Moral Majorities across the Americas

Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right

Benjamin A. Cowan

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469662084
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This new history of the Christian right does not stop at national or religious boundaries. Benjamin A. Cowan chronicles the advent of a hemispheric religious movement whose current power and influence make headlines and generate no small amount of shock in Brazil and the United States. These two countries, Cowan argues, played host to the principal activists and institutions who collaboratively fashioned the ascendant religious conservatism of the late twentieth century. Cowan not only unearths the deep historical connections between Brazilian and U.S. religious conservatives but also proves just how essential Brazilian thinkers, activists, and institutions were to engendering right-wing political power in the Americas. Cowan shows that both Protestant and Catholic religious warriors began to commune in the 1930s around a passionate aversion to mainstream ecumenicalism and moderate political ideas. Brazilian intellectuals, politicians, religious leaders, and captains of industry worked with partners at home and in the United States to build a united right. Together, activists engaged in a series of reactionary theological discussions. Their transnational, transdenominational platform fostered a sense of common cause and allowed them to develop a series of strategies that pushed once marginal ideas to the center of public discourse, reshaped religious demographics, and effected a rightward shift in politics across two continents.

CHAPTER ONE

The Beauty of Inequality

Brazilian Activism, Catholic Traditionalism, and the Makings of Modern Conservatism

In September 1964, with the third session of Vatican II in full swing, Dom José Maurício da Rocha, bishop of Bragança Paulista and a noted conservative, lashed out at certain tendencies in the deliberations. “The devil,” Rocha darkly affirmed, “has exerted himself so that the council may have the least success,” creating a “fever of novelties regarding the liturgy.” Rocha was incensed by the way that even “the celebration of the Sacred Sacrifice of the Mass has been violently attacked, with [the proposal of] one half in Latin and the other half in the vernacular.… The intention is to weaken the Church, plunging it into an even greater confusion than that in which it currently finds itself.” The bishop reserved exceptional ire for those who would do away with the accoutrements of “priestly vestment” and especially the cassock (batina).¹ Rocha’s complaints did not go unheard—for starters, they made him the butt of gentle ribbing by his fellow Brazilian Church fathers in an informal newsletter circulated in Rome. O Conciliábulo, generated by progressive-leaning Brazilian attendees, mocked Rocha’s dedication to the old ways, reprinting an article about him entitled “Bishop Defends Latin and the Cassock.” To the original title, the satirists of O Conciliábulo added “STILL!” so that the headline about Rocha read, “Bishop (STILL!) Defends Latin and the Cassock.”²

Fellow Church fathers, however, were not the only party interested in the pronouncements and activities of conservatives like Rocha—and the bishop’s supporters proved both more temporally powerful and longer-lived than the editorial committee of O Conciliábulo. As we shall see, support for the cassock, and for traditionalism, resided at the heart of the Brazilian state; moreover, Rocha’s defense of these accoutrements of traditional priesthood represented the critical activism of a core group of Brazilians working at and after Vatican II to stem the tide of reform. In part for this reason, Rocha himself is still remembered as a hero by ultramontane Catholics. In 2014, the far-right group Fratres in Unum lauded him as “one of the most influential bishops.… Monarchist, fiercely antimodernist, anticommunist and antiliberal, gifted with a privileged intelligence, enormous culture and exemplary piety, he wrote innumerable articles and pastoral letters, in which he revealed his love for the Church and his worries about defending the faith and its customs.”³

This assessment overestimates Rocha’s prominence; but Fratres in Unum’s encomium is more significant for what it reveals about the bishop’s importance to reactionaries. Even as a conservative, his legacy at Vatican II pales in comparison to that of his brethren from Diamantina, Minas Gerais, and Campos, Rio de Janeiro: Dom Geraldo Proença Sigaud and Dom Antônio de Castro Mayer, respectively.⁴ And Rocha was certainly nowhere near as “influential” as his progressista compatriots who famously helped to coordinate reforms, among them Dom Hélder Câmara. These relative progressives have dominated headlines and scholarship as well as historical memory since the council; Rocha and a handful of other conservatives, including Sigaud and Mayer, have long since been forgotten. Herein lies a fascinating tension: much has been written about Brazil as a source of ecumenist, justice-oriented reform within the Church; yet behind the scenes, in ways that would affect Catholicism and Christian conservatism for decades to come, a cohort of Brazilian Catholic traditionalists also organized and worked to influence the council and the Church. Though often shrouded in obscurity, Brazilians’ centrality to this work sometimes entered the spotlight—as when Mayer presided alongside Marcel Lefebvre⁵ over the renegade consecration of bishops at Ecône in 1988; or when, perhaps more indicatively, Mayer and Lefebvre, together in Brazil, issued their controversial 1983 attack on the “false notions” encouraged by Vatican II. In an open letter to the pontiff, promulgated from Rio de Janeiro, the two identified themselves as leaders of a global cohort now seeking to publicize their frustrated traditionalism because “the measures we have undertaken in private during the last fifteen years have remained ineffectual.” Together they identified the “origin of this tragic situation” in certain “errors” that would become the bedrock of traditionalist outrage: ecumenism, the decline of supernaturalism, and the promotion of various democratic attenuations of hierarchy.⁶

