The general aim of this research is to analyze how the polemic comments involving the NCBB
- National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB - Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do
Brasil) on social media, Facebook are set up. By using the characteristics of this genre which
does not have a shape, a content and a fixed structure, we have as specific aim to investigate
the types of polemic correlating with the values which these utterances have brought with basis
on the extraverbal context and in the linguistic materiality. It’s known that social media has
been putting more and more emphasis on daily communication. We have seen in Jakubinskij
(2015 [1923]), Volochinov (2013 [1930]; 2017 [1929]) and Bakhtin’s works (1997 [1963];
2015, [1934 – 1935]; 2016 [1979]; 2017 [1979]) the theoretical and methodological basis to
analyze the comments based on the notions of language, dialogism, utterance, discursive genre,
polemic as well as contemporary scholars of the dialogical theory of language. The corpus of
this research was built of comments about a documentary published on February 23, 2018 on
Facebook which accuses the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil of political alliances
with the Labor Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) and their resistance to the doctrine of the
Roman Catholic Church. With that being said, we have selected some comments in order to
analyze the ideological confrontation between the lay faithful conservative Catholic and the
progressives. The result reveals the conflict amongst the different social voices, the social
polarization on the Internet, the types of polemics, the verbal violence between the supporters
of each position (conservative and progressive) and the inseparability of the religious and
politics spheres. Moreover, the analysis shows that this discursive genre works as a dialogue
which is shaped by the axiological position of the Internet user.