Church-State Reciprocity in Contemporary Brazil: The Convening of the International Eucharistic Congress of 1955 in Rio de Janeiro Open Access

In July 1955, the Roman Catholic Church and the Brazilian government staged what Manchete magazine called “the greatest spectacle of faith ever seen in Brazil.”¹ Held in Rio de Janeiro to venerate Christ and inspire participation in Holy Communion, the 36th International Eucharistic Congress (IEC) drew more than a million people. The government built a large plaza and provided lodging, security, and other aid for the weeklong fair. Church reports underlined state commitment: not only would the IEC take place despite the political tempest following President Getúlio Vargas’ suicide, but the leader’s last decree had granted 14 million cruzeiros in funds.² For its part, the church backed Brazil’s policy of nationalist developmentalism by promoting the sacred pageant as a way to foster tourism and class harmony.

This article explores such reciprocities between church and state and argues that economic considerations have been central to the link between religion and politics in contemporary Brazil. Indeed, the crucial church-state pact fostered under Vargas and nurtured throughout the democratic-populist era (1930-64) entailed an important financial dimension that is usually overlooked.³ Public subsidies helped the church expand its social and religious works, but also created dependence on the state.⁴ The 1955 eucharistic congress vividly highlights how finances and faith mingled in Brazil’s complex mosaic of religion, politics, and society.

The IEC marked the apex of a church-state harmony that originated in the Brazilian bishops’ campaign to reassert Catholic influence after disestablishment at the start of the First Republic (1889-1930). Preserving the colonial unity of cross and sword during the Empire (1822-89), the church had operated as part of the state bureaucracy. But an undisciplined clergy and severe government regulation led to the church’s institutional breakdown. In the 1870s, bishops and imperial officials clashed over state intervention in ecclesiastical affairs. The positivist-inspired military officers who toppled the monarchy ended subsidies to Catholic activities, secularized education, wrote religious freedom into the Constitution of 1891, and generally undermined the church’s position in Brazilian society.

The bishops welcomed liberty from state control, but they also pushed for the reestablishment of time-honored privileges. Under the leadership of Dom Sebastião Leme da Silveira Cintra, archbishop of Olinda and Recife (1916-21) and later Rio de Janeiro (1930-42), the church rebuilt its cadres—its clergy, religious, and lay activists — and strengthened its ties to local and regional officials. As the church grew stronger, Brazil’s leaders acknowledged it as a bulwark of social stability. When President Artur da Silva Bernardes (1922-26) paid an unprecedented official visit to Dom Leme, he stressed the church’s collaboration in “maintaining order and promoting national progress.” By the time Vargas rose to power in the Revolution of 1930, the church was poised to reenter national politics.⁵

In exchange for church guardianship of the status quo, Vargas granted Catholicism quasi-official recognition. The 1955 IEC triumphantly embodied that relationship but also marked the start of a transition to a new era for the church.

This essay first discusses eucharistic congresses as major rallying points for the Catholic world and as contributors to the church’s political influence in Brazil during the First Republic. It then analyzes the intense reciprocal relationship between church and state under Vargas. Finally, focusing on the 1955 IEC, it describes the different sectors of government (and private enterprise) that contributed, the economic links that complemented the political ties, and the IEC’s catalytic effect on Brazilian life. The gathering affected the physical development of Rio, Brazilian tourism, and in particular the career of Dom Hélder Câmara, the IEC’s secretary general and arguably the most influential Latin American bishop of the twentieth century. Seen at the time as the brains behind the event, Dom Hélder best embodies the complex issues surrounding it, including the church’s struggle to adapt to a rapidly modernizing, increasingly pluralistic society and its growing awareness of Brazil’s poverty.⁶

The Congresses and “Romanization” in the First Republic

Inaugurated at Lille, France, in 1881, international congresses arose from a European eucharistic revival rooted in church reaction against secularization and persecution following the French Revolution. Inspired by successful pilgrimages to sites of eucharistic miracles in the heatedly anticlerical France of the 1870s, the congresses sought to bolster believers’ faith by assembling them in devotion to the Eucharist, the Body of Christ taken as Holy Communion, the central ritual of Catholicism.⁷ As the congresses quickly spread to other countries, a permanent committee of clergy chose the locations, each ratified by the Pope. The first international congress outside France took place at Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1885, followed by gatherings in Jerusalem (1893), Montreal (1910), Chicago (1926), Sydney (1928), Carthage (1930), and Manila (1937).

Attracting millions of attendees, the festivals projected the church’s power as it reasserted itself doctrinally and politically. At the 1905 Rome congress Pope Pius X, the “Pope of the Eucharist,” increased the importance of the sacrament by shifting emphasis from simple adoration to daily consumption of Communion as spiritual food. The most controversial congress took place in London in 1908, when Protestants persuaded the prime minister to bar the Catholics from publicly showing the Blessed Sacrament. In contrast, at the Vienna festival of 1912, the Austro-Hungarian emperor and his archdukes marched in a procession of hundreds of thousands. After a hiatus during the carnage of World War I, the congresses dropped earlier public complaints about the secular state to underscore Pope Pius XI’s notion of the Eucharist as sole unifier of humankind.

In Brazil, the church fortified itself through a process of “Romanization,” a campaign for the conservative modernization and moralization of Brazilian Catholicism. Begun in the 1850s, this movement flourished under republican religious freedom and lasted into the 1950s. For the first time, the Brazilian church adopted the rigid model of seminary training established at the Council of Trent in the 1500s. Directed by a growing corps of priests either born or educated in Europe, the new system reduced the proportion of Brazilians among the clergy and strengthened ties to the papacy. Romanization was further intertwined with the Europeanizing tendencies of the First Republic. Pastors “Europeanized” religious customs by essentially seizing control of popular Catholicism and substituted uniform rituals under priestly authority for varied and numerous lay practices.

