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No Display of Unity

The 500th anniversary of the Gospel’s arrival in Brazil became not a cause for celebration,
but an occasion for some bitter and highly public disputes.

By Alejandro Bermudez

Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, like most of the 500 other bishops who were present at the open-air celebration, was appalled. Suddenly, in the middle of the Solemn Mass commemorating the 500th anniversary of the evangelization of Brazil, a Pataxo Indian native, wearing a black bandana, stood up, took the microphone and read a statement harshly criticizing the Catholic Church, as well as “this 500 years of suffering, massacre, exclusion, prejudice, exploitation, extermination of our relatives, rape of our women, and devastation of our lands, which were taken away from us.”

Jerry Adriani Santos de Jesus, the Pataxo spokesman, would end his diatribe by asking the bishops to “take back your Bibles.”
The disparate reaction of the Brazilian (and other) bishops to the harsh words of the Indian speaker form a sort of portrait of the Catholic Church in Brazil, illustrating the tensions that divide the world’s second largest episcopal conference, the Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CNBB).

Radically different programs

As the Brazilian press had gleefully and exhaustively reported, the celebration at which Cardinal Sodano presided was preceded by a series of clashes among the Brazilian bishops. The Mass was to be celebrated at Porto Seguro, at the spot where the Portuguese Franciscan Henrique de Coimbra celebrated the first Mass on the soil of what is now Brazil, in 1500. The bishops were sharply divided on how that 500th anniversary should be observed. Some bishops wanted a ceremony that would make a strong political statement; others wanted a purely religious observance of the Catholic liturgy.

Eventually the Vatican entered into the dispute to mediate the disagreements, and several highly ideological songs and symbols were eliminated from the original program for the celebration. The final program, as approved by the Vatican and accepted by the CNBB, did not include the presence of the Pataxo spokesman; it certainly did not allow for him to deliver a speech.

So how did Jerry Adriani Santos de Jesus manage to make his way up onto the altar during the middle of the Mass?

“The Pataxos requested the opportunity to talk before the ceremony, but they appeared at another moment, when it was not scheduled,” Bishop Geraldo Lyrio Rocha, who was responsible for the organization of the ceremony, told reporters after the event. But the Pataxo militant himself would later tell the press that both the timing of his intervention and the black bandanna which he wore in symbolic protest were suggested by Sister Silde Coldebela, one of the liturgical coordinators of the celebration working for the CNBB.

As if the Pataxo protest was not enough to demonstrate the rifts among the Catholics of Brazil, five of the country’s bishops made the decision not to attend the ceremony in Porto Seguro. Instead, these five bishops held a “parallel” prayer service at the very time that Cardinal Sodano—the Pope’s personal representative—was presiding at Mass. These bishops said that they would “remember” rather than “celebrate” the arrival of the Gospel in Brazil, because they saw no cause for celebration in the anniversary. These protesting bishops are well known in Brazil: Bishops Gianfranco Masserdotti of Balsas; Tomas Balduino, the retired bishop of Goias and chairman of the Brazilian bishops’ controversial committee on land reform; Apparecido José Dias of Roraima; Austrian-born Erwin Krautler of Xingu; and Spanish-born Pedro Casaldaliga of Sao Felix de Araguaia—who had almost abandoned his diocese during the 1980s to support the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and who has been one of the most outspoken critics of Pope John Paul II in Brazil.

Opposing camps

So the ceremony intended to celebrate the 500 years of Christianity in Brazil, and to show the unity of the Catholic Church, instead made it painfully evident that there is serious disagreement among Church leaders. The main line of division separates an adamant old guard of bishops influenced by liberation theology from a group which the secular press dubbed “the silent majority.”

The Brazilian secular press, always enthusiastic about stories that show divisions within the Catholic hierarchy, did not have to work very hard in order to dig up material for such stories. In fact—particularly after the public stir caused by the incident with the Pataxo Indian—the division of the bishops into two opposing camps was abundantly clear.

On one side stood bishops such as José Edson Santana Oliveira of Eunapolis, the diocese in which Porto Seguro is located. Bishop Santana Oliveira openly apologized to Cardinal Sodano during his homily at a Mass two days after the 500th anniversary celebration, in a small, ancient church in Porto Seguro:

I want to take advantage of this public occasion to apologize—as my brothers in the CNBB have not done so—for the offensive words made by our Indian brother, and for his use of improper expressions during the Mass. He was manipulated—and certainly not by our diocese. We humbly ask the forgiveness of your Eminence and of the whole Church.

However, Bishop Gianfranco Masserdotti took an entirely different public stance. Bishop Masserdotti is the head of the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a CNBB commission that had opposed the plans to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Brazil’s evangelization, on the grounds that the observance would be “an offense to the natives.” He told the press that he fully supported the Pataxo protester:

His words were a shout of anguish, expressing feelings that are enclosed in the hearts of his brothers. In the context of the Mass, this was a voice that made a difference, in the middle of the official celebrations.

Furthermore, Bishop Masserdotti said, the Pataxo protester was not speaking only for himself. “I think he expressed the thoughts and feelings of the bishops,” he said.