In these moments, Mayer’s centrality to the most famous of traditionalist ruptures emerged dramatically; that centrality, however, derived from a cohort of traditionalist Catholics in Brazil who had conspired across decades, even before Vatican II, to set a course for the mutiny at Ecône. Alongside other Brazilian clerics—most notably Sigaud—and organizations (especially TFP, or the Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, founded in 1960 by lay activist Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira),⁷ Mayer played a major, in some sense pioneering, role in the national and transnational politics of Catholic traditionalism, in particular during and after the council. Yet Mayer, Sigaud, and even the rather sensational TFP are often marginalized in broader historiography of the global rise of Catholic reaction and archconservatism.⁸ On the one hand, partisans of Catholic traditionalism have always acknowledged the Brazilians’ role and even pointed out the ways in which this marginalization dates back across the decades.⁹ Academic accounts, on the other, seem to have largely ignored these Brazilian actors.¹⁰ In this chapter I seek to write these actors into that broader historiography, highlighting their activism at Vatican II as part of the construction and evolution of transnational Catholic traditionalism.

Mayer, Sigaud, and Oliveira began collaborating in the 1930s, paving the way toward their vigorous, and vital, archconservative Catholic activism at Vatican II. In 1960, the bishops and Oliveira crowned their longtime cooperative relationship by publishing Reforma agrária: Questão de consciência, an anticommunist battle cry for Catholic renewal and against wealth redistribution. The book’s preface declared its “position radically against the neopagan avalanche of socialism … undermining our Luso-Christian spiritual patrimony.”¹¹ Such polemical crusading by Sigaud, Mayer, Oliveira, and TFP reverberated in midcentury Brazil. They made headlines as representatives of social and political conservatism based in Catholic traditionalism and gained political influence with the military regime and among security forces.¹² Yet their activities also had significant repercussions internationally; they helped to shape and sustain global Catholic and Christian reaction to modernization and secularization.¹³ In this chapter, I focus on Mayer, Sigaud, and TFP as important leaders in a constellation of protagonists who, at the crossroads of the Second Vatican Council and in its aftermath, sought to set the agenda of international Catholic traditionalism and eventually of Christian conservatism. By no means did the Brazilians treated here single-handedly generate present-day Catholic traditionalism; but they did play a signal, historiographically undervalued role in its genesis. The bishops (especially Sigaud) and TFP organized against changes they feared would come out of Vatican II, even before the council itself unfolded. The council, as is well known, developed into a watershed, a focal point for diverse currents in the Church, revealing the complex, variegated, and often interrelated factions even within the episcopate (none of which, it bears mentioning, truly sought the wholesale secularization feared by traditionalists). In the months and years that followed, through tumultuous Church politics and their own changing relationships (including Sigaud’s break with TFP, as well as Mayer’s increasing distance from the Vatican), these leading Brazilian reactionaries would continue to agree on a basic set of issues. TFP and the bishops drew on a tradition of prominent Brazilian engagement with Catholic reaction in the first half of the twentieth century, exemplified by traditionalist heroes like Dom Sebastião Leme, Salgado, and Rocha; and based in that history, Brazilians at Vatican II and afterward worked as part of a transnational group of conservative Catholics constructing a common platform of grievances. This platform eventually came to define Catholic and—more broadly—Christian archconservatism. The key grievances included anticommunism; a strident, detailed moralism; antiecumenism; defense of hierarchy per se; antistatist dedication to private property and free enterprise; and vociferous defense of the primacy of the supernatural in a world perceived to be increasingly secularized.

