Artigo do NYT sobre a Igreja Positivista do Brasil

(© Nadira Shira / The New York Times)

Nearly in Ruins: The Church Where Sages Dreamed of a Modern Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO — Neighbors from surrounding apartment buildings toss empty beer bottles through a gaping hole in the roof of the once-majestic church. Pigeons roam the cavernous nave, their excrement piling up on the floor. A watchman guards treasures from the thieves who prey on the city’s derelict buildings.

The neoclassical Positivist Church of Brazil, with its soaring columns and a cryptic sign above its entrance proclaiming, “The Living Are Forever and Increasingly Governed by the Dead,” was long a captivating sight on Benjamin Constant Street near the old city center.

These days, the crumbling, graffiti-taggedchurch, whose freethinking founders helped modern Brazil rise from the ashes ofan empire, is just another emblem of how Rio de Janeiro neglects its past,allowing grandeur to fall into ruin.