Religious Narratives of Healing and Conversion in a Charismatic Catholic Church in Montevideo: a Brief Approach

Abstract

The paper is based on an ethnography realized in a charismatic catholic Parrish in Montevideo, Uruguay. The first part deals in general terms with the distinct features of this movement as a mixture of Catholicism and Pentecostal Protestantism, its emphasis in emotions and corporal manifestations of the sacred and its conflict relationship with the catholic structures. The second and third parts are about a typical element of Pentecostalism at general level: the healing practices. In this community, they are oriented to generate a whole transformation, insofar they are grounded in a tripartite conceptualization of human beings, where mind, body, and spirit must be attended. In this sense, the “treatment” here deals with the suffering as a total experience, giving sense to it through charismatic narratives. To be healed is to be a converted, a person that has reinterpreted her life through the religious expressions given by the community. Charismatic manifestations, therefore, constitute also a way of healing, insofar they are related with the spiritual dimension of the persona, and constitute the strongest evidence of her belonging to the community. They integrate a cosmology where what is conceived as health is a balance between spiritual, corporal, and emotional dimensions, which being interrelated, they influence each other.