On 14 October 1952, twenty archbishops met in Rio de Janeiro to arrange the foundation of the Confêrencia Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB) in order to “co-ordinate and subsidize religiously oriented activities, as well as those concerned with charity, philanthropy and social work” throughout the national territory.17 Bishop Helder Câmara, who had become auxiliary bishop of Rio de Janeiro, was nominated the first secretary and entrusted with the preparatory work for the project of the CNBB.18 Starting from 1954 the Episcopal organization, prevailing over the individual dioceses, became the unofficial “voice” of the Church in Brazil.19 Within it, Bishop Câmara20 appeared as the figure destined to assume, at least in part, the “charismatic” role formerly held by Cardinal Leme in the religious renewal of the Thirties. It was during this period that the “turn to the left” of the Brazilian episcopate occurred thanks to the new Papal Nuncio Armando Lombardi (1954-66), who favoured the nomination of progressivist bishops, collaborating with Bishop Câmara in preparing the most “advanced” social declarations.21
In May 1956, the conference of the bishops of the Northeast, organized by Bishop Câmara in Campina Grande (Paraíba), in the presence of the president of the Republic Kubitschek who concluded the proceedings, denounced the “terrible injustices” of the country, announcing that the bishops would take the “side of the oppressed, to co-operate with them in a work of promotion and redemption”.22 The question of “social justice” and of “land reform” was destined to become the strong point of the CNBB, especially from 1958, with the new pontificate of John XXIII.
After the establishment of the CNBB, two events of continental importance had great influence on the action of the Brazilian hierarchy: the creation, in 1955, at the initiative of Bishop Câmara, of the CELAM (Latin American Episcopal Council) and the Cuban Revolution of 1959.23
“As the point of departure for the irruption of politics in the heart of the ecclesiastical institution” writes Pierre Vayssière “we find the CELAM, an organ for linking the various episcopates of the continent, created in 1955 at the initiative of Bishop Helder Câmara”.24 At the end of the 1960s, a group of South American theologians began to formulate a “liberation theology”25 whose spirit penetrated the Second General Assembly of the CELAM, held in Medellin in 1968, in the presence of Paul VI.26 The new theological current which stated that it wanted to apply in Latin America the directives of Vatican Council II, presented the mission of Jesus Christ as being pre-eminently the work of social and political liberation. It used social science, and especially Marxist methodology, as a tool for “freeing the oppressed classes”. In this situation, the theologian became, according to the formula of Gramsci, an “organic intellectual of the proletariat”,27 whose main function is to bring closer the “kingdom of justice on earth”.28
This same period saw the Cuban Revolution which “to the Latin-American imagination represents the paradigm of every future revolution” appearing “as a detonator capable of triggering a giant explosion whose continental shock wave would upset the conservative regimes, thus obtaining the ‘second independence’ of Latin-America”.29 The revolutionary guerrilla warfare, according to the Castro-Guevara plan, managed to encompass about twenty countries of Central and South America, bringing the continent to the edge of chaos.
In the religious and civil life of Brazil and of Latin America, the religious left-wing tendency spread rapidly through a process “that was supported by members of the episcopate and by Catholic Action in the workers’ and university environments and was demonstrated in the birth of Grassroot Ecclesial communities”.30 At the beginning of 1962, inside the Juventude Universitaria Católica (JUC), a document called “Estatuto Ideológico” (Ideological Statute) was approved; it advocated “socialism” and the “Brazilian revolution”. From the JUC and the JEC (Juventude Estudantil Católica),31 the two student associations of Catholic Action, a new organization was born, Ação Popular,32 which advocated an open revolutionary action to overthrow the foundations of Brazilian society.33 It intended to stand beside the “socialist current that is transforming modern history”, by adhering to the “avant- garde role of the Soviet Revolution”.34
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira saw in this itinerary, that he had in fact foreseen, the logical development of the progressivism he had fought during the 1930s and 1940s. It was to be opposed by the TFP, which he considered to be the legitimate development of the former Catholic movement, in absolute loyalty to the perennial Magisterium of the Church.
