In times of a threatened catholicism: religious restraints and definitions in the modern era, under the purple of cardinals

For a deeper understanding of issues related to Catholicism and threats to it in the 16th century, the temporal and spatial spectrum must be increased, given that it is a time of great knowledge of non-European peoples and of interaction with different religious professions in Christian Europe itself. One, therefore, must reflect on the external threats and the internal crises of a “Christianity” that had been in collapse since the late Middle Ages (according to mediaeval imagery), on the restraints that States put on the Church and the religious communities that develop alongside the Church and on the strategies that the bodies of the Catholic Church find to constantly adapt to stimuli and tensions. Within the scope of the environment of disturbances produced in modern Europe from the very often blood-red clashes of different religious professions, analyses and comments have been made on a Protestant image that was confiscated in the 1560s from a New Christian merchant in Rua Nova dos Mercadores, resulting in his arrest and prosecution by the Lisbon Inquisition. The direct attack on the Papacy and the Church is clearly shown in pictorial terms, transparent in its symbolism around mass, whose officiants are foxes (enhancement of their colour, similar to that of the high dignitaries of the Church), illustrated in both the text of that image and in its discursive elements. But Catholicism clandestinely or openly adapted in a dynamic manner in both Europe and overseas territories. In particular, in Portuguese America, invasive multiculturality appears to constitute a true threat vis-à-vis catechetical programmes and cultural syncretisms. The article is therefore a summary of threats, resistances and adaptations, subdivided into four modules: the first addressing the external threats and internal crises in Catholic Europe, the second the vicissitudes and restraints, the third a pictorial testimonial of the attacks against the Papacy and the fourth addresses catechetical programmes and multicultural syncretisms.