Brazil's Political Bishops

...Moderate politicians, meanwhile, have tended to fall into one of two categories, both delimited by the habits of autocratic politics, and both the nemesis of Brazil's activist bishops...

...In 1985, in perhaps its most widely known action, the Vatican ordered Frei Leonardo Boff, the radical theoretician of liberation theology, to keep his "silence" for a year (eventually reduced to 11 months) because of his teaching that the Catholic hierarchy was irrevocably allied with the ruling class...

...PURSUING SOCIAL JUSTICE Brazil's Political Bishops BY HAL LANGFUR Rio de Janeiro Bishop Mauro Morelli had just returned to the Duque de Caxias Cathedral after one of his customary midnight walks in a neighborhood of the Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro's poorest slum...

...Through regional offices and local diocesan branches, the CNBB works with parish priests and some 100,000 comunidades eclesiais de base (CEBs), or "Christian base communities...

...Suddenly several gunshots cracked from the darkness across the street, and a man whose identity the bishop never learned fell dead on the cathedral's steps...

...Morelli is not alone in his self-appointed role as ecclesiastical witness and government critic...

...Officials attribute two-thirds of the killings to random homicides and fights between criminal gangs...

...But he quickly backed away from the program when it drew strong opposition from landowners...

...The primary violence here is the violence of a state organized around an economic system that doesn't consider its own people citizens...

...The single important exception is the populist Leonel Brizola, former governor of Rio de Janeiro State, whose popularity has risen almost as sharply as Sarney's has declined...

...According to the police, in the first half of 1987 there were more than a thousand murders in the Baixada, whose sprawling plains embrace five municipalities containing 4 million people...

...Ambitious attempts to restructure the government have been stifled...

...The point of greatest friction between the Church and the civilian government has been land reform...

...It emerged from the dictatorship a highly organized institution committed to challenging the government on questions of human rights, political freedoms and economic inequalities...

...His visit bore little fruit: John Paul II gave his unequivocal support to the CNBB's call for land reform...

...Last July, it upset the CNBB by appointing conservative Bishop Lucas Moreira Neves as Brazil's primate and archbishop of Salvador, Bahia...

...The Workers' Party, the Communist Party and other Left-wing political groups that might be expected to seek support by calling for social justice have been unable to shake off the effects of 20 years of military control...

...It was just past noon...

...Immediately, the Church began testing thelimits of his commitment to democratic rule...

...The maneuver worked -almost: Neves was elected by a Congressional electoral college, but he died on the eve of his inauguration...

...Like Cardinal Eugenio de Araujô Sales of Rio de Janeiro, who has labeled himself "aphotocopy of the Pope," Moreira Neves-a third cousin of Tancredo Neves-deliberately eschews alliances with the poor...

...One per cent of all rural producers in Brazil hold 48 per cent of the cultivable land...

...The two decades of military repression that began with the 1964 coup transformed the Brazilian Church from a conservative into a progressive force...

...He was, in fact, never supposed to be President...

...most seem resigned to letting the promise of participatory democracy end up as the facade it often becomes in Latin America...

...They will need to combat an apparently growing nostalgia for military rule...

...The first challenge came in the form of an unusual book that appear ed in bookstores throughout Brazil just four months after the military left power...

...Convened a few weeks prior to the moratorium, Congress was charged with writing a constitution to replace the one imposed by the military...

...As he pulled the chancellery's heavy door shut behind him, he heard shouting outside, and the sound of someone running...

...What remains to be seen, therefore, is whether Church forces can convince Brazilians to insist instead on democratic reforms...

...By involving the population in this fashion, the CNBB has managed to put more pressure on the Sarney government for social reform than any other organization...

...A fair redistribution had been one of Neves' central campaign promises, and one of the CNBB's most urgent demands...

...After its release, Sarney considered banning the volume by invoking the National Security Law, a repressive remnant of military rule that he has subsequently used several times...

...He easily defeated Archbishop Serafim Fernandes de Araujô, whose candidacy was backed by a block of several dozen conservative bishops led by Cardinal Sales...

...Morelli puts the death toll at twice the police tally, based on informal testimony gathered by his priests, nuns and parish workers...

...That Brazil's bickering labor confederations failed twice last year to muster support for a general strike was merely the most glaring evidence of the Left's impotence...

...The Church leadership distrusted Sarney long before the demise of his economic policies...

...Sarney, hoping to muzzle Brazil's progressive prelates, hurried off on an unscheduled trip to Rome for an audience with the Pope...

...Tancredo Neves, the populist opposition leader, chose him as his Vice Presidential running mate solely to gain the support of promilitary legislators who viewed Sarney favorably...

...LikeMorelli, Caldas faults the civilian government and its failure to guarantee democratic processes...

...As Latin America's most consistently liberal, socially active episcopate, Brazil's 374 bishops have over the past three decades systematically posted themselves at the country's chief pressure points...

...The Brazilian Bishops' Conference (CNBB) is the hub of a network that cuts across virtually every sector of a society where nine of every 10 people are Roman Catholic...

...Even common citizens turn to gunmen instead of justice...

...The book caught the government entirely of f guard, as did the revelations of Church involvement: Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, the archbishop of the world's largest Catholic archdiocese in Sào Paulo, had supervised the project from start to finish, and the work had been published by Vozes, Brazil's leading Catholic publishing house...

...In Bishop Morelli's diocese, for example, slum-dwellers have formed CEBs to work on such projects as repairing washed-out roads, building church pews, revising commuter train schedules, supporting workers' strikes and marches...

...It is no accident that Roman Catholic prelates can be found at the center of both conflicts...

...Caldas monitors a land-reform conflict that the Church estimates has claimed some 600 lives since the military stepped aside in March 1985...