The church further worked to influence society at large. It opened schools for the children of the urban middle and upper classes, whose Eurocentrism meshed well with Romanization. Their attitudes contrasted sharply with the inward-looking, millenarian worldview of popular Catholicism in rural communities such as Canudos, the religious settlement opposed by the church hierarchy and destroyed by the army in 1897. Striving to instill in the masses moral order and obedience to authority, Romanization vaulted the church into the arms of Brazil’s modernizing elite.⁸

Romanization reinvigorated the institutional church after its poor performance in the 1800s. The church’s new freedom allowed it to create dozens of additional dioceses and to import thousands of European priests and nuns. By the late 1920s, the church’s highly educated cadres were running social assistance projects, publications, schools, convents, and seminaries. They also had become ingrained in local and regional networks of power.⁹

Most important, Romanization spawned an ideology of neo-Christendom, which posited a Catholic religious monopoly and a central role for the church in Brazilian society through influence on the state and on the middle and upper classes. The revitalized church marshaled the faithful to pressure the government for religious education in the public schools of the State of Minas Gerais, for instance. Neo-Christendom thrived under such leaders as Dom Leme. He reaffirmed Brazil’s Catholicity and upheld the social order by supporting the authorities, re-Christianizing the secularized upper classes, and maintaining a conservative, paternalistic outlook toward the poor. In 1922, for example, he encouraged the prominent intellectual and former atheist Jackson de Figueiredo to found the Centro Dom Vital. Its membership coordinated a panoply of Catholic organizations that served as the church’s political base. Dom Leme also set up Ação Católica Brasileira (ACB, Brazilian Catholic Action), a group of lay organizations that the archbishop and the clergy used to mobilize the faithful.¹⁰

In line with Romanization, Dom Leme made national eucharistic congresses a religious and political tradition. Situated on the periphery of the Catholic world, Brazil figured little in the first international congresses. Before 1955, moreover, only one of those gatherings took place in Latin America: the 32d, at Buenos Aires in 1934. Following a worldwide trend, however, Brazil held diocesan festivals, beginning as early as 1915 in São Paulo.¹¹ In 1922, led by Dom Leme, Rio de Janeiro hosted the first congress of national significance, followed by others in Salvador (1933), Belo Horizonte (1936), Recife (1939), São Paulo (1942), Porto Alegre (1948), and Belém (1953).¹²

As part of Brazil’s centennial independence celebration, the 1922 Rio festival testified to the church’s patriotism. It also marked church efforts to guide Brazilian society just as a newly formed Communist Party, nationalistic artists and intellectuals, and rebellious army officers began demanding political and social reform. Typifying Brazil’s congresses, the Rio pageant showcased Holy Communion as the way to spiritual purity, the antidote for life’s difficulties, and the guarantor of social harmony. At the fair’s end, Dom Leme and other bishops laid the first stone of the Cristo Redentor, the statue of Christ the Redeemer, to be raised on public land atop Rio’s imposing Corcovado peak. Approved by the government, this last touch broke a republican taboo against open church-state cooperation.¹³ Conceived by the French Vincentian missionary Pedro Maria Bos and built by a French sculptor, the statue captured the essence of eucharistic congresses’ elevation of Christ—and not popular saints and rituals—as the center of official, Romanized Brazilian Catholicism.

Church and State Under Vargas: Forging a “Moral Concordat”

The First Republic ended on October 24, 1930, as Dom Leme, invested as a cardinal days earlier, escorted the deposed President Washington Luís Pereira de Sousa to safety after negotiating an accord with the rebels. As Brazilian church historian José Oscar Beozzo has observed, “The First Republic, which began its history by establishing the separation between church and state and excluding the church from the new liberal positivist order, paradoxically leaves the scene 40 years later at the hands of a member of the Catholic hierarchy.”¹⁴

The revolution had defeated the old oligarchical elite. In the volatile political atmosphere that followed, Vargas sought church legitimation of his regime. His victory had the full blessing of Archbishop João Becker and the powerful church of Vargas’ native state of Rio Grande do Sul, where priests, nuns, and Catholic activists had enthusiastically joined the Revolution. His relationship to the national church, however, was still uncertain. Dom Leme seized the opportunity to pressure Vargas for concessions. In May 1931, the cardinal showed the church’s force by rallying the faithful around Our Lady of Aparecida, the black Virgin named patroness of Brazil in 1930 by Pope Pius XI. After a procession with the Virgin’s image through the streets of Rio, Dom Leme consecrated the country to Our Lady as Vargas and his cabinet looked on. Crowds gathered again in October for a weeklong devotion to Cristo Redentor. Vargas, his cabinet, and 45 bishops accompanied Dom Leme in dedicating the statue on the Corcovado. During the festivities, Dom Leme presented Vargas with a list of Catholic demands to be included in a new constitution.¹⁵

Vargas and the church established an informal pact of cooperation, which historian Ralph Della Cava has labeled an “unwritten concordat.”¹⁶ The church offered the state ideology, moral content, and models of social discipline, and it backed Vargas’ emerging corporatist system by aiming to “respiritualize culture” and foster cooperation among social classes.¹⁷ Corporatism resonated strongly with church teachings on social unity and against class struggle. For instance, Oliveira Viana, one of Brazil’s leading intellectuals and a key Vargas adviser, saw the Vargas regime as flowing from a “Christian corporatism.”¹⁸

For itself, the church sought state support in the cultural and religious spheres. The Constitution of 1934, for example, contained all the proposals made by the Liga Eleitoral Católica (Catholic Electoral League), the political pressure group set up by Dom Leme. These included promulgation of the constitution in the name of God, the indissolubility of marriage, civil recognition of the legal validity of religious marriage, labor legislation inspired by the precepts of social justice and the principles of a Christian order, rights for Catholic unions, and more general Catholic demands, such as female suffrage and freedom of education.¹⁹

The government also placed religious images and crucifixes in public buildings and reinstituted military chaplaincies, banned under the republic. As Thomas Bruneau has observed, Dom Leme had regained a “position for the church in public life.”²⁰ In light of Vatican concordats with Italy, Germany, and a dozen other countries, church and state later contemplated a formal accord. None was reached, however, presumably because Dom Leme feared the church would fall under the control of Vargas’ authoritarian Estado Novo (1937-45), which repressed political organizations and closed the National Congress. Nevertheless, as one bishop put it, the informal pact endured as a “moral concordat.”²¹

The moral concordat revoked prohibitions on state subsidization. During the First Republic, the church had at times overcome this legal barrier through political accommodation and thus had received some federal and state funds for charitable and other works.²² Now Vargas collaborated openly with the church. In 1931, for example, he created a Caixa de Subvenções to fund charitable establishments — an area dominated by Catholic institutions. In contrast with the first republican constitution, moreover, the 1934 magna carta permitted the subsidization of Catholic institutions. Accordingly, subsidization increased during the Estado Novo. For instance, the church used public monies to organize anti-Communist labor unions known as Círculos Operários. Although the círculos declined in importance after Vargas’ fall in 1945, the state still expected the church to help discipline workers.

