2002 / 3
Introduction
José Oscar Beozzo and Luiz Carlos Susin
Contemporary Brazil is a living laboratory of expressions of faith and ancestral religions in new syntheses, flourishing in the winds of freedom blown by modernity. The foremost religious canon — virtually the only one that counts — is that of life experience and the encouragement of life in its basic dimensions: the body and its needs; the struggle for a livelihood; solidarity among neighbours; the symbolic expression of the sacred and the meanings it contains; the erotic, mystical, and playful dimensions of human existence.
The Brazilian ‘condition’ or ‘history’, like that of all parts of Latin America, began before 1500. That date officially marks the arrival of Portuguese navigators in lands that were to form what was later called Brazil. For at least 40,000 years, however, some 600 different peoples have been spreading over and taking root on this territory. Of those, 130 have survived extermination and the violent processes of integration. The majority, though, were thrown into the melting-pot of forced miscegenation with the Portuguese colonizers to which the native women were subjected. Some 4,000,000 Africans brought over as slaves were then added to the native peoples.
These native peoples and Africans have produced a mixed-race Brazil and endowed it with a strong cultural, religious, even ritual expression of the spiritual forces that rule life on earth and of indigenous contemplation and grace. The African slaves and their descendants have, through their resistance struggles, witnessed to the strength of life in adversity. They have kept deep ties with nature and with their ancestors, giving women a central position extending to their worship.
The economic and cultural history of Brazil is — officially — that of a colony of modern times, a colony facing first Europe and later also the United States. It was first a quarry for material extraction, then a dependent part of capitalist concentration of resources, and is now dependent on the concentration of technology and income, today on a globalized scale, which has been reproduced internally through a strongly vertical class hierarchy, the [8] insignificance of the poor majority, and growing social exclusion and violence.
In the interstices of official Catholicism, a popular Catholicism has developed, capable of nourishing resistance and dignity, self-esteem, and the sense of life, suffering, and death through a syncretic re-interpretation, with its own special traits coming from officially unrecognized sources, of indigenous and African traditions, despised but persistent and re-surfacing everywhere today. ‘Lots of religion’, ‘Drink from every spring and refresh yourself in many ways to ward off danger’ is a sacred command for the people of Brazil, something reflected in the best Brazilian literature, such as Grande Sertão: Veredas, by Guimarães Rosa.
On top of its original inhabitants and those transplanted by Portuguese colonization, Brazil has, from the mid-nineteenth century, received immigrations from various countries of Europe and Asia, who have brought new Christian churches and new religions with them. Finally, globalization, in this part of the planet and as it affects religion, has poured the soup of traditional Brazilian syntheses into a pot of Pentecostal and New Age stew, in a real ‘carnival of the soul’.
The National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) has been in existence for fifty years. Founded by powerfully charismatic leaders such as Dom Hélder Câmara, it has had a strong presence on the Brazilian scene, filled with the spirit of the council and totally engaged in social questions. The Catholic Church has shown an energy and a creativity that have flowed into Brazilian society from the time of Catholic Action to engagement in organized social activities, such as trade unions and political parties. In the same way, pastoral strategy for land has produced what is the most organized and significant social and political movement of today, the Landless Workers Movement (MST). The rise of base church communities, furthermore, is evidence of hope and prophecy within the church, of a participatory way of being church, of ‘ecclesiogenesis’, which, even if spread today over so many forms of popular church communities, organized in parishes and chapels, are still the true base on which the church rests.
In Brazil, various church denominations are flourishing, and Christianity’s course is marked out by reasonably solid ecumenical frameworks, with official ecumenical bodies and innumerable partners in ecclesial and social initiatives affecting the whole of Brazilian society. The church’s presence to the indigenous peoples and rural workers is likewise ecumenical in character.
The mega-cities, great state capitals such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, [9] Belo Horizonte, and others, affected by grave risk of social disintegration and violence, have also become an arena for pastoral creativity, such as the ‘dwellings’ initiative for those who live and suffer on the streets, and similar initiatives for mothers and babies, street children, marginalized women, and the like.
The ecclesial face of Brazil is also marked by the conciliar form of religious life, which has taken the inspirations of the Medellin Conference to heart: the preferential option for the poor, ‘insertion’ in places where the bulk of the people live, accompanying the base communities. Among religious communities, those of women are outstanding for their missions in precarious situations, in ‘priestless parishes’, and in their social pastoral outreach, often putting their own lives at risk. The co-ordinating role of the Conference of Brazilian Religious has also been notable, running a number of services dedicated to the social and cultural ‘insertion’ of religious, besides being responsible for the maintenance and publications of a lively group of theologians.
In this social, ecclesial, and pastoral climate, the theology that sprang into life as liberation theology has also, in the last few years, taken on board the complexity of new soundings and of the emergence of new faces, voices, and subjects: feminists, blacks, economic, ecological, and ethical challenges. Theology has also widened its reach to include lay people, with people’s courses, and at the same time has found a forum for governmental institutional recognition, thereby gaining a broad base and a more objective platform in the academic world.
The last few decades have, then, produced a real ‘Brazilian ecclesiogenesis’, which is still proceeding and which can be a valuable contribution to the world’s churches. At the same time, it is facing a multiplicity of new situations that challenge pastoral action and theological reflection. The first of these is the globalization of problems and the world’s loss of bearings, as part of the global crisis of Planet Earth: the crisis of rationality and the neopaganism that have up to now affected mainly the First World; the crisis of insignificance, which has prolonged poverty and whose first victim has been Latin America; the crisis of cultural pluralism, which has affected colonial and post-colonial Africa; the crisis of religious pluralism, whose cradle was in Asia — all these have now become a complex and world-wide crisis under the impact of market-driven globalization, leaving everyone on the entire planet bereft of a sure and peaceful course. In Brazil, the intense growth of Pentecostalism, including the special case of Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and the ingenuity shown by religions in accepting New Age concepts, are [10] attempts — sometimes courageous ones, sometimes exasperated, sometimes ambiguous — to respond to this situation.
In ecclesial terms, nonetheless, the greatest challenges — even giving this word a positive sense — appear to come from the ever more prominent place occupied by women in the churches: with energy and application, they are ministering to the people, leading pastoral endeavours, facing up to conflicts arising from the traditional hierarchy of power. There is also the bubblingup of creative thought coming from Afro-Brazilians and the black movements, not to mention a challenge that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated: that of the relevance or otherwise of evangelization campaigns carried out through the more complex aspects of culture, especially formal education, university courses, and the communications media. Inevitably, a large part of the church’s resources is concentrated on education.
Finally, faced with a nation in which, under the cloak of freedom and globalization of the market, the state is reducing its own scope and reducing the public sector and social services, while at the same time carrying out privatizations that mean transnationalization, unemployment, an increase in poverty and in the informal sector of the economy, a growing incidence of corruption and violence at all levels, what is possible for a church when ethics, justice, and life for all become the imperatives deriving from the people themselves?
Brazil shares the problems, strengths, and hopes of the majority of Latin American countries and of those of most regions of the world. It is not unique. That is why the ‘news’ that follows may possibly prove to be a help in bringing peoples suffering their birth pangs closer together.
Concilium
English 
