Death of the
Red Bishop
By JONATHAN
POWER
Sept 8, 1999
LONDON- When Archbishop Helder Camara died at the end of
last month the president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique
Cardosa, declared three days of national mourning. Not bad
for a cleric who in his "red bishop" days, as Time magazine
once dubbed him, so riled the authorities that they sent a
gun squad that rained a hail of bullets into his modest
apartment tacked on to the back of a church.
"When I feed the poor they called me a saint", he once
said. "When I asked, 'Why are they poor?' they called me a
communist."
I don't know personally Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor,
the Nobel prize winner, but I see certain important
similarities between the two men: a commitment to justice,
an anger with those who ignore the poverty of the majority,
a preparedness to seek compromise and reconciliation rather
than perpetual conflict. Bishop Belo's time of testing has
now come- and perhaps he has failed it by fleeing to
Australia. Archbishop Camara's passed into history some time
ago with the ending of the military dictatorship, against
which he'd rallied most of the hierarchy of Brazil's
dominant Catholic Church.
I was a cub foreign correspondent at the time of my first
visit to Brazil. Imagine my astonishment when I descended
the aircraft steps in Recife, the bustling sea port
metropolis of Brazil's backward north east states, to see in
the waiting crowd a diminuative figure in a frayed black
cassock. Dom Helder had heard I was coming, he explained,
and wanted to thank me for inviting him to speak at a
conference on the Third World in London.
We'd certainly done him proud. He was featured in long
newspaper articles and tv programnes and inspired a very
large hall full of young, palpitating, would-be
revolutionaries, with a message of the struggle of the
peasants and proletariat of underdeveloped Brazil, albeit
couched with a multitude of references to the tactics of
Gandhi, Danilio Dolci, Martin Luther King and all the other
great practitioners of non-violence.
He whisked me off in a taxi to be his guest in a
seventeenth century convent up on a hill overlooking the
old, very unspoilt, town of Olinda, nearby. Over the two
week's of my visit one of the younger nuns, an earnest
revolutionary herself, told me a lot about the archbishop.
"He can talk to everyone. The beggars who come to his door
talk to him for two hours over breakfast. If he gets into a
taxi he will talk to the driver for the whole of the
journey. The most important thing about him is not what he
does, but what he gets others to do. He has a gift for
helping people to discover they can do great things." "The
world will change", Dom Helder explained to me, "when the
small people start to believe in the other small
people".
Dom Helder, however, also believed in megaphone
diplomacy. It was not enough just to wake people up in his
own diocese; he used every opportunity to travel to Europe
and North America to spread the word about one of the
world's most unjust societies whose distribution of income
was worse (and still is) than South Africa's. More than any
other single person, he made dirt of the reputations of the
generals - Geisel of Brazil, Pinochet of Chile and
Stroessner of Paraguay.
He was silenced by the government and his name was not
allowed to be mentioned in the newspapers or on tv. His
house was attacked not once, but four times. One of his
closest associates, a priest, was murdered. Another close
aide, now a bishop, was imprisoned.
The military government's apparatus of repression and
torture slowly withered away under the impact of the
criticism of the Church, the probings and publishings of
Amnesty International and the pressures from Washington
during the term of office of the human rights activist,
Jimmy Carter. Helder Camara then turned his attention and
that of the Church, now headed by one of his own admirers,
Cardinal Evanisto Arns of Sao Paulo, to the workers'
movement, led by Ignacio da Silva (who recently lost the
presidential election to Mr Cardosa) and to the burning
issue of land reform.
For half a century or more politicians have promised the
peasantry a fairer share of Brazil's notoriously unequal
land holdings. President Cardosa, at last, has begun a
serious, if still insufficient, effort to do something about
it.
Brazil remains along with Paraguay the most unequally
divided place on earth. This has propelled marches,
occupations and, on many occasions, in retaliation, the use
of armed militias by angry landlords to drive occupying
peasants off their land. Killings of demonstrators are not
unknown. To protest, bishops and priests, often encouraged
by Dom Helder, have joined the peasants' ranks.
Helder Camara, old and infirm, did not live to see the
end of the struggle. Only his example and words survive. He
was not, pace our youthful exhuberance, a revolutionary. He
was not a man of violence. He was simply a radical promoter
of a better deal for the poor. "Revolutionary violence is
too often paternalistic- imposing ideas on people that they
are not ready for." He preferred the slow way of educating,
cajoling and pushing, "using weapons that armies cannot
use."
In a speech some years ago I heard Helder Camara sum up
his credo. "As for peace, it is well known that there can be
an instance of false peace, with the same deceptive beauty
of stagnant marshes on a moonlit night. The peace which
speaks to us, which moves us, for which we are prepared to
give our lives, presupposes that the rights of all are fully
respected: the rights of God and the rights of men. Not just
the rights of some men, a privileged few, to the detriment
of others - the rights of each men and all men".
Vague? Not at all. His 90 year life helped change Latin
America's largest and most powerful nation for the better
and profoundly influenced the rest of the continent too.
Three days was not enough to mourn this man.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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