The Sacrilegious theft of the Cathedral of Bahia. A study on the interaction between secular and ecclesiastic justice in the Bahian archbishop in the 18th century

Abstract

In the year 1729, César de Meneses, viceroy of Brazil, addressed a letter to D. João V in which he reported on the two thefts that had taken place at the Cathedral of Bahia. In the first, a gold purifier worth 150,000 réis, was stolen from the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament of the See. In the second, three ampullas, which together made up a total of 600,000 réis, were taken from the tabernacle. For the viceroy, if the first theft was unpredictable, the second was due to the negligence of the ecclesiastical justice, which, by not taking all the necessary steps to discover the author of the first misfortune, ended up encouraging its repetition. Based on this case and its developments, the objective of this article is to analyze the interactions between secular and ecclesiastical justice regarding the investigation and punishment of sacrilegious crimes of theft that took place in the archbishopric of Bahia in the 18th century.