Cover
story: In Appreciation
Câmaras preference was for the
poor
By GARY MacEOIN
Dom Helder Pessoa Câmara,
retired archbishop of Recife and Olinda in the parched and impoverished
Northeast of Brazil, a brilliant thinker and one of the Catholic churchs
most inspired and charismatic leaders of the 20th century, died Aug. 27 at his
modest home in Olinda. He was 90.
Under his moral leadership the Catholic church in Latin America
moved from its traditional support of the wealthy landowners and business elite
to a preferential option for the poor.
When the Second Vatican Council assembled in Rome in 1962 Dom
Helder participated as an auxiliary bishop of Rio de Janeiro. Although at age
53 one of the youngest of the more than 2,000 participants, he quickly emerged
as a leader. Wearing a wooden cross over a simple black cassock, he urged his
fellow bishops to give their silver and gold pectoral crosses to the poor and
drop such titles as eminence and excellency. He helped create a
small think tank headed by Cardinals Pierre Gerlier of France and Giacomo
Lercaro of Italy that became known as the church-of-the-poor group.
Although shunned by bishops from the Anglo-Saxon world, some of
whom saw the groups ideas as merely a device to extract a higher level of
aid for the missions, the group attracted widespread sympathy and support. In
1965, two weeks before the end of the council, Dom Helder summed up the
groups findings. Almost 2,000 years after the death of Christ, at a
time when the Declaration on Religious Liberty is to be promulgated, nearly
two-thirds of humans live in a subhuman condition that makes it impossible for
them to understand the true meaning of liberty. ... Underdevelopment has
plunged Latin America and the whole Third World into a situation unworthy of
the human person; it constitutes an insult to creation. A revolt by Latin
American Christians against the church is inevitable if the church sins today
by omission, in an hour of oppression and slavery.
The press loved the tiny, almost emaciated Brazilian who gave
interviews in a mixture of Portuguese, Spanish and French, and who made himself
understood more by his exuberant gestures than by his words. I had an
extraordinary experience of his simplicity, honesty and humility when, during
the second session of the council in 1963, he asked for my help. An
organization of young European businessmen based in Brussels had invited him to
address their convention in English, a language he never succeeded in
conquering, though this did not stop him from getting his message across.
My assignment was simply to revise the text for linguistic
accuracy, but at one point I noticed a misinterpretation of some economic data.
Hesitantly, I pointed this out to him. He thanked me profusely. I really
know very little about economics, he said. But these things have to
be challenged, and when no one else is doing it, I have no choice. I do my best
and learn as we go.
Learn he certainly did, and he also persuaded many of his Latin
American colleagues that the future of Christianity in the hemisphere hung on
the churchs response to the economic and social crisis that had been
building up since World War II.
An article in Vózes de Petropolis in 1968 sums up
his thought in five short paragraphs:
The church must overcome that magic and fatalistic
Christianity that she has transmitted to the Latin American masses; a religion
preached to men without freedom easily becomes a magic and fatalistic one;
there should be real hope here on earth, not only an otherworldly reward.
The church must speak clearer and louder to the rich and the
powerful. They often mistake a stratified disorder for law and public
order.
The church should encourage the use of lawful nonviolence, a
democratic political pressure.
The social revolution necessary in Latin America presupposes
a social revolution in North America; there is a problem of justice in the
relations between a developed and an underdeveloped world.
The church should stop thinking that this implies an
intrusion into politics, realizing rather that it is her duty because it deals
with the common good and relates directly to world peace.
Dom Helder practiced what he preached. When I visited him in 1969
in Recife, to which he had been promoted as archbishop five years earlier, he
welcomed me to the single room that was both his living and working space --
the sacristy of an old church no longer used for public worship. He slept next
door behind the altar in the church.
One of the Oblate missionaries from the United States with whom I
was staying was taking me one day to a meeting at which the archbishop was
speaking. He braked the car unexpectedly and pulled over to the curb. Dom
Helder opened the door and got in. My friend later explained that the bishop
had no automobile. When he wanted to go somewhere, he simply went out to the
street and waited until a passer-by gave him a lift.
When he came to Recife, a regional seminary was nearing completion
in the neighboring town of Olinda. It was an offshoot of Pius XIIs effort
to promote priestly vocations in Latin America. As theologian José
Comblin explained when I visited him there in 1969, the bishops had been
animated by the new pastoral insights of the council to bring theologians,
sociologists and historians from Europe to staff it. One of the innovations was
to send seminarians to work in a parish for a year before ordination. When the
seminarians discovered the enormous difference between the concept of the
priestly ministry as taught them in the new seminary and the reality of
priestly life and practice in a typical parish, a majority of them decided to
leave. Most bishops simply wrote them off as failed vocations. Not so Dom
Helder. Even if you decide not to be ordained, he told them,
that is no reason why I cannot use your knowledge and experience. As
laymen you can still work for the diocese.
By this time Dom Helder had become a non-person 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 São 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 militarys 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, Leónidas Proaño of
Riobamba, Ecuador, and Manuel Larrain of Talca, Chile, succeeded after fierce
conflict in establishing CELAMs independence. This made possible the 1968
CELAM meeting at Medellín, 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.
Medellín 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.
He defended the use of class analysis as the central and
indisputable element for understanding the social situation, insisting that one
could use the insights of Marxism without becoming a Marxist. His response to
those who denounced him as the red bishop serves as the perfect
synthesis of his world-view: When I feed the poor, they call me a saint;
when I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.
Gary MacEoin is a Latin America expert and frequent contributor
to NCR. He can be reached at gmaceoin@compuserve.com
National Catholic Reporter, September 10,
1999
|