Abstract
At my fieldwork in a Catholic Social Centre, I had noticed that youngsters well succeeded in the social inclusion process were encouraged to offer a testimony to other excluded teenagers. This practice was rooted in Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and aimed to exhibit them as protagonists and ‘empowered’ youngsters. This text explores a series of entanglements of testimony as a practice, discussing it as simultaneously Christian and secular, informative and performative, individual and relational. The conclusion suggests that the testimony’s efficacy is dependent on these entanglements, which are visible in its historicity (from Freire’s pedagogy to the actual use) and in its relational temporality (the narrator past is projected on the future of his audience), making visible the Brazilian Catholic secularity.
Keywords
testimony; Catholicism; secularity; social inclusion; Paulo Freire