This last element formed a critical node around which Brazilian Catholic reactionaries and their allies coalesced. Like the other themes just mentioned, the loss of enchantment and mystery, of the presence of the supernatural in everyday life, greatly disturbed those who saw themselves as the baluartes (bastions) of Catholic traditionalism. At Vatican II and thereafter, TFP leaders joined Sigaud and Mayer in agitating for mystery and magisterium; indeed, the Brazilians were in some ways the prime (and heretofore unrecognized) impetus behind organized conservative resistance at Vatican II. After the council, they carried on with this work and sought to cooperate in this cause across both national and denominational borders. They persisted, at least in part, thanks to the friendliness that Brazil’s dictatorial government (1964–85) displayed toward their endeavors; and though their efforts have gone largely unsung by scholars, they are remembered and lionized by generations of traditionalists within and outside Brazil. In this chapter I seek to address several aspects of this story: Brazilian conservatives’ orchestration of a reaction at Vatican II and the focus of that reaction around the fundamental issues of magisterium, the supernatural, hierarchy, and nostalgia for an imagined medieval past in which those values reigned unquestioned; the critical place of moralistic antimodernism in that reaction; the Brazilian military regime’s productive affinity for Sigaud, Mayer, TFP, and the issues they championed; and the notoriety and admiration these actors gained in Brazil and beyond.

I. “Congratulations, Excellency, Congratulations”: Sigaud, Mayer, the TFP, and Organizing Conservative Reaction at Vatican II

An inveterate opponent of religious freedom, Dom Geraldo Proença Sigaud prepared, in September 1965, to speak out against De Libertate Religiosa, the schema on religious liberty proposed by reformers at Vatican II. At the heart of his objections lay a concept he feared and hated: creeping, un-Christian modernity—a “modern man” who would signal the death of the traditional Church. Sigaud thus criticized the schema for accommodating an errant “modern sense of human dignity,” too ecumenical and secular to reflect the Church’s sacrosanct mission. Fascinatingly, Sigaud suggested that such near-godless modernity inhered exclusively in what we might now call the Global North, eschewing the Global South. “This sense” of human dignity, he argued, “this ‘modern’ man of which the document speaks is a North American, Central European phenomenon,” absent in “Iberia, in Italy, in Latin America.”¹⁴ While, as we shall see, Sigaud only rarely owned his leadership of conservative Catholicism, he here seemed to locate the pulsing heart of traditionalism and resistance to change in the ancient and populational centers of Catholicism—southern Europe, Latin America. This was not a claim to superiority or exclusivity; but it did reflect Sigaud’s sense of himself and his cohort of Portuguese, Brazilian, and Italian allies as a mainstay of the effort to defeat liberalizing measures at Vatican II.

The council’s historic proportions were of course evident even as it took place and generated much maneuvering and speculating among participants and observers, all interested in the outcomes of this high-stakes meeting. The most conservative Church fathers, alarmed by the reformist plans of a developing majority, eventually gathered in an umbrella group calling itself Coetus Internationalis Patrum (International Group of Fathers).¹⁵ This rather loose and shadowy coalition had one clear and distinguishing feature: Sigaud was its leader and the person who did the most work to further its cause, in some sense living up to his contention that “homo modernus” had not yet invaded Latin America. In this work Sigaud was supported by close cooperation not only with Lefebvre but—more significantly—with Sigaud’s compatriots: Brazilian TFP activists and Dom Antônio de Castro Mayer. Together, they launched a well-organized attack on Catholic progressivism and change within the Church—one that belies contentions that conservatives lacked mobilization and organization.¹⁶ Among other issues, this attack centered on the anxieties mentioned earlier regar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: It Has Become Attractive to Be Rightist and Conservative
• Chapter One: The Beauty of Inequality: Brazilian Activism, Catholic Traditionalism, and the Makings of Modern Conservatism
• Chapter Two: Guardians of Morality and of Good Behavior: Morality, Dictatorship, and the Emergence of Conservative Evangelical Politics in Brazil
• Chapter Three: Paths Taken, Paths Repressed: Dictatorship, Protestant Progressives, and the Rightward Destinies of Brazilian Evangelicalism
• Chapter Four: Preach the World, Reach the World: Authoritarian Brazil and the Organization(s) of a Transnational Right
• Chapter Five: Uniting the Right: Staples of the Transnational Right-Wing Consensus and the Platforms of Contemporary Conservatism
• Notes
• Index