Corações em Festa: Desenho e Fé no Novenário e Procissão do Sagrado Coração de Jesus em Laranjeiras-SE

Abstract

Laranjeiras, a Sergipean city was, in the 19th century, an important economic pole of the state. Besides, the city was also known for its cultural expressions, which mostly featured religious aspects, as in the Procession to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, our principal object of study. Important social disputes also occurred in the same city, including some related to the Catholic religiosity, as displayed in the strong rejection, by the local population, of the substitution of the Sacred Heart of Jesus’ Sculpture from the Head Church. That fact made necessary for the state government to send a hundred policemen to try to solve the problem, which ended up in the maintenance of both sculptures on the altar in the church, although it was disapproved by the ecclesiastical rules. The work entitled “Hearts in Party” has as its objective to analyze the relation of the laranjeirense community with the sculptural images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus during the Novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in the Sergipean city of Laranjeiras in the years 2008 and 2009. We will analyze, through the pattern of the feast and the performance of the participants, what have changed and the resemblances that remained in the relation between the community and the sculptural images. We will explain the origin of the Brazilian religious imaginary tradition and devotion in relation to the sculptural images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus from the aforementioned city. The sculptural images, as well as the other visual elements, might help clarify how the religious drawings (religious sculptures) arouse in the people not only the feeling of faith, also working as a pedagogical instrument of religious conversion and “triggers” of memory, which might reveal either individual or collective dramas and joyfulness feelings, social, political and cultural disputes, displayed in the disposition of the images at the moment of the feast and in the look of those who observe them.