The Church of the Third Order of Carmo immediately adjacent to the Old Cathedral, but is well worth seeing in its own right. “Third Orders” are lay organizations associated with monastic orders, whose members stop short of complete vows: they don’t have to embrace either poverty or chastity, and a lay member can resign from a third order at will. Third Orders are associated with specific religious communities—Carmelites, Franciscans, Dominicans, etc.—just as the first two orders (monks and nuns) are. However that doesn’t quite capture the clout of third orders in Brazil, which have some of the commercial, political, and social advantages of fraternal orders in the USA or even, heaven forbid, Masonic lodges. One thing that a Brazilian ordem terceira often did, was to build a church for members of the order. Looking at how opulent some of these churches are—in Rio, Sao Francisco da Penitencia is another—you get the feeling there was a fair amount of one-ups-manship involved. There are two main tourist draws to this church: (A) the Baroque-Rococo architecture, and (B) a statue of Jesus’s great-grandmother. (A) The Third Order of Carmo predates Colombus; in Rio this order has been active in this location since the 1600s. In 1752, the Order decided to replace their modest chapel, with a grand new church. The work was done quite rapidly, compared to the cathedral next door. Funding and planning was done within three years, and the church’s interior and most of its façade was built by 1770. The exceptions on the façade were the two twin towers with their bulbous domes covered in blue-and-white tile, which were built between 1847 and 1850 to a design by Manuel Joaquim de Melo Corte Real, a professor at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, to bracket the original Baroque contra-curved gable. If you look at the two side-by-side facades (see photo)—the old cathedral and the Ordem Terceira church—one difference immediately strikes you: the original façade of the Ordem Terceira church is built entirely of stone. For the cathedral—and every other colonial church in Rio, only the base is stone; most of its façade is plaster. The medallion showing St. Simon receiving the scapular from the hand of the Virgin of Mount Carmel is an allusion to the third order: members were presented with scapulars on acceptance into it. The interior is a single aisle nave with side chapels. As was normal for Rococo churches, it took decades to complete the elaborate interior decoration. Two master wood-carvers are primarily responsible for the 18th century work: Luiz de Fonseca Rosa and Valentim da Fonseca e Silva (Master Valentim). The chapel of the Novitiate, to the right of the chancel, is entirely the work of Valentim and is considered one of his masterpieces. The paintings in the chapels are by Manuel da Cunha. In the 19th century, sculptor Antônio de Pádua e Castro spent almost 30 years carving decorations for the walls of the nave, giving the entire interior an over-the-top Rococo look. There’s an elegant dome over the chancel (see photo). While I actually prefer the interior of the Royal Chapel next door, there’s no question that this is also a fabulous Rococo interior (see photo). (B) The altar is perhaps the most strikingly curious feature of the entire church, showing four generations of the family of Christ: the infant Jesus, his mother Mary, her mother St. Anne, and Anne’s mother St. Emerenciana (see photo), all three of the ladies being dressed in Carmelite brown. Don’t feel embarrassed, however, if you’ve never actually heard of St. Emerenciana before. There are very good reasons why you would not have. The first and only place where Jesus’s great-grandmother is named, is in the Proto-Gospel of St James. “Proto-Gospel” means that when church fathers decided which documents to include in the official version of the Good Book, this was one of many that was dismissed as being apocryphal. Further, while there’s always been a fair amount of quality control on exactly what a particular book or epistle of accepted Scripture says, there was no such enforcement on consistency for proto-stuff, so verbiage would be locally added, deleted or radically changed over the course of the Middle Ages, with no authority correcting it. I was intrigued enough to search out two different English translations of the proto-gospel of St. James on the ‘net, and neither of those two versions even mentions a St. Emerenciana. If some Catholics, somewhere, take a strong affection to saints of dubious pedigree, the Church has been known to turn a blind eye to a local favorite. However, in this case, the closest the church gets to a St. Emerenciana is St Emerentiana, a 4th-century martyr, and even her cult has been officially restricted to local calendars since 1969. So I took several photos of St. Emerenciana while here, strongly suspecting I’d probably never get another opportunity to see her.

just another nicechurch in Rio. Ok but really not esceptional. Shame it seems like the old is not so well preserved here.