Additional resources flowed to Catholic entities under the Conselho Nacional de Serviço Social (National Social Service Council), created by Vargas in 1938 and run by individuals with ties to the church. Subsidies continued under President Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946-51), the second Vargas government, the administrations of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61), Jânio Quadros (1961), and Joño Goulart (1961-64), and even the military regime (1964-85)²³

The church used public funds to expand Brazil’s social infrastructure, building hospitals, child-care centers, orphanages, charitable organizations, housing projects, libraries, and educational entities (schools, universities, seminaries, and convents) that taught hundreds of thousands of people. In line with the ideology of neo-Christendom, the church saw these works as a way to instill Catholic truths in the populace. According to government statistics, in 1955 Brazil had 5,478 Catholic social projects. By the mid-1960s, 40 percent of the people in Salvador, Bahia, were receiving Catholic charity. Across Brazil, government at all levels supported 416 hospitals, while the church ran 300 hospitals known as santas casas and directed another 800 of the country’s 2,854 private medical centers. In all, religious orders tended 150,000 of Brazil’s 284,000 hospital beds. A later church study estimated that 10 percent of Brazilians benefited from its establishments, with 61.6 percent of the activities backed by national, state, or municipal governments.²⁴ Thus, under the moral concordat, the church became a major social arm of the state.

The surge of projects complemented the state’s own increased presence in the social arena after 1930.²⁵ The church, however, believed that government efforts were inadequate. Seeking to bolster the state, in the 1950s the bishops hoped “to multiply by ten, by a hundred, by a thousand the action of official agencies.” Furthermore, though reliance on public funds meant having to seek patronage, the bishops saw the church as a corrective to the inefficiency and influence peddling of the political system. The church could manage the social network better than “grandiose” government departments paralyzed by bureaucracy and electoral interests. Subsidies were not a political favor, but the “people's money” used in service to the community.²⁶

Strictly ecclesiastical projects also benefited. In 1954, for example, the Brazilian Congress voted five million cruzeiros for the construction of the National Basilica of Aparecida, which became a major attraction for pilgrims and a symbol of Brazilians devotion to Our Lady.²⁷ Celebrations such as episcopal anniversaries received state funding, as did eucharistic congresses. The 1940 Recife festival, for instance, acquired resources at the municipal, state, and federal levels, as well as from banks, commercial interests, industry, and numerous church groups, while the 1953 Belém congress secured a federal grant of three million cruzeiros.²⁸

Church, State, and Society in the 1955 Eucharistic Congress

The 36th IEC in Rio was an immense display of piety but also of luxury, efficiency, and power. Like previous congresses, it aimed to inoculate the faithful against modernity by focusing on the “great modern errors,” “the essential function of the priesthood,” an “intense eucharistic life,” and the family.²⁹ The economics of the IEC joined different sectors of Brazilian society—church, state, military, business, the press, labor, and the faithful—in an effort to polish Brazil’s international image. Public and private aid facilitated cooperation by making the IEC a Brazilian success story and giving the church a platform to preach the faith as the key to national unity. In the process, church and state revealed common goals in national development, labor relations, and social policy. The religious and the political, the sacred and the secular, and paradoxically, the traditional and the modern melded into one.

The Congress opened as a relay team, in an event conceived by Roberto Marinho’s Rádio Globo and his daily newspaper O Globo, carried the Eucharistic Torch from the Corcovado peak to the Praça do Congresso, the downtown esplanade laid especially for the congress’ main events. There, world champion triple jumper Ademar Ferreira da Silva used the torch to light a four-meter-high, 840-kilogram candle—said to be the world’s largest—that would burn throughout the congress. “This colossal candle marked the presence in spirit of millions and millions of persecuted brothers behind the Iron Curtain,” stated O Seminário, the official journal of Brazil’s candidates for the priesthood. In the praça stood a 15-meter-high brazilwood cross and the throne of Dom Pedro II, lent by descendants of Brazil’s imperial family.³⁰

Participants could also admire a giant monstrance, 2.5 meters tall, containing 140 kilograms of gilded silver, 56 brilliants and encrusted diamonds, 1,029 semiprecious stones, and a bluish beryl weighing 790 grams. Cast especially for the congress, this receptacle for displaying the Holy Eucharist was, the IEC Boletim Informativo insisted, “a work of art to be executed with the greatest diligence” and “without delay.” Dom Jaime de Barros Câmara, Dom Leme’s successor as cardinal-archbishop, received donations for the monstrance of gold and silver objects and at least 19 collections of precious stones. From throughout the country, people rich and poor sent jewelry, and widows gave up cherished wedding rings.³¹

The most imposing prop was the altar, conceived by Lúcio Costa, the urban planner who later would design the new capital at Brasília. Located at the water’s edge, the altar took the form of a caravelle to symbolize the arrival of Catholicism in Brazil with the first Portuguese explorers. Its mast, made by the Brazilian navy, rose 30 meters into the sky.³²

About 1.5 million people participated in the IEC, including 300 bishops, 20 cardinals, and thousands of priests and visitors from around the world. The attendance was striking, given Rio’s population (according to the 1950 census) of 2.3 million. Officially, the church registered more than 450,000 people in Rio alone, among them the current Miss Brazil, Emília Barreto Correia Lima. Many Brazilians arrived from far-off Brazilian states, such as the passengers on Panair’s special pilgrim flights from Bahia.³³ In the praça, the crowd reached one million during the opening ceremony and half a million at the closing. Hotel ships floated in Guanabara Bay, some carrying foreign delegations led by their pastors. Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York, headed a group of three hundred on the ship Brasil. Others came from New Orleans and San Antonio, other parts of Latin America, numerous European countries, and the Middle East.³⁴

The congress encompassed a myriad of activities intended to accent the church’s presence and to inculcate Christian values in Brazilian society. In one march, thousands of priests and seminarians walked down Rio Branco Avenue, a main thoroughfare in the heart of the business district. A maritime procession carried the Eucharist to the praça. There were other processions, liturgies, study sessions, and concerts, as well as ceremonies honoring the bishops. Special events catered to foreign pilgrims, the military, girls, women, seminarians, the handicapped, and the sick, among others. Pope Pius XII blessed the congress during a radio address to Brazilians that emphasized social unity and Catholic traditions in the land of “order and progress.” President João Café Filho, Vargas’ immediate successor, also spoke over the airwaves and led other high officials in receiving Benedette Aloisi Cardinal Massela, Pius XII’s legate to the congress and the former apostolic nuncio (1927-46). From Geneva, where he was meeting with Western European leaders, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower telegraphed a greeting to IEC participants. Moreover, public officials pronounced Brazil’s consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The church announced that it would distribute four million religious medals during the congress, and the government issued special postage stamps.³⁵

Rio underwent a spiritual awakening. The masses of people in the streets and the outpouring of emotion and religiosity made the IEC a “vast plebiscite of faith,” as Nereu Ramos, president of the Brazilian senate, put it.³⁶ Wearing IEC emblems on their chests, for a week Cariocas and their guests prayed, sang, and paid homage to Christ, Our Lady of Aparecida (the congress’ patroness), and church leaders. Radio stations helped by broadcasting special programs about the IEC, as well as classes in Gregorian chant. Triumphalistic, highly Romanized Catholicism dominated. “Convert the Protestants!” the people exhorted God during one public prayer session. “Convert the Jews!”

