When people asked Divaldo Franco for proof of his teaching, he pointed not to his books but to a piece of land in Salvador da Bahia. The Mansão do Caminho ("Mansion of the Way") is the most concrete social work of Brazilian Spiritism: from an idea for an orphanage grew a small city of care that today serves more than 5,000 people daily — whatever one thinks of the source of its funding.
From the Caminho da Redenção to the Mansão
In the late 1940s Divaldo Franco and his lifelong companion Nilson de Souza Pereira founded the spiritist centre Centro Espírita Caminho da Redenção in Salvador. Faced with the many abandoned children in the poor districts, the two decided that lectures alone were not enough. On 15 August 1952 the Mansão do Caminho arose from it as the centre's social work. Begun in the Calçada neighbourhood, it was moved about eight years later to a larger, initially rough site in the Pau da Lima district, where it remains to this day.
The Family House Instead of the Orphanage
The defining feature was the educational model. Instead of an anonymous mass orphanage, Franco and Pereira built small houses, in each of which a chosen foster mother lived with a manageable group of children as a real, permanent family (casas-lares, substitute families). The children grew up not as numbers but with siblings and a home. Divaldo himself raised dozens of children over the decades. As residents, almost 700 children and adolescents lived there up to the end of the 1980s.
A Small City
What began small became a complex of around 78,000 square metres with dozens of buildings, which shifted from a mere shelter to an education and health centre for the whole region. Today the institution serves more than 5,000 people daily:
- Education: around 2,000 students daily — from the crèche "A Manjedoura" (from four months of age) to secondary school, the Colégio Nilson de Souza Pereira, named after the co-founder — plus vocational training.
- Health: a health centre with free medical, dental and psychological care across dozens of specialties, a laboratory and a maternity ward for the poorest.
- Social: counselling, adult education and help for families from the surrounding favelas.
What It All Lives On
The remarkable thing is the funding. Because spiritist services must by statute be free, the work sustains itself above all on book royalties: Divaldo irrevocably transferred the rights to his more than 250 psychographed books to the Mansão — every copy sold funds a piece of bread or a medicine. Added to this are the proceeds of his worldwide lecture tours, donations and hundreds of volunteers. Behind it stands the spiritist motto that Bezerra de Menezes and the FEB had already placed at the centre:
"Fora da caridade não há salvação" — outside charity there is no salvation.
A Pedagogy of Self-Help
The Mansão does not merely want to feed but to lead out of the cycle of poverty and violence. Crèche and school allow single mothers to work; vocational training opens the way into the legal job market. Many of the former home and slum children are now doctors, teachers or skilled workers — and quite a few support the work in turn. Over the decades, tens of thousands of children have passed through its institutions.
After the Founders
In 2015 Nilson de Souza Pereira, the organizational mind, died at 88; on 13 May 2025 Divaldo Franco died in the very Mansão he had built. The work continues — and it is precisely the part of his legacy about which there is nothing to argue: whatever one thinks about mediumship, the schools, the clinic and the rescued children's lives are verifiable.
What Remains
The Mansão do Caminho is the most visible evidence of what distinguishes Brazilian Spiritism: charitable rather than commercial, institutionally anchored rather than ridiculed. Where Kardec supplied the doctrine, a work like this translates it into walls, classrooms and hospital beds — spirituality that is not exhausted in theories of the afterlife but tries to prove itself in this world.
Sources
- Mansão do Caminho, Salvador (social work of the Centro Espírita Caminho da Redenção); founded 15 August 1952 by Divaldo Franco and Nilson de Souza Pereira.
- Current figures: around 78,000 m², more than 5,000 people served daily, ~2,000 students (crèche "A Manjedoura", Colégio Nilson de Souza Pereira), health centre and maternity ward; official website and Brazilian press (CNN Brasil, Alô Alô Bahia, 2025).
- On the founder and the doctrine see the articles on Divaldo Franco, on Bezerra de Menezes and on mediumship in Brazil.