"...identifying that "ails the Brazilian polity is not merely the despondency of defeat, but the despondency of godlessness, the despondency of a culture of greed, the horrors of the modern world imposed upon them from outside." By late 1917, Padre Cicero's sermons as he traveled the Northeast drew thousands every time he spoke, and despite the trappings of Catholicism attached to them, they felt like carnivals or Texan revivalist movements more so than staid masses. It began to be said that Padre Cicero could perform miracles - that his touch healed the blind, that men crippled along the trenches of the Parana could suddenly walk once more, that those whose lungs had been ravaged by Argentina's liberal use of chlorine gas could suddenly breathe fully again.
Padre Cicero was also an interesting, potentially dangerous new wrinkle in Brazilian society specifically because he spoke to neither right nor left. He was an opponent of socialism, a fierce one, in fact, but yet he spoke of a communitarian God, of a Catholicism that needed to "tend to its flock" and promised Church leaders that if they could not combat materialism and capitalist excesses, they would "be destroyed on the altar of the false gods of revolution as the flock finds nowhere else to turn." In his language he decried the massive latifundia, denounced the concentration of political power amongst southern oligarchs of the cafe com leite establishment, and excoriated the overwhelming arrogance of the Fonseca years. At the same time, he explicitly drew the line between political and social modernization and Brazil's defeat in the war; it was by turning from God "in heart and soul" that Brazilians had become weak enough to be held at bay by their numerically inferior enemy, which Cicero identified as having won due to carrying "the ideological cause of radicalism which they believed in as fervently as we once believed in God," while Brazil had lost, unmotivated by "a cause of nothing." In essence, the contours of Brazilian integralism were being sketched out in the poverty-stricken villages of the Northeast, one fiery sermon at a time.
Cicero's crusade was colored very much by the peculiarities of the poor, isolated corner of the country where it was occurring - his crowds were often overwhelmingly black freedmen or children of slaves, as tied to the latifundia by economic need as their parents and grandparents had been by bondage - but the years after the war were fertile ground for an explosion of introspection and, in darker moments, recriminations seeking to find some scapegoat for what was being called the Vitoria Mutilada - the "mutilated victory." There was a sense, a very broad one, that while Brazilian territory had never gone touched, and the goal of installing a friendly government in Montevideo had been met in the first weeks of the war, the war had not in fact been anything approximating a favorable strategic outcome by the time it ended. Brazil had quit the war before the United States could further sink any of its navy and in doing so swallowed a provision that demilitarized the Uruguayan coast, perpetually forbidding Brazilian warships from the River Plate, which erased many of the advantages of a Uruguayan satrapy. While the whole of Argentina's Mesopotamia was demilitarized, too, in Rio de Janeiro this was seen as a total surrender of strategic advantage, and for as much as many Argentines had wanted to press ahead with harsher terms, it was in Brazil that the provisions of Asuncion were seen as a humiliation, with them the only member of the Bloc Sud never conceded ground in the field and forced into retreat.
The political situation in Brazil was thus highly volatile, and Hermes Fonseca's scalp had not been enough to sate the "braying mobs," as Prime Minister Pessoa referred to the industrial strikers in major cities or the roving bands of demobilized veterans who had within months of the ink on the treaties being dry formed violent gangs that extorted business owners, traded in contraband in the inflationary postwar economy, and were looking for an outlet of their rage other than each other. The language of bitterness appealed to this polity, and the type of appeal to a renewal of faith typified by Cicero was not unique to him, but mirrored in similar language by the devout Luis I, who privately shared more than a few of Cicero's less bombastic beliefs about the importance of the Church as the foundation of the Brazilian state, at least in terms of promoting a sense of shared nationhood and political unity..."
- For Thine is the Glory: Brazil and Integralism
