Transnational Religions: The Roman Catholic Church in Brazil & the Orthodox Church in Russia

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2001 by Ralph Della Cava

In the absence of significant resources from abroad, ROC cut two important deals at home: one with the state, another with the so-called "New Russians," that emergent class of capitalist entrepreneurs. The state offered the church tax concessions and rebates, the exceptional right to import "humanitarian aid" free of excise, the return of its pre-revolutionary properties (greatly reduced in numbers and almost always limited to church buildings in disrepair), and limited subsidies for the restoration of church buildings. The "New Russians," above all, the country's wealthiest bankers, chief executives of oil and gas companies, the flamboyant Mayor of Moscow, and many a financial wizard, have largely made hefty donations to the Patriarchate to refurbish one or another church of the capital.

And what did ROC offer in exchange? Its critics charge that the Church has turned a blind eye to widespread corruption in public and private places. Or that it unabashedly and overtly supported the electoral campaigns and policies of President Boris Yeltsin (Chaplin 1999). And finally that it shamelessly cozied up to Communist deputies to pass the 1997 new law on religion. Moreover, these same critics point to recent financial scandals involving key church leaders, hushed up by ROC and not prosecuted by the authorities, in order to reinforce their contention that the church has once again become supine handmaiden and blind defender of the state -- not the faith (Bychkov 1999a).

Catholicism in Brazil: Finances and ideology

On this issue of financing, let us now turn to Brazil to consider this and some of the other variables along which we have just reviewed the recent history of the Orthodox Church in Russia.

The experience of the Catholic Church in Brazil suggests that while transnational funding is far more substantial, it may assure local recipient religious institutions of no greater independence than were they to rely for support on a single state or the wealthy private sector. From the mid-nineteen seventies until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Brazilian church was probably the single largest beneficiary of worldwide Roman Catholic philanthropy.

The country's size only partly justified its greater share. There was also the compelling appeal to Catholics, especially in West Europe, of the dynamics of Brazilian Catholicism at that time. "Base ecclesial communities" were attempting to reorganize the church from the bottom up. Liberation Theology set forth the faith as an arm to free men from poverty and injustice as welt as from sin. Bishops stood up to generals, denounced torture, supported human rights, defended pluralism and took the lead in re-organizing and protecting civil society. That "revolution" -- both in the image and reality of the Brazilian, and by extension, the entire Latin American church -- ultimately helped greatly guarantee the flow of resources year in year Out (Della Cava 1989).

Until the nineties, that is. For, once the Berlin Wall had fallen (1989), all Central Europe, with significant Catholic populations, swiftly came into its own and was at last fully accessible. The response from West European confreres was instantaneous. Germany, the region's richest Catholic nation as well as its historic major power, is a prime example. Decades before, its bishops had created Misereor, one of seven powerful charitable agencies under direct episcopal control that financed Catholic development projects throughout the world and especially in Latin America. But, by April 1993, previously loose arrangements to aid Central Europe were formalized into an eighth agency, Renovabis. For the past seven years, German Catholic funding -- as well as Dutch, Swiss and Austrian, Italian and French, albeit in lesser amounts -- has helped raise churches, establish seminaries, open health clinics, orphanages and old age homes, and centers for the care of refugees from Pilsen to Vladivostok (Della Cava 1997a).