maxims was that freedom does not die where there is a sheet of paper left to decree it; and one day, waking up with the idea of ​​improving the condition of the Turks, he wrote a constitution, which he sent as a gift to the English minister in Petropolis. On another occasion, he began to study the anatomy of the eyes in books, to verify if they could really see, and concluded that they could.”[vi]

The joke is ready: a guy who believes that everything that is written is permanently valid as reality. Hence, freedom can never die as long as there is a sheet of paper to decree it. The world by decrees. Now, this is exactly the world of papal infallibility, which is defined by its teachings… ex cathedra.

Not only does the title of the text take us to the universe of the papacy, specifically that of Pius IX, who was responsible for the First Vatican Council, where the infamous infallibility was officially instituted around 1870, but also the old man's first folly was to have instituted that his name would be “Fulgencius”, in a Latinism typical of the Roman Church. We need only remember that the inscription on Pope Francis' tomb will be “Franciscus” for Machado de Assis' joke to gain all its relevance today.

Well, up until now, the character is a kind of demoted pope who piously believes in his own infallibility. But the screw turns when we notice the content of his decrees. ex cathedra: freedom, an eminently liberal value, and the scientific study of anatomy. The story establishes a crossover between these two apparently distant semantic fields: on the one hand, the religious belief in the infallible written word that reveals divine secrets and, on the other, the scientific habits of a century that took science as a synonym for progress and, in the same act, froze the capacity for scientific research in sterile positivism.

Hence the need to prove, by studying books, the ability of the eyes to see, a fact obviously attested by everyday life. But the pious logic of his conception of science makes him fall into ridicule: the eyes can only see if they so decree, ex cathedra, anatomy books. What exists is what is proven by the letter of the text, instead of the letter of the text being responsible for proving its explanatory capacity of reality through reason.

Thus we can also invert the logic for any religious teaching: marriages only exist when duly performed by Catholic priests in accordance with the appropriate Roman liturgical sacrament. If it is not performed, it does not exist, even though people live together, share their lives, love each other, have children, etc. The written word is set apart from reality and takes its place in a reasoning that the story tries to take to the edge of the absurd. On the one hand, it criticizes the idea of ​​papal infallibility: it is so because the pope said so; and, on the other hand, the habits of a scientism that has little scientific spirit: it is so because science books have determined it.

But it is not only by name and title that the relationship with the papacy is established. At the center of the plot is Fulgencio's idea that his goddaughter, Caetaninha, who lives with him, should marry his nephew who arrives after his brother's death. Having decided that they should marry, he makes the decision that love should be taught “with logic”: “(…) first the foundations, then the walls, then the ceiling… instead of starting with the ceiling… The day will come when we will learn to love as we learn to read… On that day…”[vii]

Instead of a romantic love ideology, another one of scientific content. And then old Fulgencius decides to do exactly what a pope does in his Magisterium, within which he has the infallibility to issue judgments. ex cathedra, that is, straight from the chair of Saint Peter: he decides to teach young people what love is scientifically conceived. In the exercise of his Masterium, however, he first needs to lay the foundations and prove the existence of the universe, until he reaches the existence of man and woman, and then talk about love.

Everything needs to be properly demonstrated and taught, in an almost Thomistic fixation. Here comes the wisdom of old Machado de Assis: love, conceived in its bases, sexual desire, exists beyond the teachings of our pontiff from Tijuca. The young people fall in love and the story ends with the victory of reality over pedantry and religiously conceived science:

As he said this and closed the door, something resounded on the side of the porch – a thunder of kisses, according to the caterpillars of the farm; but for the caterpillars any small noise is worth a thunderclap. As for the authors of the noise, nothing positive is known. It seems that a wasp, seeing Caetaninha and Raimundo together on that occasion, concluded from coincidence to consequence, and understood that it was them; but an old grasshopper demonstrated the inanity of the argument, claiming that he had heard many kisses, in the past, in places where neither Raimundo nor Caetaninha had set foot.

