Baptists -- Missions -- Brazil; Brazil -- Description and travel
Not all of these shrines are canonized, but nevertheless they have
power over the people. As we were making a trip into the interior of
the State of Pernambuco we passed a station called Severino. Near the
station we could see a splendid church building which had been
constructed in honor of St. Severino. This saint is not in the
calendar, not recognized by the church nor the bishop, yet it is
popular all over Brazil. Many people are named after him, and to this
shrine are brought many of the same sort of things as were described in
connection with the shrine of the Good End. This idol is stuffed with
sugar-cane pith. The head of it was found in the woods some time ago. A
tradition was started that an image had fallen from Heaven. The
superstitious people believed the report and soon a shrine was in full
operation, which today, even though it be not canonized, is exerting a
far-reaching influence. The owner of the shrine gave up his farming and
lives handsomely on the offerings the deluded bring to his private
shrine.
In one of the most magnificent churches in Bahia is an image of a negro
saint. This holy being won his canonization as a reward for stealing
money from his master to contribute to the church. That is it: Do
anything you please, provided you share the spoils with the church.
Across the breast of the Virgin's image in the church of Our Lady of
Penha in Pernambuco, before which church the Bibles were burned in
1903, are written the following words: "One hundred days' indulgence to
the person who will kiss the holy foot of the Holy Virgin." This
pitifully expresses, perhaps, the thought behind saint worship. It is
the hope that the aching of the sinful heart may find some assuagement
through the worship of these gilded, gaudy images. It is claimed by the
priests and some of the more intelligent that the image worshiped is
only a concrete representation of the saint, and it contains
symbolically the spirit of the saint. To be sure! This is exactly the
reason the more intelligent fetish worshiper in Africa assigns for
worshiping his hand-made god. The etone or piece of wood is a
representative of God and to a degree contains His spirit. Such worship
is condemned as being idolatry in the African. The thing which is
idolatry in the African must be idolatry in the Catholic. Even the
Catholics will condemn the idol worship of the heathen, and yet this
same Catholic church has in scores of places in South America and in
other heathen lands, taken the identical images worshiped by the
heathen and converted them into Catholic saints.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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