The Devil's Church, an adapted narrative

Em The devil's church, Machado de Assis crafts a narrative that is intense, tense, and unsettling, yet easily understood. For the reader more deeply involved in ideological issues, it serves as a political paradigm; however, for the reader even more attuned to the Brazilian context, it serves as a model.

An old Benedictine manuscript recounts that the Devil, one day, had the idea of ​​founding a church. Although his profits were continuous and large, he felt humiliated by the haphazard role he had played for centuries, without organization, without rules, without canons, without ritual, without anything. He lived, so to speak, off divine remnants, human oversights and favors. Nothing fixed, nothing regular. Why shouldn't he have his own church? A church of the Devil was the effective means of combating other religions, and destroying them all at once.

This was the trajectory of President Jair Bolsonaro, a parliamentarian of little influence, driven by provincial and personal interests. He was constantly associated with the lower ranks of the legislature, which is composed of deputies... rats who hide in the plenary sessions, flee from the podium, and meet in the dead of night to divide crumbs, lick their nails, and tarnish their biographies.

Far-right parties, with the support of a society morally linked to fascism, evangelical businesses, and slave-owning entrepreneurs, have built the devil's church in Brazil, indoctrinating and persuading vulnerable people that evil can be better than good.

Scripture against Scripture, breviary against breviary. I will have my Mass, with wine and bread in abundance, my sermons, bulls, novenas, and all the other ecclesiastical paraphernalia. My creed will be the universal nucleus of spirits, my church an Abraham's tent. And then, while other religions fight and divide themselves, my church will be unique; I will find neither Muhammad nor Luther before me. There are many ways to affirm; there is only one way to deny everything. – proclaimed the devil.

The negativity of this genocidal group provokes, among the faithful followers of the devil's church, a rage against the established powers. This fanaticism demobilizes the movements and reports issued by the World Health Organization to confront the pandemic, and they take to the streets to claim the right to become infected.

They are unaware, for example, that the Army sent an official letter to the municipalities of Rio de Janeiro, and likely throughout the country, requesting a survey of statistical data regarding the number of cemeteries, the availability of graves, and the daily burial capacity in their respective areas of responsibility.

Brazil has become a surreal country that deeply shames me. I pity the friends and relatives who collaborated as a group, serving as the foundation for Nazism and Fascism to erect their walls and ramparts on our soil.