Redeeming Pardos and Pretos: Constructing Race through Devotion to Saint Benedict and Saint Gonçalo Garcia in 18th-Century Brazil

This paper explores the internal contradictions between the Catholic Church’s justification of African slavery and the Franciscan Order’s promotion of Saint Benedict “The Moor” (1524-1589)—a Sicilian-born friar descended from Ethiopian slaves—and Saint Gonçalo Garcia (1557-1597)—a Luso-Hindu merchant and lay tertiary martyred in Japan. While the Portuguese hagiographer Frei Apollinario da Conceição (1692- 1760) presented Saint Benedict as an ideal missionary to catechize slave populations in Brazil, his Brazilian-born contemporary Frei Santa Maria de Jabotão (1695-1779) reconfigured the mixed-race Saint Gonçalo Garcia as the redeemer of pardos, capable of defending the political aspirations of mixed-race locals in Recife, Pernambuco. Ultimately, I argue that both Franciscan chroniclers articulated alternative understandings of blackness by positioning it as an “accidental” property devoid of moral imputations and as an index of African ancestrality rooted in a privileged, biblical genealogy of black sanctity.