Fervent popular religion served as a Spanish distraction device

Evidence

The elaborate religious ceremonies, the obsessive veneration for San Gennaro and the Virgin of the Carmine, which played such a prominent, and in Doria’s view lamentable, role in the revolt of 1647 were hardly ‘rational’ and certainly had not made religion civil. Instead they made civil society religious and, as a consequence, provided the Spaniards with yet another set of devices for distracting the people from the correct understanding of their civic responsibilities. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1806

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the culture-industry critique: emotionally absorbing ritual as control. Also resonates with blindness’s shattering of religious-ritual order in Saramago.