“We saw a different Rio, Catholic, perfectly conscious of spiritual values, disproving that the capital of the republic is just the land of carnival and macumba [Afro-Brazilian religion], a fame that erroneous publicity spreads everywhere,” observed journalist Hélio Damante following the congress. He further noted that of the one million people who received the Eucharist at Communion services, at least three hundred thousand were men and boys, an improvement over the usually much lower male participation in Communion.³⁷

Like the 1922 Rio congress, the 1955 IEC took place at a critical historical juncture. Reelected in 1950, Vargas had resumed his earlier nationalist drive for industrialization and had built worker support to counter antistatist conservatives. As politics became increasingly polarized, Vargas’ opponents feared the resurgence of the Communist Party, outlawed in 1947 with the church’s encouragement. They further disapproved of his sympathy for the syndicalist regime of Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón. Vargas’ suicide in August 1954 ignited further nationalist sentiment. Despite calls from the Right to suspend balloting, three months after the IEC Brazilians voted in Kubitschek, Vargas’ political heir. In November the army staged a preemptive coup to block another anti-Kubitschek plot.³⁸

Like the 1930 Revolution, the crises of 1954-55 cast Rio’s cardinal-archbishop, Dom Jaime de Barros Câmara, as an intermediary. Two weeks before the suicide, Dom Jaime and his auxiliary bishop, Dom Hélder Câmara (no relation), visited Vargas at the Catete Palace to discuss a possible resignation. Vargas refused. Following the pro-Kubitschek coup, opposing military factions requested the support of the cardinal, who frequently celebrated Easter Mass for members of the armed forces. Dom Jaime replied with an appeal for peace to the military commanders.³⁹

The IEC also came at a key moment for the church. Brazilian society was growing increasingly pluralistic as alternatives to Catholicism gained appeal. Spiritist, Afro-Brazilian, and Protestant religious rivals—“enemy number one of the people's faith” in the eyes of Latin America’s bishops—eroded the church’s religious monopoly and even competed for state funding. In the 1950s, Protestant ministers began to hold large revivals, while adherents of the Afro-Brazilian faith Umbanda exalted their religion in newspapers and conferences as a new national faith. The bishops responded by organizing an official campaign against the Umbandistas.⁴⁰ In addition, the church’s battle against Communism deepened as the Cold War progressed. Thus, in the “pious 1950s,” large devotional gatherings such as the national Rosary Crusade, processions of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, and local eucharistic congresses became political arms for defending neo-Christendom. The IEC, Brazil’s most important religious event of the decade, stood as the last great exhibition of Brazilian Catholic hegemony.⁴¹

Piety, however, was just one option for the church. The institution also sought to adapt its conservative, Romanized Catholicism to meet other challenges of the modern world. Because Brazil’s model of capitalist development failed to improve conditions in the countryside, vast numbers of people migrated to the cities, where many had to settle in favelas, or shantytowns. Fully supportive of nationalist developmentalism yet committed to social justice, a small but influential group of clerics began to challenge the neo-Christendom model and to advocate structural changes, such as agrarian reform. Backed by the Vatican, they also created new church organizations dedicated to those goals.

The key reformer was Dom Hélder Câmara. A profoundly devout priest, trained in the 1920s and 1930s by the Romanizing Vincentians and influenced by Franciscan spirituality, Father Hélder possessed a wide-ranging political biography. In the 1930s he worked in the Ministry of Education and then on the National Education Council. Both in his home state of Ceará and in Rio, he was a leader of Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB, Brazilian Integralist Action), a movement inspired by European fascism. Staunchly corporatist, AIB upheld the family, the nation, and God and enjoyed enthusiastic support from the clergy. After the undoctrinaire Vargas crushed integralismo during the Estado Novo, however, Father Hélder disassociated himself from the movement.⁴²

Like a number of former integralistas who shared a strong desire for Brazil’s development but not necessarily the movement’s fascist image, Father Hélder gradually moved left. In 1947 he became national director of Ação Católica Brasilieira. In the 1950s, ACB gained inspiration from European progressive Catholics, such as Jacques Maritain, the French humanist and lay theologian, whose ideas entered Brazil by way of Alceu Amoroso Lima—a leading Catholic intellectual, a key influence on the first Vargas regime, and a mentor of Father Hélder. Partly in response to Communism, Hélder helped revitalize this lay apostolate, which became active in student and worker politics in the 1950s and openly radical in the 1960s.

Named Dom Jaime’s auxiliary bishop in 1952, Dom Hélder used the ACB model to form the Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB), one of the world’s first associations of bishops.⁴³ Shortly before the IEC, Dom Hélder was promoted to archbishop, and he immediately joined other Latin American prelates gathered in Rio for the congress to found the world’s only continental episcopal group, the Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM). CELAM concentrated on traditional concerns, such as the critical shortage of priests, but it also focused on Latin American underdevelopment.⁴⁴

As a central figure in these initiatives, Dom Hélder began to depart ideologically from his superior, Dom Jaime, and to eclipse him as the leader of the Brazilian church. Perhaps unwittingly, Dom Jaime himself spurred his assistant’s rise by making him the chief IEC planner. Despite an incipient rivalry, however, in 1954 and 1955 the two worked together for the success of the congress.

