Justice vs Vatican: while the Vatican hammers out its rightwing and authoritarian line, Brazil's 'red bishops' continue to plough a quite different furrow. Jan Rocha reports

New Internationalist, August, 2004 by Jan Rocha

DURING the worst years of Brazil's military dictatorship--from 1968 to 1978--over 120 bishops, priests and nuns and nearly 300 Catholic layworkers were arrested. Many were tortured. Seven clerics were murdered. Thirty bishops suffered death threats, accusations, kidnappings, or physical violence. Churches and parochial houses were raided. Church newspapers and radio stations were closed down or censored.

Unlike many of their Latin American counterparts, Brazil's Catholic bishops openly criticized the dictators. They espoused a theology that actively defended the rights of the oppressed by taking 'an option for the poor', in the words of liberation theology's Peruvian originator Gustavo Gutierrez.

As Leonardo Boff, Brazil's most irreverent but influential exponent of the new thinking, pointed out: 'Jesus was a political prisoner, who died on the Cross, not an old man who died in bed.'

In 1984, in the twilight years of the dictatorship, Boff came under attack--not from the generals this time, but from the Vatican.

He was summoned to Rome to be questioned about one of his books. Boff realized that what was really on trial was the Brazilian church's overwhelming endorsement and adoption of liberation theology. So he asked two of Brazil's leading Catholic cardinals to go with him. One of them, Paulo Evaristo Arns, archbishop of the the world's largest Catholic diocese of Sao Paulo, invited Joseph Ratzinger, the Cardinal in charge of questioning Boff, to come to Brazil and see for himself the shantytowns and slums. Then perhaps he could understand where the church was working and why liberation theology was so popular.

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But Ratzinger, a member of the Pope's inner circle and head of the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, refused. He claimed his obligation was to the universal church not a local one.

Boff pointed to the lattice window of the room they were in and said: 'Cardinal, you cannot look at liberation theology through a window like this, where it is framed in little lead squares. You have to go and feel what it's like to be poor. That's where this theology is made, it's the cry of the poor.'

Boff was later banned from preaching and celebrating the sacraments and has since reluctantly left the priesthood. Cardinal Arns' Sao Paulo diocese was drastically reduced in size. Conservative bishops were appointed by the Pope to run the new sees thus created.

This illustrates a fundamental clash: between institutional religion, which counts on the support of the established powers, and a kind of faith that nourishes and inspires social justice.

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Brazil's bishops wanted a new Latin American church, a Church of the poor, not for the rich, a church of liberation, not domination. They wanted change, not accommodation, because they said the Kingdom of Heaven began on earth, here and now, not after death. For them fatalism was not an option.

But to Pope John Paul II it all sounded too much like Marxism--which his Polish background told him could only be inimical to faith.

Gradually but systematically, all over Latin America, he replaced leftwing senior clerics with rightwingers, some of them connected with Opus Dei. Radical priests and nuns left the church in droves, and the heydey of liberation theology seemed to be over.

But not in Brazil, where the theology of liberation has entered the bloodstream and remains there.

How come?

The answer lies, to a large extent, in the geography and history of Brazil. Its gigantic size, covering half of South America, means that priests have always been thinly spread. Some Amazon prelacies are the size of European countries. So church influence and control has been patchy. At the same time Brazilian society developed in a more informal, less hierarchical way than its Hispanic neighbours. The population, perhaps without a priest for months on end, evolved their own, more festive religious celebrations.

An episcopate of over 300 bishops, representing both violent megacities like Sao Paulo, and semi-feudal rural zones like the Northeast, means a plurality of experience. Diversity encourages tolerance, symbolized in attitudes towards sexual behaviour. A recent poll of 758 priests revealed that 41 per cent had had some sort of a relationship, including sexual, with a woman after ordination. Almost half, 48 per cent, want optional celibacy. There was little agreement with the Pope's view that homosexuality is 'evil' either--68 per cent do not see it as a sin.

But more important still is the role that liberation theology has played in the creation of Brazil's most energetic movements for social justice.

The Movimento Sem Terra (MST)--Movement of Landless Rural Workers--has its origins in the Pastoral Land Commission set up in 1975 by bishops in the Amazon basin. The Commission was created to combat the growth of violent land conflicts which saw thousands of peasant families evicted from their farms and smallholdings.

The Pastoral Land Commission soon spread all over Brazil as hundreds of thousands of small farmers were expelled from their land by new hydroelectric dams, farm mechanization and government-funded cattle ranching.