The religious life of Brazil, according to a contemporary historian, was by now destined to vacillate between two poles: the progressivist pole and that represented by the TFP.35
Notes:
17. Cf. M. Kornis, D. Flaksman, Conferencia Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB), in DHBB, vol. II, pp. 884-9. “Archbishop Giovanni Montini, Vatican Secretary of State and future Pope Paul VI, greatly influenced Pope Pius XII to have the organization approved.” ibid, p 884.
18. Sergio Bernal, La Iglesia del Brasil y el compromiso social, (Rome, Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1986), p. 46.
19. One of its important dignitaries, Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider, would even define it as the unofficial spokesman for the Vicar of Christ. cf. O Povo of Fortaleza, 16 February 1981.
20. Bishop Câmara “by now holds a power in fact, if not by right, far superior to that of the cardinal of Rio, Cardinal Jaime Câmara, first figure of the national Church”. Richard Marin, Dom Helder Câmara. Les puissants et les pauvres, (Paris, Les Editions de l’Atelier, 1995), p. 83. “In the Episcopal kaleidoscope, Bishop Helder Câmara is a standard-bearer (…). He sums up in his person the whole evolution of a Church in rupture with traditional social order”. Charles Antoine, L’Eglise et le pouvoir au Brésil. Naissance du militarisme, (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1971), p. 77.
21. “Convinced of the need for a renewal of the Church in the country and that it could be done through the CNBB, Bishop Lombardi held weekly meetings with Bishop Câmara and attended several meetings of the CNBB where he supported most avant-garde social declarations.” Kornis, D. Flaksman, Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB), p. 885. “A great friend of Bishop Helder Câmara, with whom he had lunch once a week, a staunch ally of those developing the new strategies of Brazilian Catholicism, he presided, during his nunciature, over the creation of 48 dioceses, 11 archbishoprics and 16 prelatures. During these ten years, 109 bishops and 24 archbishops were nominated, who today represent the majority of the country’s episcopate.” Marcio Moreira Alves, A Igreja e a política no Brasil, (São Paulo, Editora Brasiliense, 1979), p. 80. Marcio Moreira Alves observes that the nominations of conservative bishops in Brazil are all previous to 1955, the date of the beginning of the nunciature of Archbishop Lombardi; since then, with the sole exception of Bishop José Angelo Neto, nominated in 1960, all the bishops have been of clearly progressivist tendencies (ibid).
22. R. Marin, op. cit., p. 84. From its first meetings held in Bélem (1953) and Aparecida (1954) the CNBB proposed the question of “Land reform”.
23. Cf. José Oscar Beozzo, A Igreja no Brasil, in A Igreja Latino-Americana às vésperas do Concilio, (São Paulo, Edições Paulinas, 1993), pp. 46-77. Cf. also J.F. Regis de Moraís, Os bispos e a política no Brasil, São Paulo, Cortez Editora, 1982; Thomas C. Bruneau, The Church in Brazil, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1982; A Igreja nas bases em tempo de transição (1974-1985), edited by Paulo José Krischke and Scott Mainwaring, Porto Alegre, L&PM Editores, 1986; C. Antoine, “L’épiscopat brésilien dans les décennies du dévelopement”, Etudes, no. 1-2, June-July 1986, pp. 15-26; J. O. Beozzo, A Igreja do Brasil. De João XXIII a João Paulo II de Medellin a Santo Domingo, Petrópolis, Vozes, 1994.