“The Most Sincere and Complete Cooperation of All”

One of their first steps was to seek government assistance. This proved easy to do. According to Dom Hélder, when he and Dom Jaime approached Vargas, the president exclaimed, “But this is very important! People will come from all over the world!” Dom Hélder recollected,

In addition, Vargas gathered his cabinet to study the public sector’s role in the event.⁴⁶

Dom Jaime punctuated Vargas’ commitment by calling together government officials again on May 22, 1954. Dom Hélder, the mayor of Rio, the president of the city council, the presidents of the federal senate and the Chamber of Deputies, Vargas’ entire cabinet, and Vice President Café Filho attended.⁴⁷ The details of the meeting are unknown, but in a letter to Finance Minister Osvaldo Aranha, Dom Jaime made the agenda clear. The IEC, Dom Jaime wrote,

As the cardinal recognized, the church’s religious strategy meshed neatly with state interests and the country’s economic fortunes.

Public support for the IEC took many forms. As Dom Hélder noted, the church used its clout to obtain a site for the Praça do Congresso, which skirted the shore of Guanabara Bay at the southern end of Rio Branco Avenue. The praça was essential for the large ceremonies. When the government of the federal district refused to cede the area in July 1954, Dom Jaime criticized the city in his “Voice of the Pastor” radio broadcasts. He also dispatched Dom Hélder to Vargas, who in turn sent his official envoy, Ambassador João Pizarro Gabizo de Coelho Lisboa, to Mayor Dulcídio do Espírito Santo Cardoso with orders to begin building the plaza.⁴⁹ The founders of the future Modern Art Museum also wanted the prime real estate but received it only after the congress.⁵⁰

The praça was the first section of the Aterro do Flamengo, a landfill built into the bay to extend Rio’s area. The church scrutinized this public works project and combated rumors that the government would not complete it on time. To finish it, the federal district rushed to remove one-third of the downtown Santo Antônio Hill to the praça. In a year’s time, trucks transported 2 million cubic meters of earth in 500,000 trips, giving Rio 250,000 square meters of new space.⁵¹ The church alone did not have the resources to carry out such a Herculean task, which transformed the face of Brazil’s “Cidade Maravilhosa.”

Rio’s government did much more to support the IEC, and improved its own image in the process. Mayor Pedro Alim, appointed by Café Filho after Vargas’ death, collaborated with the church to spruce up the city, cleaning, widening, and repairing streets; building 22 kilometers of new highways; and renovating the Cristo Redentor statue.⁵² At the church’s urging, Rio put in a third water main to end shortages that had forced some people to buy the precious liquid, although after the construction, parts of the city’s lower-class North Zone still lacked it.⁵³

“Everybody knows that the Water Department has deaf ears,” the daily newspaper Jornal do Brasil opined. “The complaints continue as if Rio de Janeiro were the most backward African village.” The commentary revealed many Cariocas’ apparent frustration with the government and, oriented as many were by European ideas, perhaps also the negative image they held of their country as it struggled to develop. During the IEC, however, church-state cooperation produced “model organization” in Rio and at least temporarily reversed the norm of inefficiency in public service. Reporting Dom Hélder’s announcement before the Associação Brasileira de Imprensa (ABI, or Brazilian Press Association) that the praça was nearly completed, the Jornal do Brasil praised the IEC for catalyzing the “realization of works in record time in a country where things take far too long, notably those that fall under the control of the public power.”⁵⁴ In short, as Hélio Damante observed, the IEC provided a “lively and opportune negation of Brazilians’ reputation for improvidence and improvisation.” During the congress, everything functioned “like a good Swiss watch.”⁵⁵

Some of the most impressive public assistance came as direct subsidies. The 14 million cruzeiros granted by the National Congress with Vargas’ approval equaled approximately 165,000 U.S. dollars, a hefty sum at the time. Another subsidy of 10 million cruzeiros, or approximately 110,000 dollars, came from the mayor’s office. These funds provided 29 percent of the church’s official IEC budget of more than 74 million cruzeiros, which actually generated a 10 percent surplus.⁵⁶ Another subsidy of 10 million cruzeiros went to finish the main building of the new campus of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro in the Gávea district. A letter from the university to Osvaldo Aranha recommended “moving ahead” with disbursement of aid so that the structure could be inaugurated during the IEC.⁵⁷ The state’s many other contributions, such as the praça, were unaccounted for in financial terms. The city and national governments opened lodging for 50,000 people in public buildings, for instance; and the Municipal Health Secretariat set up seven first aid posts, each with two doctors and two ambulances.⁵⁸

The virtuosos of state support were Brazil’s armed forces. The IEC provided an example of the very significant cooperation between cross and sword absent from writings on modern Brazil. The military embellished the ceremonial aspects of the congress by providing an honor guard and personal escort for Cardinal Massela. Martial bands played at religious observances, and soldiers marched in the opening procession, which included tributes to Brazil’s men in uniform.⁵⁹ Such public display symbolized how well the church and the armed forces had reconciled since their estrangement during the First Republic. Additionally, it gave a religious hue to the armed forces’ cherished role as the povo fardado (the people in uniform).⁶⁰

The military contributed further with material and logistical support. The air force, for example, transported packages and sign-up sheets for the congress, while the navy shone its spotlights on the praça and exploded fireworks provided by the government.⁶¹ Under army colonel Geraldo de Menezes Côrtes (who had served as Rio’s director of transit and later police chief in the early 1950s), the military provided security and directed vehicle and pedestrian traffic. During the IEC, Côrtes also stocked food in government warehouses ceded by Vargas, thereby averting price speculation and actually causing food prices to drop during the large influx of visitors.⁶²

A wide variety of businesses also backed and benefited from the IEC. The church met initial expenditures, thanks to loans from seven private banks. Phillips do Brasil provided lighting and a sound system for the immense praça, while the merchant marine refurbished seven old ships into floating hotels. The Quintilha family lent its nearly completed apartment building as a hotel for bishops and priests, with suites furnished by private businesses and religious orders.⁶³

Dom Jaime recognized the Antártica brewing company for its “valuable donation” of 7,500 cubic meters of wood for the praça’s altar and benches. In large newspaper ads, the ten construction and engineering companies that helped build the esplanade thanked Mayor Alim for undertaking the project and also welcomed IEC participants to Rio, while RCA Victor issued a phonograph record of the official congress hymn. The Atlántica insurance firm commemorated the IEC by publicizing an 80-cruzeiro traffic accident insurance policy approved by the church. “Nobody is safe in a cosmopolitan city,” Atlántica warned.⁶⁴

Boosting the Tourism Industry

Business, government, and church interests merged in the IEC’s prospects for generating tourism. Though materially dependent, the church had the organization, vision, and unifying ideology necessary to fulfill this potential.

