Portuguese Colonization, Catholic Faith, and the Relativization of Secularism in the Jurisprudence of Brazil’s Supreme Court

Ana Cristina Melo de Pontes Botelho is a research professor at the Center for Comparative Constitutional Studies and a collaborating professor at the University of Brasília.

The Role of Portuguese Catholic Colonization in the Emergence of the Brazilian Nation

With the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, Franciscan priests and members of other religious orders were sent to catechize the indigenous inhabitants of the region. The Portuguese brought with them the culture of the June festivals dedicated to various saints, including Saint John, Saint Peter, and Saint Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order, who died on 13 June 1231.

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The Orthodox Church and Moscow’s Colonial Policies in Siberia

Stanislav Panin holds a PhD in Philosophy from Moscow State University and is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University.

When viewed through the lens of modern sensibilities concerning religious tolerance, some acts of fourteenth-century Russian Orthodox Saint Stephen of Perm seem questionable.

Stephen, a missionary of the Russian Orthodox Church, was particularly renown for spreading Christianity among the polytheistic peoples of western Siberia. According to his hagiography, Stephen and his followers regularly destroyed figures of local traditional deities, which Stephen “hated with intense hatred” and intentionally sought out, in order to cut them down with an axe and set them on fire.

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Communist Law and the Protection of Religious Freedom in Poland

Piotr Szymaniec is a professor at and the director of the Institute of Socio-Legal Studies, Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences, in Wałbrzych (Poland).

For 123 years, between 1795 and 1918, maps of Europe contained no independent Polish state. In the second half of the nineteenth century, former Polish lands were subject to quasi-colonial policy (with the exception of Galicia, which gained autonomy within Austria-Hungary). This policy was reflected in enforceable law; legal orders of all states ruling Polish lands defined crimes against religion, the most serious of which was blasphemy. The Austrian Criminal Code of May 27, 1852; the German Code of May 31, 1870; and the Russian Code of 1903 all introduced the crime of blasphemy.

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