Let us agree that this other argument was of no use; but such is the prestige of a good character that the grasshopper was acclaimed as having once again defended truth and reason. And so it may be that it was so. But a thunder of kisses? Let us suppose two; let us suppose three or four.[viii]

What the old man does not see and understand, the caterpillars are bald to know. In the end, nature prevails, along with the materialistic sense of our author. Now, this is precisely a comical joke against a conception detached from reality that is materialized by the relationships that the author makes very clear with the universe of the Church, specifically with the Church of Pius IX and its infallibility.

The religious dogma linked to the ultramontanism of the century becomes a laughing stock among the secular mentality that cannot differentiate itself from it. Can the Pope state in his Syllabus that the prerogative of exercising earthly power is guaranteed to him by God; the Pope can affirm that the separation between Church and State is an error of the modern times: he can affirm anything, because the logic of reality, and this is known to caterpillars and grasshoppers, is not guided by what is said, but by the material foundations of the world. It is not the Pope's saying that marriage is only valid when duly performed by priests that makes marriages not sacramentalized in this way nonexistent. People continue to get married.

Matter precedes consciousness, our Brazilian materialist from the Second Reign teaches us. Conscience, others will respond, also has its material weight and God continues to exist as long as men believe that he exists. Homosexuals will continue to be more discriminated against depending on the Pope's statements than they would be if the pontiff changed the Church's doctrine, these same others would say. And they will be right: what the Pope says or fails to say is relevant, but it is only so to the extent that, in the material logic of the world, his words are understood as those of someone in a position of spiritual leadership. It is we who give the Pope infallibility, not the divine prerogative.

It should be noted, in passing, that the image of the Church and the papacy as institutions detached from reality and operating in a kind of magical world of their own is so ingrained in our author's work that, in truth, the story, which bears a title of clear religious inspiration, is not about the religious problem, but takes the Church as a point of comparison for the ironic bludgeon of the scientific habits of its time. The subject of the story, so to speak, is not the Church, but science, the former being merely the comparative term that it ridicules. The Church is, par excellence, ridiculous. In the structure of the story, its ridiculousness does not even need to be shown, it is valid in itself and can simply be applied to science, from which, apparently, more is expected. 

Francisco again

The comments seem to take us to the center of the most heated discussions when we remember Pope Francis. What can conservative or progressive positions come from an inherently conservative Vatican in practice? Now the fight seems definitively lost for the Church. It only seems so, because the tricks of history are there to make us all look like hasty fools.

The Catholic condemnation of homosexuality, for example, sounds, in liberal Western societies, like a historical mistake by the institution that is digging its own grave. Not authorizing same-sex marriage at a time when this has become an increasingly accepted and protected daily practice not only by civil institutions but also by a collective conscience that is improving over time, is, on the part of the Church, wanting to imitate the teachings of Pope Fulgencius. Declaring homosexual practices immoral and imagining that, by doing so, something is being changed in a reality that finds its moral rules elsewhere than in the Church, deserves to be ridiculed.

But here comes the cunning of history, which can put sand in my optimism: the condemnation still speaks deeply in expressive sectors of society, as seen in the reactionary attitude of the end of the world that we have seen spreading.[ix]. By maintaining the condemnation, the Church is taking a position that is apparently unreasonable, but that history may reveal to be beneficial for its own survival. As in the case of How Much Healing There are two ways of looking at the issue: the condemnation is ineffective because the world has changed, but, by taking a stand, it positions itself in the set of problems of our time.

The trick takes another turn: the fact that conservatives or the Church condemn homosexual practices does not mean that they do not exist. They do not put an end to them as if Jesus descended to the underworld and, once and for all, conquered death and homosexuals. They are no longer able to change the new circuits through which morality is processed, just as the end of the earthly powers of the Pope were permanently enshrined in the bourgeois revolutions.

Homosexuals continue to exist there, only with more intense layers of violence (just as the battle for the separation between State and Church became more difficult with the condemnations of Pius IX), which are increasingly condemned by the new morality that is consolidating (as modern political principles continued to consolidate despite How Much Healing). It is a complex movement that tries to catch reality as it moves, and for that, the so-called materialistic sense is necessary.

