Camara's preference was for the poor - Dom Helder Pessoa Camara - Obituary

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 10, 1999 by GARY MacEION

By this time Dom Helder had become a nonperson in Brazil. The military dictatorship, which with U.S. support overthrew the constitutional presidency in 1964, had in the interval muzzled the press and abolished labor unions and all other bodies that shielded the weak and voiceless from arbitrary mistreatment. Although many church lay leaders and clerics were among the victims of the repression, Dom Helder alone protested publicly. He continued to call for fundamental social changes such as land distribution and access to education until the military regime banned all news coverage of him. While silenced at home and the recipient of many death threats, he traveled abroad as often as he could to denounce the torture and killing of innocent people.

Dom Helder gained an important ally in 1970 when Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns was named archbishop of Sao Paulo. Outraged by overwhelming evidence of torture in the military prisons, Arns issued a series of editorials in the diocesan newspaper as well as pastoral letters. "It is not lawful to use physical, psychological or moral means of torture.... It is not lawful to deprive the accused of his right to full defense.... We deplore the suspension of habeas corpus."

Encouraged by Arns, other church leaders began to join Dom Helder in open challenge to the regime. In his investigation of institutionalized torture, Arns worked with a Presbyterian minister, Jaime Wright, to obtain and smuggle out of the country the military's own records of torture sessions in its jails. A book based on these records, Brazil Never Again, quickly became a bestseller and created such a revulsion of public opinion that in 1985 the military was forced to withdraw to its barracks and return control to a civilian government. The end of a 21-year period of terror ended, in no small way due to activity by church leaders.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Dom Helder to the church in Latin America was his role in the creation and development of the Conference of Latin American Bishops -- CELAM. Through a friendship with Giovanni Batista Montini, then an official in the Vatican Secretariat of State and later Paul VI, he won Roman approval in 1955 for CELAM as a regional body with canonical authority to make decisions binding on its members. The Roman bureaucracy moved quickly to get control of the new body by setting up a parallel curial body, the Commission for Latin America.

Dom Helder, however, in cooperation with such like-minded bishops as Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca, Mexico, Leonidas Proano of Riobamba, Ecuador, and Manuel Larrain of Talca, Chile, succeeded after fierce conflict in establishing CELAM's independence. This made possible the 1968 CELAM meeting at Medellin, Colombia, in which Dom Helder again played a prominent part, helping to formulate the documents that denounced the dependence of the people on internal and international power structures maintained by intolerable institutionalized violence.

Medellin coincided with the first flourishing of liberation theology, which insists -- as Dom Helder long had done -- that Christ came to free us from the sins of hunger and oppression too. Dom Helder soon emerged as a leading proponent of the first theology developed cooperatively by Catholics and Protestants since the 16th-century Reformation, a position he maintained until his death.