More displays of episcopal division were soon to follow. Immediately after the celebration at Porto Seguro, the Brazilian bishops met for their annual general assembly. The draft of a proposed document, “Brazil after 500 Years: Dialogue and Hope,” once again pitted the “old guard” against the “silent majority” in a debate over the proper approach to the anniversary. The working draft, which had been prepared by a special commission of “experts,” was too ideological, and too tightly focused on economic issues, to satisfy the entire body of bishops. Some members of the episcopal conference suggested that the publication of the document should be postponed for a year, since the debates seemed intractable. Eventually a compromise statement was hammered out. After the debate ended, Bishop Sergio Mendes de Almeyda told reporters that the draft had been put through “drastic changes” before it was officially released on May 3. The final statement still concentrated primarily on Brazil’s social problems, but its tone was more moderate and less ideological. The document also included a new final paragraph calling for interior conversion and the renewal of faith in Brazil.

Protesting politicization of the Church

By now, many Catholics outside the ranks of the hierarchy were beginning to vent their frustration with what they saw as the lack of attention to spiritual matters, and the excessively ideological approach that had come to dominate the work of the episcopal conference.

Father Jesus Hortal, the rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, said that many bishops “pay tribute to the ideological bias against the evangelization, and ignore the fact that historically, missionaries were always on the side of the weak, the Blacks and the Indians.” He complained that some bishops “give the impression that the ‘respect’ for the Indian culture would mean that people should remain underdeveloped, without ever assimilating any moral principles.”

Father Hortal also saw an effort within the hierarchy to encourage and exacerbate Indian protests against the Church. Speaking of the Pataxo outburst during the anniversary celebration, he said that the Indian spokesman himself “was not the one truly responsible, because he was not speaking his own words, but those of the people who were behind him.”

A similar opinion was expressed by a Benedictine priest, Father Estevao Tavares Bettencourt, one of the most famous theologians in Brazil. “Many prejudices against the evangelization, unfortunately, have been transmitted even by Catholics who seem to be ashamed of their own identity,” he said. “They forget that it was the faith that brought the Indians to a new stage of human dignity.”

The protests against the arrival of Christianity are based on what is “basically a myth,” according to the noted Brazilian historian Rolph Cabeceiras. “It is the myth of the noble savage, according to which all evils came with the Portuguese and the Cross of Christ.” He went on:

They seem not to understand that, while the state celebrates only the achievements, and the radicals remember only the conflicts, the Church regrets the mistakes but rejoices and celebrates the action of God in history.

According to Cabeceiras, the words of the Pataxo Native “express the opinion of one sector of the Church, which only adds fuel to the fire instead of looking for reconciliation.”

Even more pointed were the words of Maria Clara Bingemer, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, when she was invited by the CNBB to speak about the future of the Church in Brazil. She admonished the bishops “in the name of Brazilian lay people,” to speak more about God and less about social or political issues.

Bingemer, the first woman ever to address the episcopate in a CNBB assembly, told the bishops that the Brazilian people expected them to pay more attention to the Church’s mission, promoting the Word of God among men. Bishops, she went on, should be less concerned about the competition represented by the new sects, and more concerned about what the growth of those sects reveals regarding the Brazilian search for the sacred. “At present, any religious guru who builds a kiosk on a street corner immediately has a line of people coming after him,” she observed. “There is a great spiritual thirst out there, a great search for ways to connect with the divine.” Bingemer concluded: “The mission of the bishops is to respond to that thirst by bringing people closer to God. That is your main duty.”

Bingemer was warmly applauded by most of the bishops, but “her speech was definitely not welcomed by the more progressive, social-centered wing of the episcopate,” wrote Ruy Mesquita, editor of an opinion column and Church analyst for the influential newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo. According to Mesquita, this ideological sector is now a minority within today’s CNBB. That analysis is confirmed by the controversial Bishop Mauro Morelli of Duque de Caxias, who was once proposed as running mate for the presidential candidate of the Marxist Worker’s Party in the early 1990s. According to Morelli, the bishops who oppose CNBB involvement in radical political initiatives now compose 80 percent of the episcopal conference.

Public perceptions

Nevertheless, the general perception of the average Brazilian, and of the secular media, is that the whole bishops’ conference is inclined toward that political approach. That widespread impression is certainly fostered by the fact that the more ideological members of the CNBB, like Bishops Balduino and Masserdotti, are much more outspoken than their critics, and frequently break the informal code of discretion by providing the secular media with their own personal accounts of the bishops’ confidential deliberations.

But Mesquita sees another important reason for the perception that the bishops’ conference is dedicated to political activism. The columnist points to the remarkably large bureaucracy that controls the production of documents by the CNBB, and observes that many officials of the bishops’ conference are more readily identifiable for their radical political opinions than for their Catholic faith. “In the end, despite the efforts of the ‘silent majority,’ the daily administration of the commissions and pastoral efforts of the CNBB are under the control of the minority that once represented almost the whole episcopate,” writes Mesquita.

Mesquita continues:

The problem is not the legitimate concern of many bishops about social injustice, but the total absence of any reference to religious, spiritual contents. They have turned faith into purely ideological militancy.

Mesquita ended his discussion of the latest disputes with a question that many ordinary Brazilian Catholics are beginning to ask more loudly: “When is the silent majority going to take a stronger stand, and bring about some changes?” The hopes for such changes may be higher than ever, in light of the bishops’ forthright disagreements over the 500th anniversary celebration. But Mesquita’s question still remains unanswered.

Alejandro Bermudez is director of the Aci-Prensa, a news agency serving all of Latin America; he is based in Lima, Peru.

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