Needs of the Heart

“Serbin’s superb new study offers a comprehensive look at the church from the colonial period to the end of the military government in the 1980s. He takes the long view in order to demonstrate his central argument: that the ‘progressive’ Catholic Church of the twentieth century, with its political activism and social consciousness, did not emerge out of a void but rather developed out of patterns already set in the colonial period that shifted as they played out against the backdrop of a changing Brazil. . . . The book is a welcome addition to the field of Brazilian history and the history of the Catholic Church in Latin America.” —American Historical Review

“This work stakes out entirely new terrain in the history and historiography of Catholicism and society in Brazil. . . . Uncompromising and yet compassionate in its judgments, this second major work on the Church since the author's Secret Dialogues (2000) draws ably and amply on hitherto untapped, century-old archives of key religious congregations charged with clerical training and of Brazil's national hierarchy that oversaw it . . . In uncovering these notable findings and ably setting them within the push and pull of world and national forces, Serbin reconfirms his standing as one of the leading historians of Brazil's past.” —The Americas

“Serbin . . . see[s] the equally vast and variegated military, political and religious history of Brazil through a narrower lens of changing cultural ideals of the clergy and seminaries. He charts the rise of priest revolutionaries imbued with the ideals of the enlightenment.” —Horizons

“Needs of the Heart provides a rich analysis of the historical development of the Catholic Church in Brazil. Much more than in institutional history, this work examines how, over the course of five centuries, priests navigated the divide between Europe and America as they participated in shaping a Brazilian nation as well as a distinctly Brazilian church.” —Hispanic American Historical Review

“ . . . by focusing on priests, and connecting their experience to broader socio-political dynamics, Professor Serbin enriches the stories of liberation theology and of the role played by the Catholic church in promoting democracy and social justice . . . a significant contribution to scholarship on Latin America.” —Latin American Studies

“The long and winding history of the Brazilian Catholic Church is thus revealed in Serbin’s analysis as the partial work-product of its primary foot soldiers—its clergy. As such, the book provides a critical complement to previous work which has focused with relative exclusivity on the policies and practices of church leadership, whether in Brazil or the Vatican.” —The Catholic Historical Review

"In Needs of the Heart, Kenneth P. Serbin examines the rise and crisis of a model of priestly vocation that was not 'traditional' but rather a new discipline, institutionalized in the mid-nineteenth century. Its intimate, splendidly documented analysis of men's responses to that model can give us a constructive perspective on the coverups of sexual misconduct within the American clergy. Needs of the Heart is also an extraordinary history of the Sixties in Latin America. The countercultural and experimental movements within Brazil's seminaries, ranging from psychoanalysis to 'living alongside the people,' offer us a touchstone for judging the promise and contradictions in the post-1945 Christian quest for individual fulfillment and social justice." —Dain Borges, University of Chicago

“Kenneth Serbin’s Needs of the Heart, extraordinary in its breadth, depth, and compelling analysis, unveils the triumphs and tragedies of Brazil’s priests and the seminaries that formed them. The current world-wide tensions and scandals engulfing the priesthood are reflected in this study—a study that needs to be replicated throughout the Catholic world.” —Donald Cozzens, John Carroll University, author of The Changing Face of the Priesthood

"This innovative analysis places the formation of a Brazilian priesthood at the center of a preeminently historical examination of the Catholic Church in Latin America's largest country, giving us a new understanding of the forces within and without that have uniquely and universally explained the controversial efforts of seminarians, priests, and bishops to redefine clerical identity in a a national context lying “between Europe and America.” Serbin brings an impressive amount of fresh evidence to reveal Brazil's Catholic Church from the inside, and his reliance on the voices of seminarians, priests, and religious [brothers] for dissecting the post-Vatican II debate over a priestly vocation goes to the heart of the future of the church in a twenty-first century world. This superb study takes church history in a new direction, appropriately recasting a Europe-centered ecclesia within its largest field of Third-World congregants." —Linda Lewin, University of California, Berkeley