I. Introduction
In the first half of the 20th century, leaders of Protestant denominations in Brazil felt a continual need to defend their legitimacy as both Brazilian and Protestant. This period, which spanned Brazil’s first republic, the authoritarian period of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado novo, and the developmentalist era of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961), witnessed several regime changes and new national constitutions. Amid these political shifts, the Brazilian Catholic church sought to increase its cultural and symbolic dominance in the country. Brazilian Protestants, with their denominational roots less than one hundred years old and with ties to the USA associating them with foreign control, found themselves constantly making a case for the benefit and legitimacy of their presence in their nation.Footnote 1 In order to make this case, the Brazilian Protestants associated with the Confederação Evangélica do Brasil (CEB) used several rhetorical defensive strategies, which this article will elaborate. In certain instances, the CEB leadership expressed qualified appreciation for aspects of Brazilian Catholicism or viewed Catholics as partners in a common cause. They also publicized both the historical presence of Protestants in the nation and contemporary instances of public recognition of Brazilian Protestants. Finally, they highlighted and vehemently opposed Brazilian Catholic attempts to gain symbolic or social dominance in the country. This article also argues that because they found themselves constantly in conflict with Brazilian Catholicism, the Protestants associated with the CEB articulated an ecumenism that was broadly inclusive of other Protestants but excluded Catholics.Footnote 2
As the Portuguese began colonizing the coast of South America in the 16th century, Catholic priests, notably the Jesuits, began spreading their faith in Brazil.Footnote 3 Although French and Dutch Protestants had colonies in Brazil at different points in the 16th and 17th centuries, more permanent Protestant presence did not begin until the 19th century, during Brazil’s imperial period.Footnote 4 British Anglicans and German Lutherans arrived in the first few decades for economic and trade reasons, and Brazilian colporteurs of the American Bible Society and British and Foreign Bible society spread scriptures and tracts in the countryside areas. By the 1850s, mission-oriented Protestants began to arrive, intent on starting Brazilian churches. Scottish missionary doctor Robert Kalley and his English wife Sarah arrived in 1855 in Rio de Janeiro, where they established the first permanent Brazilian Protestant congregation, the Igreja Evangélica Fluminense.Footnote 5 Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist missionaries from the USA began to arrive between the 1850s and 1870s, with the first Brazilian Presbyterian, José Manoel da Conceição, being ordained in 1865. Permanent US Episcopal missions to Brazil began later, in the 1880s, and a Brazilian Episcopal bishop was not appointed until the ordination of Athalício Theodoro Pithan in 1940.Footnote 6
Brazilian Protestants faced certain limitations during the mid 19th century, including difficulties regarding recognition of their marriages or access to burial in public cemeteries. Prior to a marriage law passed in the early 1860s, Protestants could have the legality of their marriages contested by Catholic authorities, who considered marriages performed without a Catholic priest to be null.Footnote 7 Concluding his discussion of contested Protestant marriage, prohibition of non-Catholics serving as senators or deputies, and denial of access to public cemeteries in the major cities of Pernambuco, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, historian Pedro Feitoza argues that “becoming a Protestant in nineteenth-century Brazil entailed living on the margins of the juridical and political arrangements of the time.”Footnote 8
To create a united front to lobby for their interests and coordinate their activities, several Protestant leaders established the Confederação Evangélica do Brasil (CEB) in 1934, in which the Brazilian Methodists, Episcopalians, and two Presbyterian denominations were the principal Brazilian members.Footnote 9 The CEB was led by Brazilian Protestants, and its leaders engaged in Brazilian political and intellectual debates.Footnote 10 On the other hand, the organization and its programs received substantial funding from the US-based Committee for Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA), which coordinated several US denominational missions to the region, and the World’s Sunday School Association (later known as the World Council on Christian Education). Over the decades of its existence, the CEB connected Brazilian Protestants to developments in the wider Protestant ecumenical movement, participated in governmental campaigns in public health and literacy, promoted the formation of Sunday schools around the country, and generally lobbied for Protestant interests with public officials.
While the CEB represented several Brazilian Protestant denominations, Brazilian Baptists and two emerging pentecostal groups, the Assembleias de Deus and the Congregação Cristã do Brasil, were not a part of the CEB during this period. Regarding Baptists, historian Wanderley Pereira da Rosa argues that Landmarkism, or a belief that Baptist polity and doctrine were the true continuation of the New Testament church, made Baptists less interested in cooperating with other denominations.Footnote 11 During the 1930s to 1950s, CEB leaders gave little notice to pentecostal groups, since they were focused on developments within their own denominations and the happenings in the international Protestant ecumenical movement.Footnote 12 However, the CEB considered itself to represent all Brazilian Protestants, urging all evangelicals – from Methodists to Adventists to Baptists – to call themselves simply “evangelical” on national censuses to make Brazilian Protestantism appear as united as possible.Footnote 13 The CEB viewed Baptists and the Assemblies of God as within the broad tent of evangelicalism, praising their social work and publications and defending them in cases of vandalism or persecution.Footnote 14 Though based in Rio de Janeiro, the CEB strove to represent Protestants across the country by establishing delegations in various national regions.Footnote 15
The CEB’s leadership simultaneously celebrated their ties to the US and international groups and stridently defended their patriotism and concern for Brazilian social issues. In a setting where Catholics were gaining cultural strength through the efforts of Cardinal Sebastião Leme and expanding Catholic Action groups, a major part of Protestants’ defense was opposing Brazilian Catholicism. The CEB’s rhetorical strategies included showing limited appreciation or collaboration with Catholics in common cause, showcasing the historicity of Protestantism in Brazil, celebrating moments of public Protestant recognition, protesting persecution and anti-Protestant prejudice, and combating Catholic attempts to gain symbolic or political dominance.
