INTERPRETATIONS OF RELATIONS BETWEEN CURE ANIMARUM AND POTESTAS INDIRECT IN THE LUSO-AMERICAN WORLD

In this text I try to evidence the relations between cura animarum and potestas indirecta that were stablished in a expansion zone of the portuguese empire. To make it possible, I will examine at first how the jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez’s thought about “law” and “custom” was understood by a jesuit missionary, in São Vicente in the end of the 17th century. Afterwards, I will compare his point of view to the one of a royal official and try to identify the extension of an agreement which was being built locally about the legitimancy of habitual procedures of indian labor explotation. The inquiry I intend to bring concerns the way the circulation of certain notions widely spread in Europe were incorporated here by the missionaries of Província do Brasil. A clear answer to this question might allow us to clarify how the missionary knowledge, while trying to run the mission in expansion zones of the portuguese empire ceased immediately to propose specifically as “missionaries”, bringing along a set of theological, political and juridical propositions that had as a motive the need of a intervention from the missionary in the formation process of colonial society in order to obtain people’s convetion. The tension between cura animarum and potestas indirecta evidences the dimension of jesuit mission policy in Brazil