Rio de Janeiro’s authorities had long recognized their city’s promise as a draw for visitors, but tourism in Brazil remained “at best in its infancy,” as one visitor put it in the 1940s.⁶⁵ Rivadavia Caetano da Silva, treasurer of the Confederação Nacional do Comércio (CNC, the National Confederation of Commerce) and former president of the Rio de Janeiro state tourism federation, blamed the industry’s lack of growth on the “pernicious” influence of government, which hampered foreigners with visa restrictions and did little to attract guests. The country lacked tourist infrastructure, a situation sorely apparent during the IEC, as a shortage of hotel space obliged many foreigners to stay on the hotel ships and Brazilians in public accommodations. Brazil also lacked well-planned excursions, comfortable transportation into the interior, and promotional publicity.

Thus, despite Brazil’s drive for economic development, it failed to cut a slice of the growing international tourist pie. In 1954, Silva noted, U.S. travelers had spent $1.4 billion on foreign travel, with Europe absorbing $550 million, Mexico $250 million, and Japan $60 million. “Of the $70 million expended in South America, how much must have been Brazil’s part?” he asked. Silva did not answer this rhetorically powerful question, suggesting that no one in Brazil knew, either. Statistics of the International Monetary Fund demonstrated that in the early 1950s, Brazilians spent more on travel outside their country than did foreigners who visited Brazil.⁶⁶

In 1955 the church filled the organizational breach by setting up nearly two dozen commissions to coordinate different aspects of the congress and to mobilize the city. The souvenir commission encouraged industry to manufacture mementos of “good taste” for the salvation of the people and the IEC’s coffers. Buyers could choose from 36 different kinds of items, including 40,000 copies of a Bible emblazoned with an IEC logo.⁶⁷ A decorations committee offered the populace guidelines for adorning the city so as to impress visitors. Its president, the Benedictine priest Dom Gerardo Martins, stated that stores should not exhibit crosses, altars, chalices, or religious images because such items would harm the aesthetics of commercial displays; appropriate were large photos of picturesque scenes of Brazilian cities. Shop windows needed to convey to foreigners and Brazilians alike “our sensibility and the beauty and refinement of our national products,” he said.

Whatever Cariocas did, it had to be uniquely Brazilian yet avoid all signs of provincialism, such as festoons and streamers, which would detract from Rio’s native and architectural beauty. “Ornamentation that befits Paris or London will certainly be a failure for us,” Dom Gerardo stated. “Let us not forget that Brazil, and notably Rio, is the leading country in modern architecture.” Perhaps sensing that the enthusiasm for captivating visitors was overshadowing the sacred, Dom Hélder cautioned Rio’s populace to “avoid the expression tourists: the right word is pilgrims.” In reality, IEC participants could be both.⁶⁸

The church reinforced the link between religion and tourism by forming a Pilgrim Assistance Commission to train more than five hundred guides, defined as “persons speaking foreign languages who are able to offer information about the congress, Brazil, and Rio de Janeiro.”⁶⁹ A training course prescribed the Ten Commandments of the Guide:

1. The guide sees Christ in the pilgrim.

2. The guide loves the pilgrim and helps in all ways.

3. The guide treats all pilgrims equally.

4. The guide fulfills his duties, even with sacrifice.

5. The guide wins over the pilgrim with a good example.

6. The guide is obedient and disciplined.

7. The guide confronts and solves all difficulties.

8. The guide does not criticize nor speak badly of anybody.

9. The guide is generous and unselfish.

10. The guide is courteous and gentlemanly.⁷⁰

The trainees visited Rio’s Tijuca Forest and took classes on the city’s sites, Brazilian history, politics, literature, and art. Other organizations supplemented these efforts. The Touring Club do Brasil, for example, placed guides at the Santos Dumont Airport and the central bus station to aid arriving visitors.⁷¹

The church’s publicity campaign further demonstrated its commitment to tourism, though it spent “not one cent” on newspaper, radio, or television advertising. Instead, a publicity commission headed by Auxiliary Bishop Dom José Távora established a press office just blocks from the praça at the São Joaquim Palace, the curial offices, where reporters picked up releases on the IEC.⁷² In the praça, the church set up broadcast booths and special seating for reporters, who had permission to circulate freely during the ceremonies. The resulting coverage filled the airwaves and Rio’s dailies.⁷³ The emphasis on good press relations was new for a church wary of modernity, but not surprising in light of the reformers’ efforts to adapt the institution to changing social and economic conditions. Dom Hélder in particular worked the press well and received credit from the ABI for “focusing the entire world on our capital.” The archbishop in turn declared that the journalists’ reports gave the IEC “magnitude and splendor.”⁷⁴

The church’s own publication, the Boletim Informativo, expanded tourism-related publicity. One issue exhorted Brazilians to save for the trip to Rio: “Immediately get a piggy bank or open an account at a bank or at the Caixa Econômica [federal savings bank], and start saving. If you have a little money left over, put some aside in order to help the pilgrims without funds. This same measure can be taken in religious associations.” Other issues refuted rumors circulating in the turmoil surrounding Vargas’ death that “revolution is going to break out during the congress and nobody will be able to return home. . . . These false reports,” the Boletim suggested, “must be repelled as promptly as possible whenever they arise.” After the suicide, the Boletim assured readers that Vargas had always supported the IEC.⁷⁵

More to the point, the bulletin focused on Brazil’s tourist attractions. Appearing in six languages, it described Rio as both a “modern” and a “traditional” city. “Available two steps away from the urban agitation are its forests (without snakes!), which are a place of repose and an invitation to meditation; mountains cross our path and unforgettable beaches await us at each step.” In the same vein, the Boletim voiced enthusiasm for nationalist developmentalism. “Brazil is a young country in South America,” it announced.

An IEC album published by a group of priests and a military officer expressed similar sentiments in its commercial and political advertisements. For example, one proclaimed the growth of the energy, transportation, and industrial sectors of Minas Gerais under then-governor Kubitschek. Likewise, a handbook for pilgrims, issued in five languages, effused optimism about Brazil and repeated the common belief in its racial democracy.⁷⁷

“Still so unknown” in the world, Brazil enjoyed unprecedented publicity from the IEC, declared João Vasconcellos, the CNC president. In churches “in the four corners of the world, from the most important cities to the most remote hamlets . . . posters speaking of our country were put up.” The IEC was an “excellent opportunity for advertising the country,” wrote journalist Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho. “And publicity means new tourists in the future, when the pilgrims tell their compatriots all about our country.”⁷⁸

The Fight Against Communism

The IEC occurred at a poignant moment in the struggle against Communism. In May 1954, Vargas had doubled the minimum wage, a move aimed at building working-class support but which ultimately stirred anti-Communist fear. Before its proscription in 1947, the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) had gained two hundred thousand members, making it the largest Communist party in Latin America and leading to impressive electoral showings, such as its plurality on the Rio city council. Though banned, the PCB remained an important political force in the 1950s. The Cold War came into sharp focus on the eve of the IEC as Hungary’s Communist government suspended the life sentence of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, a Catholic cause célèbre after his imprisonment in 1949 for opposing the regime. Dom Jaime had protested the jailing and staged a procession of the Eucharist to show solidarity for the cardinal.

