“The children of the widow” from the perspective of suspicion: Marian congregations, Catholic intellectuals, repression and Masonic reorganization strategies within the intricacies of the State bureaucracy (1937-1945)

Abstract

The present article is concerned with discussing the paths that Pernambuco Freemasonry took in the period after the installation of the Estado Novo, when it remained with its activities and assets prohibited by the State. Throughout the text, we will discuss how the anti-Masonic ideology was disseminated in various spaces of the bureaucracy of the Estado Novo of Pernambuco, many of them, formed within a sociability, political and intellectual of conservative-Catholic matrix. Trying to read sources related to this process of building a logic of suspicion, we will observe how it was important in the process of reorganizing Pernambuco’s Masonic actions in the period of 1937-1945.

Keywords
Freemasonry; anti-Masonry; Estado Novo; Marian Congregates; Catholic intellectuals