The governmentality of catholic ‘souls’: church and education in the nineteenth century

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze two papal encyclicals pontificates of the century XIX, proposing to demonstrate how that among the various practices of Catholicism, which prioritized the school-based missionary, apostolic and disciplinary body of religious – and, subsequently, the Catholic believers themselves – was the predominant, assuming the role of regenerating the Church and the main form of exercise of power over their church in contemporary populations. It would not be showing the automatic transition from one form of power to the other, but to identify its possible genesis point and the changes in the strength of a theology of features increasingly in educational and institutional framework that assumed a pastoral and ascetic bias.