The church hoped to promote social harmony by steering Brazil’s working classes away from Communism. The Americas were the Communists’ “favorite target,” the Jornal do Brasil noted. Catholics formed a barrier against these “totalitarian agents,” and the IEC infused the faithful with “new energies” for their “redemptive crusade.” In a 1954 pastoral letter, Dom Jaime evoked the social function of the eucharistic congresses, likening them to the “table of the Father, which brings together sons perhaps separated by the force of antagonistic interests.” In the Eucharist, “bosses and laborers” once again became brothers. “It is there that the soldier kneels alongside the general, sharing in the same benefits,” the cardinal wrote. “Governments cannot ignore the effect of that spiritual union.” As Dom Jaime noted in calling for state support, the IEC could cause a “profound repercussion among the masses in this confusing and agitated hour.”⁷⁹ Indeed, the congress occasioned a truce by 150,000 maritime workers whose demand for higher wages had threatened to disrupt it.⁸⁰

Catholic writer Humberto Bastos underscored church support for a corporatist development model that opposed Communist notions of class conflict. “The church remains the spiritual base par excellence,” he wrote. “The campaigns for social assistance, for the recuperation of the worker, have no other meaning.” Economic growth created a “climate of natural disquiet,” and without the church the industrializing areas of Brazil would be “stirred up by political groups. . . . It would be pure and simple anarchy. The impact of social decomposition would bring the complete disarticulation of the labor market.”⁸¹

In appealing to the masses, the church presented itself as an alternative to Communism. One example was the festa do trabalhador (festival of the worker), organized by members of the Juventude Operária Católica (Catholic Worker Youth), one of Brazil’s leading Catholic Action groups. JOCistas canvassed Rio’s factories, workshops, offices, stores, and banks to discuss the importance of the congress with workers. Though opposed to class struggle, they believed that to fulfill the Eucharist’s dignifying potential, laborers needed to obtain an equal share in society’s benefits by organizing unions.

They demonstrated this during the festival by staging a play in the huge Maracanã soccer stadium, titled “The Worker and the Eucharist.” Its verse dialogue reflected the church’s desire that working people “liberate them-selves/from their precarious situation. . . . It is shameful and inhuman/To use man as a pure instrument of profit.” Dressed in laborers’ clothing, young men and women carried bottles of wine, wheat, and flowers to an altar—the laborer’s worktable—for Mass. Another group of men shouldered a large cross, signifying the sanctity of work and of collaboration with God in seeking social welfare. The play also identified workers as the Christ of national development; they bore the cross—the quintessential sign of both suffering and hope in the Christian world—in the quest for Brazil’s progress.⁸²

In contrast, according to church rhetoric, behind the Iron Curtain there was no Christ and no salvation. The hundred million Catholics of the “silent church” faced repression from atheistic governments. “Convert the Communists!” the people prayed. One night during the congress, bishops from 14 Communist nations called attention to religious persecution by marching to the praça altar. Four bishops’ thrones remained empty to symbolize the vacant sees in Communist countries. For a few moments the lights went off, revealing only the burning candles held by the clerics. The audience said prayers for priests killed by the Communists and recited the stations of the cross for the salvation of Eastern Europe.⁸³

Dom Hélder’s Shift to the Poo6r

Overseeing this Catholic response to Communism was Dom Hélder Câmara. He was a paragon of the priest as administrator, public figure, and politician, orchestrating the ostentatious arrangements without questioning the church’s paternalistic views of the working class. Indeed, his leadership and organizational acumen won him national popularity and boosted his appeal among Brazil’s entrepreneurial and social elite. After the IEC, for instance, Dom Hélder became friends with the local president of Volkswagen, which began to make cars in Brazil during the Kubitschek presidency, and even knew his private telephone number. Rio’s bankers’ association made Dom Hélder an honorary member, and Varig airlines gave him a free pass.⁸⁴ Dom Hélder also became one of Kubitschek’s principal advisers, although he turned down offers to become minister of education and mayor of Rio.⁸⁵ When Kubitschek invited Pope John XXIII to the inauguration of Brasília in 1960, he chose Dom Hélder to travel secretly to Rome to contact the Pontiff⁸⁶

While basking in prestige, however, in the late 1950s Dom Hélder increasingly concentrated on social reform. He and other Catholics sought fresh approaches for meeting not only the Communist threat but also the negative effects of economic development, such as the burgeoning favelas. While some members of Rio’s middle class carried out charity in the shantytowns, others glossed over the substandard conditions and viewed them with curiosity; they even made a fad of visiting them to party. The favelas had been festering for at least half a century, but after the PCB’s postwar electoral success they suddenly became a political challenge for church and state. Thus, in 1947, the church countered growing Communist influence in the slums by joining the federal government to provide them with social services —a substantial shift from the strategy, advocated by many leaders, of eradicating them and returning favelados to the countryside.⁸⁷

Dom Hélder had witnessed this social blight since his arrival in Rio in the 1930s, but only during the IEC did he develop a profound interest in it. One IEC committee, for example, was charged with constructing new housing for the poor, using the dismantled benches donated for the Praça do Congresso by the Antártica company.⁸⁸ For Dom Hélder, moreover, the IEC placed church efforts in favor of the corporatist development model in sharp relief. His friend and European counterpart Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, visited Rio’s favelas and was repelled by the contrasts between their poverty and the IEC’s splendor.⁸⁹ Gerlier sought out Dom Hélder after the congress and spoke of his shock.