The question, however, that the passages from the Wizard pose is the following: do we really need the Church's validation to exist? We continue to exist beyond the Church's sanction or condemnation. Moral conscience evolves without it. No one truly believes in hell, no one is waiting for heaven to open and Jesus to return to end the world. None of us believe that we are going to hell because we practice acts of sodomy, as they used to say.

Why on earth should we consider what the Pope says on the subject as important? Why do we celebrate so much the supposedly progressive speeches of the Pope, who ultimately represents an institutional authority, if his validation no longer matters? Wouldn't it be better to ignore it and affirm the precedence of the real over the discursive? Invest in other forms of religious morality that distance themselves definitively from the Church?

One could say that, given the way things are arranged in our concrete world, institutional condemnation represents more violence, or at least validation of an authority that justifies violence. But the story takes us to another level: shouldn’t the conversation actually aim to undermine the power of the institution? Wouldn’t it be more profitable to say that the institution simply doesn’t matter? To undermine it, ignore it, ultimately destroy it? Wouldn’t the most important thing be to abolish the papacy once and for all as an institution that is more than obsolete rather than to celebrate the arrival of a progressive pope? Wouldn’t the pope be intrinsically conservative? Wouldn’t the essential thing be to ridicule an institution that considers itself entitled to dictate universally valid morality from the height of its relationship with God?

Important detail: the end of the Church as an institution does not mean the end of faith or of the Church as a community of believers. To use Leonardo Boff's terms: the end of the Church as a power is not its end as a charisma.[X]. And the end of an institution like the papacy is not the end of religious and moral leaders with local, national or global projection that can, yes, have a positive influence on the great civilizing debates.

Pope Francis's trump card, it seems to me, was to have been a personality of this other type, influencing through the teaching and example that gave him moral authority in the great discussions of our time, without, however, abolishing this other aspect of the position he occupied. It was beyond his capacity to do so, it is true, but it is within our capacity to center the debate not on the pope's progressivism or conservatism, but on the obsolescence of the papacy.

It should be said, in passing, that the Church as an institution has great difficulty in changing its positions, no matter what. And this for a fair reason: its power is based, and has always been, on teachings that claim to be divine and, therefore, unchangeable. The question is to what extent its charisma is also linked to this. The Church itself changes as an institution, because even God's representatives on earth are subject to history, but it cannot change its discourse.

Look at the imbroglio: Saint Paul (the true and the false) is categorical in his condemnation of homosexuality, and sexuality in general, which makes it hard to swallow, from the strict point of view of the moral teachings of the text that is considered sacred, of divine inspiration, that homosexuality is within acceptable practices. The Jesus of the Gospels openly speaks out against divorce. How can the Church not consider divorce a problem?

The challenge, ultimately, I think, is to separate the religious teaching itself from the moral teaching.[xi]. This is the most beautiful solution: let us maintain the metaphorical humanist sense of the Gospels and relativize the morality they imply because, after all, they were written in a society very different from ours. But, at the same time, it cannot, as an institution, do such a thing, because its power is based, to a large extent, on the image of being the moral regulator of life. To do so is to lose power, or, at the very least, to plunge into an abyss in which its place in the world is unknown.

*Filipe de Freitas Gonçalves He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).

Notes

[I] In an article published in Ax of Assis in Line, Felipe Pereira Rissato discovered a contribution by Machado to the newspaper The Cosmopolitan, in which our author celebrates, on September 20, 1884, the unification of Italy in a short note, which says: “Everything has its time. What was in the heart of every Italian, what Machiavelli insinuated to the Medici, could only be done in this century, after Italy learned the hard way in the school of servitude. The best freedom is the one that costs the most”. As can be seen, our author’s liberal convictions remained alive after 1881 and he expressed himself in favor of unification, which, in our context, means opposition to the Pope’s claims. The author also refers to a poem published by Machado in Correio Mercantil, on February 10, 1859, in the same issue in which the very important “O jornal e o livro” began to be published, the publication of a poem in which our young writer celebrated the movements for the unification of Italy, related to the independence of Greece and the movement that was being glimpsed in Poland. The chorus is sing-song and enthusiastic, with a military flavor: “Pale Italy — resurrect now./ The burning in the breasts — in hope the faith!”. Felipe Pereira’s article can be read here: Machado de Assis in the Cosmopolitan newspaper. The poem in its entirety can be consulted on the Hemeroteca website.

