In Defence of the Faith: Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Comissario in the Age of Inquisitional Decline by James Wadsworth (review)

The Catholic Church of Brazil in the late colonial period has not been a topic much favored by historians. While neglect may be too harsh a term, there is much we need to know, but do not, about the role of religion in the colonial order. James Wadsworth’s study is a most welcome corrective to this situation, with an original approach and considerable merits.

A central institution in the Catholic Church in the Tridentine period was the Inquisition. It guarded the faith by ensuring orthodoxy in both belief and conduct. It could be used to control those who challenged the political order. It was the more formidable because it worked in secrecy and outside of the ordinary legal system. In Portugal there existed a General Council of the Inquisition, and tribunals at Lisbon and Evora. No such institutions existed in the New World colonies, over which the Lisbon tribunal held jurisdiction. Instead the Inquisition depended upon its agents there—basically the comissários assisted by familiares and qualificadores—to investigate unorthodoxy, report it to Lisbon and, usually acting on instructions from that tribunal, to arrest and punish the culpable.

James Wadsworth brings the Inquisition to life, revealing both its strengths and its weaknesses, by tracing the career of Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a comissário in the captaincy of Pernambuco in the Brazilian Northeast from 1770 to 1813. Born at Recife in 1742, Marques de Araújo belonged to a prosperous local family, his male ancestors being immigrants from Portugal, and the females brasileiras starting with an Indian woman. He took his first vows as a Jesuit just before that order’s expulsion from the Portuguese dominions in 1759. He renounced those vows and was ordained a priest in 1764. When called to Lisbon along with other ex-Jesuits in the late 1760s, he seized the opportunity to secure his appointment as a comissário.

Thanks to Marques de Araújo’s distinctive handwriting, James Wadsworth has been able to identify about 500 cases in which the comissário was involved. Of these, only 6 percent involved “crimes against the faith,” including a single denunciation of Judaism. Most notable were the prosecutions against bigamy. The bulk of the comissário’s work, in which he was noted for his promptness, diligence and reliability, involved investigating the suitability of those requesting appointment as inquisition officials. The one area in which Marques de Araújo showed personal commitment and zeal was in his abhorrence of what he termed “os libertinos” (the freethinkers), those influenced by the culture of the Enlightenment and thus skeptics in their religious views and behavior. Surprisingly, the chief libertino in Marques de Araújo’s eyes was Bernardo LuÍs Ferreira Portugal, dean of the cathedral chapter of the diocese of Olinda.

According to Wadsworth, the final years of the comissário’s career were consumed by his feud with the dean and by the associated struggle with the cathedral chapter, which resolutely refused to pay Marques de Araújo his stipend as a canon, which post he had held since 1797. In both conflicts he came off the worse, although the honors bestowed on him by the crown after its arrival in Brazil in 1808 (facilitated by a vast financial “donation”) may have offered some consolation to the comissário, aged 70 in 1812, in his declining years.

Marques de Araújo’s life provides fascinating insights into the role of religion in the Northeast of Brazil in the late colonial order: the absence and resulting ineffectiveness of the bishops, the dominance of the Church hierarchy by local elite families, the social standing conferred by Inquisition offices, and the erratic effectiveness of the Inquisition.

While the work is not as penetrating or as precise as might...