“I was thrown to the ground like Saul on the road to Damascus,” Dom Hélder later recalled.⁹¹

As a result, Dom Hélder dedicated himself “first and foremost” to work in the favelas.⁹² Together with his IEC assistants, he used the IEC’s 8-million-cruzeiro surplus to found the Cruzada São Sebastião (Saint Sebastian Crusade), a housing program named for Rio’s patron saint. (“From the name alone you can see that we were still tied to the medieval attitudes of Christendom,” Dom Hélder said in retrospect.) Going beyond earlier church strategies that merely emphasized education, the bishop implemented concepts of community development.⁹³ Like the IEC, the cruzada received broad public and private support. The Café Filho government donated 50,000 cruzeiros. Later Dom Hélder won Kubitschek’s approval to construct housing using money from sales of land reclaimed from the sea. Thus originated Dom Hélder’s reputation as the bishop of the favelados. In 1957 Dom Hélder expanded his efforts for shantytown dwellers by organizing a congress of Rio favelas, and in 1959 he founded the Banco da Providência, a charitable and social service entity financed by an annual fair.⁹⁴

In one of its major projects, the cruzada built apartments for the residents of Praia do Pinto, a large favela located near the upper-class neighborhood of Leblon. Some Cariocas attacked the cruzada for putting this housing next to prime real estate, while more sympathetic critics, such as IEC collaborator Colonel Côrtes (now a member of Congress and a student of the favelas), believed that the slum dwellers should receive the resources to build their own homes.⁹⁵

The cruzada ultimately failed because of interference from clientelistic politicians, land speculators, and an unsympathetic military regime. Like many other favelados, the residents of Praia do Pinto were removed to public housing projects on the outskirts of Rio, far from their jobs. Nevertheless, Dom Hélder was pleased that the cruzada had drawn the attention of authorities to the favelas for the first time.⁹⁶ Yet despite his and other Catholic activists’ increasing awareness of the need to combat poverty, the cruzada’s most serious deficiency was perhaps its inability to go beyond the paternalistic view of the poor that marked Brazilian neo-Christendom. Instead of focusing on social inequality, the cruzada still emphasized such classic elements of neo-Christendom as anti-Communism, the Christian family, good moral behavior, and acceptance of the social order.⁹⁷

Conclusions

The centrality of economic factors in church-state reciprocity necessitates a more varied analysis of the link between religion and politics in modern Brazil. A shared corporatist ideology was a key element, but the palpable economic aspects of the collaboration provide an even clearer picture of how and why church and state cooperated.

The church was not only a political actor but a multidimensional organization acting in many spheres. As a nonprofit institution, its search for resources was especially critical because it had to seek diverse funding sources. As Dom Hélder later recalled about the IEC, the church needed money, “and we thought of all sorts of ways of getting it.”⁹⁸ Thus the Brazilian “moral concordat” involved the state’s material support in exchange for the church’s religious legitimation and the application of its labor and organizational skills for social peace and economic development.

The symbiosis of the moral concordat, however, made the church financially dependent on the state. In 1955, anthropologist Thales de Azevedo aptly observed that such reliance caused the faithful to lose “the habit of contributing directly for the necessities of their religious community.” The pattern continued even after the 1964 military coup brought attacks on the church and damaged the moral concordat. Former congressman Márcio Moreira Alves noted that most Catholic charitable projects received public monies from all levels of government. Before the generals took control of all federal spending, “the voting of the budget was annually preceded by a kind of siege. Hundreds of priests and nuns from the four corners of the country would grab the parliamentarians in the corridors in the hope of obtaining more money for their projects.”⁹⁹ Instead of a missionary organization, the church resembled a lobby.

The system recalled the royal patronage of the colonial and imperial eras and the church’s prominence as a provider of social aid.¹⁰⁰ It also reflected the traditional patron-client relations of Brazilian politics. In the modern era, however, the church had to compete for patronage in an environment of increasing religious pluralism, which eroded the Catholic religious monopoly. Thus the moral concordat both linked the church with its past and mirrored the growing religious struggles of contemporary Brazilian society.

In a broader sense, the IEC tapped into the ancient Constantinian identification of religion with nation and power. The church was Romanized, but it was also patriotic. Its contribution to tourism linked nationalism, economic progress, and religion. Church, state, and the private sector pooled their interests, revealing a multiplicity of relationships and blurring institutional boundaries. A decade later, the universal conclave of bishops known as the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) abandoned triumphalism in favor of religious freedom and ecumenism, once again creating a sharper division between church and state and forging a new identity for Catholicism. For an ecclesiastical leadership embattled by religious competition, the memory of the 1955 IEC now evokes nostalgia for an era when the Brazilian church easily commanded the masses and government cooperation.¹⁰¹

In the 1990s, the church faces serious religious and political challenges from other denominations. A prime example is the syncretistic, neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, one of whose pastors caused a national uproar in 1995 for punching and kicking an image of Our Lady of Aparecida on television. In the long run, however, increased religious competition could rejuvenate Brazilian Catholicism.¹⁰²

Standing at the nexus of the church-state relationship, Dom Hélder questioned the stark contrast between publicly supported religious ostentation and the poverty of most Brazilians. During the developmentalist euphoria of the Kubitschek years, the government displayed its alliance with the bishops to allay conservatives’ fears about developmentalism, while Dom Hélder and the church’s growing reformist wing seized on the theme of progress as a way to social justice. Dom Hélder used his prestige to alert politicians and business moguls to the need for change in the socioeconomic structure.¹⁰³ Later, at Vatican II, he and Cardinal Gerlier became leaders of the movement for a “church of the poor.”¹⁰⁴ Dom Hélder’s new stance, however, cost him popularity among Brazil’s elite and sidetracked his career by prompting his transfer out of Rio in March 1964.

The military that had once been Dom Hélder’s gracious collaborators now vilified him as a Communist bishop. One of its ambassadors to the Vatican allegedly boasted of blocking his nomination as cardinal.¹⁰⁵ Ultimately, Dom Hélder’s story demonstrates the importance of finances in the spiritual context, but also the limits of the moral concordat. His fall from the pinnacle of prestige among the upper class is a reminder that while the church frequently relied on power and wealth to influence society, it also needed to sacrifice them to rediscover the spiritual roots that nurtured its mission for justice.

The author thanks Ralph Della Cava, Pedro A. Ribeiro de Oliveira, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Marina Bandeira, Dain Borges, Mark Szuchman, Eric Van Young, and two anonymous HAHR readers for their excellent comments on earlier versions of this article, and also those who remarked on a presentation of these findings at the Second General Conference of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Church in Latin America, São Paulo, July 25-28, 1995. He is also grateful to the agencies that funded research for this article: the Fulbright Commission (Brasília), the Organization of American States, the History Department of the University of California, San Diego, the North-South Center at the University of Miami, and the History Department and Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Diego. Thanks also go to Cristina Mehrtens for research assistance.