...The Baixada is a concentration camp for the discarded, people who politically and economically have found no space in our society," said the bishop...

...The economic chaos that followed, besides precipitating the suspension of foreign debt payments in late February of last year, tainted the work of the newly elected Congress from the start...

...Instead, they have taken on a new, equally pugnacious, increasingly solitary role as custodians of the world's third largest democracy (after India and the United States...

...In Bishop Caldas' rural diocese, CEBs are devoted to defending squatters' rights, improving health care, forming peasant unions, building schools...

...For Morelli, the shooting was another bloody sign not only of the violence gripping the Baixada and other slums throughout Brazil, but also of one of the tragic failures of the country's threeyear-old civilian government...

...Inthe bishops' eyes, he is linked irrevocably-and justifiably-to the military...

...These are the grass-roots building blocks of the Church's campaign for social justice, the essence of liberation theology...

...Minutes later, Moraes was dead, the victim of a professional killer hired by local landowners who objected to his work on behalf of the region's landless peasants...

...With the murder of Padre Josimo, the accusations reached unprecedented proportions...

...To date, fewer than 20,000 families have been resettled, while the number of deaths related to land disputes has continued to climb...

...Planted squarely on the side of the landless, the Church accuses Sarney of implementing a democracy for the rich only...

...Two thousand miles away in Imperatriz, a frontier town serving the ranch lands south of the Amazon, another bishop, Dom Alcimar Caldas, lives with an unremitting memory of the gunshots that startled him from his work nearly two years ago...

...By comparison, fewer than 450 such deaths occurred between 1965-80, the most repressive years of the dictatorship...

...To support the charge, Church leaders note that the real minimum wage stands at its lowest level in more than 30 years, the purchasing power of the average worker has fallen by more than half, and public services have suffered a general deterioration...

...But the effort quickly degenerated into a fiasco, creating the political uncertainty that today manifests itself in recurrent rumors of an imminent coup...

...And those who do possess real power have succumbed to infighting, self-promotion and corruption, rarely thinking beyond the next election or Cabinet reshuffling...

...Still, the election last summer of Bishop Luciano Mendes de Almeida to the presidency of the CNBB has ensured that the Church will continue on its progressive course for the foreseeable future...

...Our peasant union leaders have been systematically eliminated, and any peasants who stand up for themselves are candidates for death...

...Outside the Church, few Brazilian leaders have shown comparable resolve...

...In a recent poll conducted by a leading Sâo Paulo newspaper, a third of those surveyed said only a military coup would restore order to the political and economic spheres...

...But if democracy is to take hold in Brazil, the progressive bishops will require more than control of the CNBB...

...Bishop Ivo Lorscheider, then president of the CNBB, denounced the government as "fascist...

...In a matter of months, Brasil: Nunca Mais became the best-selling nonfiction work in Brazilian history...

...For the poorest of Brazil's 125 million Catholics, the CEBs are often the only connection to power and the sole hope for improved living conditions...

...Inourregion, wherebrutal crimes occur almost daily, three or four years have passed without a single trial by jury, and without a single criminal being sentenced," he told me...

...In late March, for instance, progovernment forces defeated a move to reduce the length of the five-year Presidential term and adopt a parliamentary system of government...

...Sarney, soon after taking office, announced that he would expropriate 100 million acres of idle farmland and turn it over to 1.4 million landless families by 1989...

...Sarney himself set the tone in the Congressional and gubernatorial elections of November 1986...

...Until the country elects a leader by popular vote, places strict limits on the influence of the military, and begins to decrease the gap between rich and poor, democracy here will be largely an illusion...

...Although the inauguration of civilian President José Sarney deprived the bishops of their main foe, the military regime, they have not languished during the ensuing political liberalization...

...The result was a sweeping victory for the PMDB, followed by a price explosion causing the worst inflation in Brazil's history...

...It has been more than a year, however, since Brizola wielded direct influence in an elective office...

...It contained the distillation of more than a million pages of testimony obtained by lawyers who had access to military court files in Brasilia...

...Where sustained repression did not thoroughly rout the Left, the frustrations of working underground engendered lasting divisiveness...

...Hal Langfur, a new contributor to the NL, is a free-lance writer who has reported from Brazil for the Chicago Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor...

...But Cardinal Arns and his colleagues had arranged for its simultaneous publication in the U.S., making censorship futile...

...Those whose careers depend on the favor of senior politicians have remained, if not silent, then easily cowed...

...Caldas ran out of his office and around the corner to find his colleague, the black priest Josimo Moraes Tavares, lying on the steps of a Church building, bleeding from the shoulder and chest...

...In either case, crime and homicide rates are worse than ever, the legacy, he says, of a government that has ignored basic matters of social justice...

...Entitled Brasil: Nunca Mais, or, in its American edition, Brazil: Never Again, it was the product of a six-year secret project to document the crimes of the dictatorship...

...The testimony included detailed accounts by political prisoners of torture endured and murders witnessed while under military interrogation...

...He glanced back into the yard...

...Months behind schedule, the legislators are producing a voluminous and seemingly unworkable document...

...Sarney, the beneficiary of a political compromise, an indirect vote, and a fluke of history, assumed the Presidency in April 1985...

...they blame the remainder on so-called esquadròes de morte, or death squads of hired gunmen who have increasingly imposed their lethal form of vigilante justice in areas where the police and courts have proved ineffectual...

...But on other occasions the Vatican has reprimanded the Brazilian clergy for meddling in politics to the detriment of the Church's doctrinal mission...

...Pressured by leaders of the governing Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), he maintained a wage and price freeze through the election, months after his own economists began warning of grievous consequences...