24. Pierre Vayssière, Les révolutions d’Amérique Latine, (Paris, Seuil, 1996), p. 263.
25. Its first systematic wording, of 1971, is the work of the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez. Born in 1928 and trained at the University of Louvain, Father Gutiérrez was for many years Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, exercising, as Pierre Vayssière (op. cit., p. 358) observes, an important influence in the university world of North America. Among the theologians who laid the foundations for liberation theology, we recall the Jesuits Jon Sobrino and Juan L. Segundo, the Franciscan Leonardo Boff and Archbishop Helder Câmara “who although not a theologian by profession, gave a very great contribution to the development of liberation theology with his words and with his actions”. Battista Mondin, I teologi della liberazione, (Milan, Borla, 1977), p. 36. Apart from the support given by Archbishop Câmara, the thematic and organizational development of the movement was supported by bishops such as Leonidas Proaño in Ecuador, Oscar Romero in Salvador, Sergio Méndez Arceo and Samuel Ruiz in Mexico, Zambrano Camader in Colombia. On liberation theology cf. also Armando Bandera O.P., La Iglesia ante el proceso di liberación, Madrid, BAC, 1975; Father Miguel Poradowski, El marxismo en la teologia, Madrid, Speiro, 1976; Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, De Medellin a Puebla, Madrid, Editorial Catolica, 1980.
26. Cf. B. Mondin, I teologi della liberazione, p. 31. “It is with the meeting of the CELAM in Medellin, that liberation theologia acquires its right to citizenship.” R. Vidales, “Acquisizioni e compiti della teologia latino-americana”, Concilium, no. 4, 1974, p. 154.
27. José Francisco Gómez, “El intelectual orgánico según Gramsci y el teologo de la liberación en América Latina”, Christianismo y Sociedad (Mexico), no. 91, 1987, pp. 102-04.
28. Alvaro Delgado, “Le clergé en révolte”, La Nouvelle Revue Internationale, no. 4, April 1973, pp. 70-1, pp. 65-75.
29. P. Vayssière, Les révolutions d’Amérique Latine, p. 127, 174.
30. Michael Sievernich, Théologie de la Libération in DSp, vol. XV, 1991, p. 501.
31. The JUC and the JEC, which were the two student branches of the Brazilian Catholic Action (ACB), were recognized by the ecclesiastical hierarchy in 1950 and in fact they were dissolved with the end of the ACB in 1966.
32. Cf. Haroldo Lima, Aldo Arantes, Historia da Ação Popular da JUC ao PC do B, São Paulo, Editora Alfa-Omega, 1984, and the entry Ação Popular (AP) of Mônika Kornis, Dora Flaksman, in DHBB, vol. I, pp. 16-17. The first national co- ordinator of the new organization was Herbert José de Souza and its main ideologist the Jesuit Father Henrique de Lima Vaz. The Basic Document of January 1963 stated: “Ação Popular opts for a policy of revolutionary preparation. They try to mobilize the people by developing their levels of consciousness as regards capitalism (national or international) and feudalism”. In P. J. Krischke, A Igreja e as crises políticas no Brasil, (Petropolis, Vozes, 1979), p. 85. “It would be difficult to establish a difference between such a statement and the official guidelines of the marxist parties. The difference means, nevertheless, that it had its origins in sectors having access to the people through the vast ecclesiastical network of parishes, schools, institutions of social welfare, etc.” (ibid).
33. Cf. Aloizio Augusto Barbosa Torres, “Ação Popular, Capitulo deplorável na historia do Brasil Católico”, Catolicismo, no. 183, March 1966.
34. H. Lima, A. Arantes, op. cit., p. 37.
35. Oscar de Figuereido Lustosa O.P., Presencia da la Iglesia en la sociedad brasileña, in Manual de Historia de la Iglesia, edited by Quintín Aldea and Eduardo Cardenas, Editorial Herder, Barcelona 1987, vol. X, pp. 1334-5. “In the middle of the two groups is the majority of the Christian group (bishops, priests, laymen), the conservatives and the liberals, who on several occasions vacillate between approving reactionary ideas and supporting certain progressivist demands.” ibid, p. 1335.