[ii] No artigo “Machado de Assis and religious freedom”, José Almeida Júnior comments on our author's position in relation to religious issues, especially on the need for religious freedom and separation between State and Church, clearly showing that, in these initial years of ideological combat in the liberal ranks, Catholic conservatism was one of Machado's chosen enemies.

[iii] Machado de Assis, At random, February 7, 1865. In: Obra Completa de Machado de Assis. São Paulo: Editora Nova Aguilar, 2015, v. 4, p. 233-34. From now on, as all citations will be made from this edition onwards, the reference is limited to OCMA, maintaining the initial indication of the specific work and the volume and page on which the citation is found.

[iv] Machado de Assis, At random, February 21, 1865. In: OCMA, v. 4, p. 237.

[v] I am choosing as my subject texts from the beginning of our author's career, when he incorporated political faith into liberalism, and some from his maturity, after the publication of Bras Cubas, when his supposedly skeptical view of the world had already asserted itself. Regarding these choices, two clarifications: in the middle of Machado's work (the first novels, especially Helena, and the first two books of short stories), there seems to be a more condescending view of religious life. The atmosphere is more stifling, more resigned to the dictates of the world (although trying to glimpse necessary changes in them) and, therefore, the religious tone fits like a glove. I will not worry about this core, focusing only on the 20-year-old liberal and the mature 50-year-old writer. A second important observation is that I still see, in the mature Machado, although in a much more nuanced way than in his youth, the same liberal ideal as before. The problem is too complicated to be developed in a footnote, but suffice it to say that all the satire constructed by the author in his maturity is only intelligible if we consider liberal modernity as a paradigm. An imperfect paradigm, it is true, but a paradigm nonetheless. It is not because Machado can clearly see the improprieties of our liberalism (and of his paradigm up North) that his horizon is not the realization of a fully modernized society.

[vi] Machado de Assis, ex cathedra (Undated stories). In: OCMA, v. 2, p. 417.

[vii] Machado de Assis, ex cathedra (Undated stories). In: OCMA, v. 2, p. 418.

[viii] Machado de Assis, ex cathedra (Undated stories). In: OCMA, v. 2, p. 421.

[ix] Just remember that the African Bishops refused to follow the Pope's instruction regarding the blessing of people individually. See: Machado de Assis' chronicle about Tiradentes, Available at https://aterraeredonda.com.br/a-cronica-de-machado-de-assis-sobre-tiradentes/

[X] Leonard Boff, Church: charisma and power (essay on militant ecclesiology). Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 2022. It is worth remembering that the Brazilian theologian sat in “Galileo Galilei’s chair,” as he likes to say, because of this book. It is also worth remembering that the person on the other side of the table judging as an inquisitor was the then Cardinal Ratzinger, future Benedict XVI.

[xi] Pastor Ed René Kivitz, in a recent interview, said inspiring words about this separation and the historicization of the moral teachings of the gospels. The interview can be found at the following link: Pastor Ed René Kivitz is the guest on Dando a Real with Leandro Demori. Accessed on April 26, 2025. It should also be noted that the pastor's speech, although inspiring, does not represent the most significant aspect of Brazilian evangelism. Strictly speaking, it seems that a religious movement only gains social and political importance when it is reduced to moral teachings. Or, at least, that is the feeling of those who observe the historical moment in which we live, since this is not a characteristic of religious life, but of contemporary culture. If we turn the screw a little further, we could, at the limit, say that this is a characteristic of the religious world that is becoming universal as a cultural mode in our world, transforming religiosity into an important key to understanding our time. Thinking more specifically about the Brazilian case, I have the impression that nothing politically important happens in our country without religious feelings being engaged in the process. In addition to contemporary conservatism, we should also remember the fundamental importance of the Ecclesial Base Communities for the social movements of the end of the last century and also of the PT itself. Taking part in the religious life of the people is an essential task that any movement that aims to have political and social importance must have as its point of escape.

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