Dias

"what actually seems to unite the Protestant churches is their common anti-Catholicism."¹ (311)

"When the Protestant churches were later introduced into Brazil, this was part of a socio-political programme which put them radically against the Catholic Church, which was at that time allied to the nineteenth-century oligarchical state. Thus there has been no escaping from the Brazilian Protestant ethos, shaped and consolidated by political questions and ideological assertions which put the churches in hostile opposition to the Catholic Church."² (311)

"If the central assertions of the Reformation did express themselves in Brazilian Protestantism, they were watered down as much by the pietist, moralistic and self-centred version of North American Protestantism as by the anti-Catholicism of the emerging ecclesiastical structures. They were also responding to the antagonistic, no less belligerent attitude of the Catholic Church which did not want to allow a place for altemative ecclesiological expressions in nineteenth-century Brazilian society." ³(312)

"One must also note that the enormous development of the Pentecostal churches further aggravates the situation, in that these ecclesiastical expressions are founded on a conservative Protestant individualism and mobilize people in a religious perspective which has no connections to the social problems besetting them." ⁴

1ZDias, ' Ecumenism and Renewal in Brazil: an Appraisal', The Ecumenical Review 39:3 (1987), 310–317, 311.

2ZDias, ' Ecumenism and Renewal in Brazil: an Appraisal', The Ecumenical Review 39:3 (1987), 310–317, 311.

3ZDias, ' Ecumenism and Renewal in Brazil: an Appraisal', The Ecumenical Review 39:3 (1987), 310–317, 312.

4ZDias, ' Ecumenism and Renewal in Brazil: an Appraisal', The Ecumenical Review 39:3 (1987), 310–317, 313.