Pilgrimage of John Paul II to Brazil, 1991. Faith and Progress

Social
Brazil in the early 1990s was in a state of profound economic and social crisis. As late as 1985, the country was still ruled by a military dictatorship that had seized power 20 years earlier, including in response to attempts to implement the agrarian reform. The farm structure in Brazil was the axis of the bloody conflict. The degree of land concentration in the hands of the wealthiest owners there was among the highest in the world, with just a few per cent of farms occupying more than half of Brazil’s arable land. Much of this land was not cultivated, adding to the resentment of many agricultural workers who did not own land.

In 1985, the government committed itself to reform, but the transfer of land progressed very slowly. A movement of landless agricultural workers was then formed, which used the illegal occupation of the land of the great landowners as their primary tool of struggle. In the early 1990s, the movement ran about one hundred such campaigns a year. It was an effective measure. The occupation accelerated the expropriation of land, but it involved enormous risks. Landowners hired armed militias, the so-called pistoleiros, to defend their property. There were bloody clashes. Between 1985 and 2006, 1,443 people died as a result of this conflict.

The situation in the cities was no better than in the countryside. Favelas — Brazilian shanty towns — were inhabited by millions of people living in squalor. According to Vatican documents, in 1991, 40 per cent of Brazilian workers earned less than $70 a month. Inflation was rampant in the country. In 1990, its rate was close to 3,000 per cent, in 1991 — almost 500 per cent.
The government fought the crisis with neo-liberal methods, including deregulation, the abandonment of some state monopolies, and the privatisation of companies. As a result, inflation was finally brought under control, but some previously protected sectors of the Brazilian economy collapsed. In 1997, Brazil entered a currency crisis that significantly impeded the country’s development and forced the government to seek international assistance.

Religious
The majority of Brazilians are Catholics. In 1991, it was estimated that they made up about 75 per cent of the population. 50 years earlier, it was about 95 per cent of the population. At that time, people were leaving the Catholic Church mainly in favour of the Protestant faith and sects. John Paul II thought that it was due to the shortage of priests, but Brazilian Catholicism also had other problems. One of them was religious syncretism. Many Catholics there are more or less influenced by African beliefs. In its most extreme form, this syncretism exists as a separate religion, Candomblé.

A more critical issue for John Paul II — addressed directly during this pilgrimage — was the influence of liberation theology. This heterogeneous current in theology developed in the 1960s called Christians to social justice activism and linked theology to the ideologies of leftist movements. In its extreme form, liberation theology led to the participation of priests in revolutionary militias. Some of the theses propounded in this current — especially those related to the Marxist idea of class struggle — were officially declared false by the Church. However, liberation theology posed a threat, in the Pope’s opinion, especially to priests, even in its less extreme forms because strong social commitment often marginalised religious formation. John Paul II sought to address these dangers while stressing the great value of commitment to the poor.

Interior of the Candomblé Temple

The pilgrimage lasted 10 days, i.e., from 12 to 21 October, and covered ten cities, capitals of the Brazilian states: Natal, São Luís, Brasília, Goiânia, Cuiabá, Campo Grande, Florianópolis, Vitória, Maceió, and Salvador.
In Natal, he was welcomed by hundreds of thousands of people, chanting “João de Deus” (in Portugal: John of God) — a nickname known from a song composed in his honour on the occasion of his previous pilgrimage to Brazil in 1980. The Pope began his journey in the capital of the poorest region of Brazil, in one of the country’s most dangerous cities. He could see women in the front rows during mass, each with a headband on their foreheads. The names of sons, husbands, and fathers who died from bullets fired by people hired by the big landowners’ militias were written on the headbands. However, John Paul II came to Natal at the end of the Eucharistic Congress, so his homily that day was about the role of the Eucharist in the life of a Christian.

He took up the issue of agrarian reform two days later on 14 October in São Luís: “there is certainly still a long way to go before we can speak of a fair distribution of land in this country.” He explained that private property — itself being good — must serve a primary purpose, i.e., the livelihood of all people. “It ceases to be legitimate when it is not productive or when it serves to interfere with the work of others.” He, therefore, called for the acceleration of the reform that would transfer to the needy the wasteland belonging to the great latifundia. In so doing, he took an unequivocal stand on the issue that was an axis of division among Brazilians, including Brazilian Catholics.
At the same time, however, he unequivocally criticised the practice of unlawful seizure and occupation of other people’s land by the landless agricultural workers’ movement: “neither justice nor the common good authorises (...) the seizure of someone else’s property under any pretext.”

In subsequent speeches and homilies, the Holy Father recalled the social teaching of the Church, speaking, among other things, of the problem of migration and seasonal work, as well as of housing policy. This last issue resonated especially in the address to the favelados — the poor residents of the suburb of Vitória. There he recalled the particular care that Christians are obliged to give to the poor, in whom “Jesus wants to be loved above all.” Footage of the meeting circulated worldwide: it showed the Pope hugging a barefoot girl who had managed to get through to the Pope.

By coincidence, it has been possible to study very closely the effects of the Pope’s speeches precisely in the area of sexual morality. From September to December 1991, The Demographic and Health Surveys Program interviewed women about their fertility. This provided researchers with accurate data on Brazilians’ sexual beliefs and behaviour before, after and during the papal visit. As a result of the pilgrimage, the number of women declaring that they do not intend to use contraception increased by nearly 40 per cent. This and other changes in the consciousness of Brazilians increased the likely number of children 9 months after the pilgrimage by 27 per cent. However, the impact proved short-lived. The Pope persuaded people to move their plans to have a child to an earlier date rather than change the number of children Brazilian couples planned to have.

• “It is necessary to constantly educate Christians in the faith, particularly those who have a great and direct responsibility for building society. It is demanded by their nature, made up of soul and body because they have been called by the Father to take possession of the Kingdom of Heaven prepared for them (cf. Mt 25:34). Hence arises the concern to find the deeper meaning of this world, which is the Creator’s work. If the world is the work of God’s hands, (...), then it must be endowed with the divine meaning that all things inherently have. There is not, nor has there ever been, a contradiction between human knowledge and faith. Everything can and should lead to God from the most complex intellectual effort to the simplest manual activity.”

• “Something quite different from the kind of poverty that Christ called blessed is another poverty that affects many of our brothers and hinders their full personal development. Faced with such poverty, deprivation and a lack of essential material goods, the Church calls forcefully for universal solidarity to combat it. The Church is the promoter of a civilisation of love. They cannot remain silent when they see the symptoms of a civilisation of selfishness in the great things of the poor. This is why they believe that they must proclaim (...) that it is an injustice ‘that wealth flows into the hands of the few while the masses are impoverished’ and that it is scandalous to see lavishness and luxury coexisting with suffering caused by a lack of the most necessary goods.”

• “What I like about you is that you know how to be together and help other children without paying attention to their skin colour, place in society, or religion. You help each other. May adults wish to act as you do and abandon all discrimination! Only in this way would the world find peace. Do you want peace in the world? Do you want the world to live in peace? To be profoundly important, you need a family, parents living together, an atmosphere of love and peace. Children born and growing up outside the real family must be helped. But something must also be done to respect the right of every child to have parents who live together, loving siblings, a happy and agreeable home. If you want it, raise your right hand.”

The Centre for the Thought of John Paul II