A igreja dos homens: o trabalho dos agentes de Cáritas para o desenvolvimento da economia popular solidária no Ceará

Abstract

This research aims at investigating the work of the so-called “Caritas Agents” for development of experiences related to a solidarity-inspired Popular Economy Project (Economia Popular Solidária – EPS) as envisioned by Brazilian Caritas, an institution affiliated with CNBB in the state of Ceara. The major issues that guided the research were: how does the Church reach its “children” by means of its Caritas Agents? Who are they and where do they come from? How did they develop the work for fomenting the EPS in the state of Ceara? What kind of meaning do they attribute to their task? How is Christian guidance interpreted by agents in their effort to fomenting EPS in order to make effective their Utopia of “God’s Kingdom” within men’s pragmatic world? What’s the meaning of “solidarity” for Caritas and its agents? As for techniques and methodological procedures used in the research I resorted to fluctuating observation for the analysis of official documents, local newspaper’s articles and investigation of websites. Besides in loco observations, I did semi-structured interviews with Caritas agents aiming at elucidating the relation between solidarity-based economy and the Catholic Church, considering the job developed by these actors forming the Church’s “social service”. The research revealed that the Caritas agent besides being a Christian militant he is also a registered worker who is, however, plagued by several contradictions. The agents’ working method is based on “solidarity” and “emancipation”, and they are required to have an “education” for “solidarity culture”. Guided by the so-called “liberating solidarity”, the agents act technically and politically to develop associative economic activities directed to the “poor” as classified by the Catholic Church during its Episcopal Conferences of Medellin (1969) and Puebla (1979). The agents try to educate the workers from the so-called “solidarity-based producing groups” according to solidarity moral principles, seen as a fundamental tool to the build-up of a society based on Christian teachings in order to include the dispossessed as conveyed by the utopian notion of “God’s Kingdom on earth”. The EPS, however, was created fundamentally as a category arising from a secular reason within the solidarity-based economic movement, that is, to create viable conditions for the “poor”, fighting poverty and the so-called “social exclusion”. According to EPS’s understanding of the matter it is necessary that one considers the dynamics of capitalistic crises whose history is closely related to work processes and social transformations. At the end of this dissertation, one may picture the movement, called solidarity-based economy, both as an alternative and a historical possibility to the capitalistic system which lead us to think about dynamic questions related to trails opened to our society and whose answers do not belong to this time. Let, then, history speak…