"Bowling alone," Bishops' biographies, and baptism by blood: New views of progressive Catholicism in Brazil

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2001 by Serbin, Kenneth P

Critical Debates

Vasquez, Manuel A. The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bibliography, index, 302 pp.; cloth $69.95.

Nagle, Robin. Claiming the Virgin: The Broken Promise of Liberation Theology in Brazil. New York: Routledge, 1997. Bibliography, index, 224 pp.; cloth $75, paperback $19.99.

Piletti, Nelson, and Walter Praxedes. Dom Helder Camara: entre o poder e a profecia. Sao Paulo: Atica, 1997. Bibliography, index, 472 pp.

Rocha, Zildo, ed. Helder, o Dom: uma vida que marcou os rumos da igreja no Brasil. Petropolis: Vozes, 1999. 208 pp.

Sydow, Evanize, and Marilda Ferri. Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns: um homem amado e perseguido. Petr6polis: Vozes, 1999. Bibliography, index, 423 pp.

Betto, Frei [Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo]. Batismo de sangue: a luta clandestina contra a ditadura militar. Dossies Carlos Marighella e Frei Tito. 11th (first revised) edition. Sao Paulo: Casa Amarela, 2000. Bibliography, index, 332 pp.

Muraro, Rose Marie, with Philip Evanson. Memorial de uma mulher impossivel. Rio de Janeiro: Rosa dos Tempos, 1999. 404 pp.

Klaiber, Jeffrey, Sj. The Church, Dictatorships, and Democracy in Latin America. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1998. Bibliography, index, 326 pp.; cloth n.p., paperback $22.

One of the most intriguing puzzles of contemporary Latin America is the failure of progressive Catholicism to become a mass movement and thereby to change society at large, achieving profound transformations that would lead to social justice. Especially in Brazil, the progressive Roman Catholic Church seemed to have all the necessary tools for growth. It had institutional strength; prestige from its defense of human rights and opposition to military dictatorship; a large, well-coordinated network of comunidades eclesiais de base (CEBs), and links to progressive political parties and nongovernmental organizations that members of the clergy had helped to create. It had earned the respect of citizens and leaders for its moral leadership, and it promoted a theology that favored the poor.

Even if we discount the wishful thinking of scholars who projected their revolutionary wishes on the church and we admit that perhaps the clergy's plans were not so ambitious, the question remains why the poor did not find progressive Catholicism more attractive and often turned to Neo-Pentecostal Protestant churches instead. The books reviewed here attempt to answer that question through some new interpretations of Brazilian progressivism, to identify new subthemes, and to suggest areas for future inquiry.

THE MACRO AND THE MICRO

A new explanation for progressivism's crisis is that grassroots militants today have less time for activism. This is the argument put forth by religion specialist Manuel Vasquez, a Jesuit-educated Salvadoran who conducted research on a CEB in Nova Iguacu, one of the infamously poor suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. In The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity, Vasquez has written a kind of Latin American equivalent of political scientist Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). Putnam laments North America's decline in political and civic participation, volunteerism, philanthropy, religious practice, honesty, and the spirit of collaboration and communitarianism. The decline has occurred as the country has suburbanized, gone to two-career families, watched more television, and experienced a loss of moral direction.

In Vasquez's version of this phenomenon, activists' lack of time for engagement in the Catholic base community movement results from the perverse effects of Latin America's neoliberal reforms of the 1980s-the underside of the globalization and technological advances presented by Putnam. Vasquez points to such causes as unemployment, fragmentation of the working class, immediatism and pragmatic individualism, decline in personal health, and the need for women to produce extra income for basic survival.

The pressures and needs generated by this deterioration [of the 1980s] have in turn forced people to react defensively, resorting to the pragmatic use of short-term, individualistic, and patrimonial survival strategies drawn from the national political culture .... It is in the context of this struggle for personal and household survival that the popular church's modernist project of intrahistorical transcendence and hope for transformation via human institutions has lost plausibility for the poor. (pp. 3, 223)

Vasquez bases his conclusions on six months of fieldwork in a neighborhood he calls Pedra Bonita and on an impressively wide and masterful reading of sources in theology, philosophy, sociology, and the writings on the Brazilian church. We feel the full sweep of Catholic progressivism's historical significance as Vasquez takes us from the Enlightenment and the modernity-postmodernity debate to the attempt by Pedra Bonita's residents to build their own theology out of such political struggles as the dispute over construction of a neighborhood school. Vasquez links the micro to the macro level by viewing Pedra Bonita and the crisis of the progressive church in the context of global trends; namely, the Vatican's neoconservative offensive of the 1980s and changes in the world economy.