By focusing on the rhetorical strategies of the CEB and the historic Brazilian Protestant denominations it represented, this article contributes to the growing literature on 20th-century Brazilian Protestantism.Footnote 16 Several historians have noted shifting Protestant/Catholic alignments in Brazil in the 20th century, with greater mutual hostility between the groups in the first half of the century giving way to some solidarity between progressive Catholics and Protestants after Vatican II and the military coup of 1964.Footnote 17 Erika Helgen has highlighted the first half of the 20th century in Brazil as the era of Catholic Restoration, when bishops and priests were “zealously defending Catholicism’s hegemony in the public sphere” to “protect both the political and spiritual integrity of the Brazilian nation.”Footnote 18 Though the first Brazilian constitution of 1891 had disestablished the Catholic church, the Catholic church achieved much public recognition and influence under Dom Sebastião Leme, who provided Getúlio Vargas with the moral support Vargas needed after taking the presidency in the 1930 revolution.Footnote 19 This article, with its discussion of how Brazilian Protestants claimed to be truly Brazilian and depicted Brazilian Catholics as grasping for cultural dominance, sheds further light on the debates over nationalism and religion that Helgen describes.Footnote 20 Pedro Feitoza has argued that early 20th-century Brazilian Protestants were not mere representatives of foreign interests or ideas, but closely engaged in intellectual debates and social concerns of their Brazilian contemporaries.Footnote 21 Wanderley Pereira da Rosa has noted how Brazilian Protestants were often more stridently anti-Catholic than their US missionary counterparts, though Leonildo Silveira Campos stresses the low views of Catholicism that US missionaries themselves had.Footnote 22 In this article, I bring out the nuances in the writings of the CEB leaders to illuminate these Brazilian ecumenists’ views on their Catholic context.Footnote 23
To gain a sense of the CEB’s views on Brazilian Catholicism, I relied on the writings produced by the CEB during the period in question. CEB’s periodical, Unum corpus, and its biannual reports called Relatórios, are key sources. Other sources included books, pamphlets, or letters written by CEB general secretaries or committee leaders and speeches presented at CEB-sponsored conferences. Taken together, these sources, though authored by different people at different points in time, provide a window into the ethos of the organization.
II. Qualified Appreciation for Brazilian Catholicism
As they made their case for Protestant legitimacy, one strategy used by the CEB leaders was expressing common cause with, or appreciation for, Brazilian Catholics. The CEB’s first general secretary, Epaminondas Melo do Amaral, spoke out against many Brazilian Protestants’ tendency to consider engaging in polemics against Catholicism as a form of evangelism.Footnote 24 Amaral believed a focus on polemics distracted Protestants from Brazil’s major problems, which he saw as “spiritualism [and] theosophy, which leave Christ on the margin,” as well as “cruel materialism, that is destroying our contemporary civilization.”Footnote 25 At a CEB conference in 1937, speaking on the subject of education, Josué Cardoso d’Affonseca offered appreciative comments about Catholic education in the Brazilian imperial period. He also argued that the ideal school teacher could be either Catholic or Protestant, provided the person was spiritually engaged and morally upright. He even went so far as to draw inspiration from Catholic intellectual and leader of Brazilian Catholic Action, Alceu Amoroso Lima, for his idea that “wisdom…gives unity to everything and puts man in contact with his eternal destiny and his obligations toward God…”Footnote 26 In 1958, CEB general secretary Presbyterian Rodolfo Anders sent condolences on behalf of the CEB to Cardinal Jaime de Barros Câmara upon the death of Pope Pius XII. Though Anders took care to avoid “mentioning the hierarchical titles of the Catholic Church,” Anders’s letter praised the pope as a “statesman and a man of culture, which he was.”Footnote 27
Regarding certain social issues, the CEB leadership acknowledged that Brazilian Catholics were sometimes aligned in fighting for the same causes. In the early 1930s, CEB leaders were concerned about morally questionable themes presented in movie theaters. After some initial tendencies toward boycotting movies entirely,Footnote 28 they arrived at the position of promoting film production that they considered wholesome or educational. In 1936, the CEB’s periodical Unum corpus praised the efforts of various Christian groups, including an unnamed organization of Brazilian Catholic women, to improve the moral quality of movies. The article concluded with a call to “make common cause with all of those who fight for the dignifying of this high and noble achievement of the century [the creation of cinema].”Footnote 29 In the 1940s, Eunice Gabbi de Souza Weaver, a member of the CEB’s social action commission who spent decades working against the spread of Hansen’s disease in Brazil, acknowledged several Catholic groups and individuals as pioneers in healthcare. For instance, her biography of the British nurse Florence Nightingale explained that Nightingale learned some of her methods from the Catholic Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. She also named the Sisters of Charity as precursors to the nursing profession that Nightingale inaugurated.Footnote 30 In her history of Hansen’s disease in Brazil, she pointed to “Padre Antônio Paschece da Silva” and a “Padre Bente” as important examples of “Christian Beneficence.”Footnote 31 In the 1950s, a Brazilian Catholic organization, the União Noelita Brasileira, promoted the establishment of a Brazilian Thanksgiving Day set on the last Thursday of November. CEB leaders encouraged Brazilian evangelicals to participate because the holiday was “of a Protestant origin and character” and so legitimately could be observed by evangelicals.Footnote 32 Although this article will later illustrate significant tension between CEB leaders and Brazilian Catholicism, CEB leaders were willing to concede that, on occasion, Brazilian Catholics and Protestants had similar social or moral agendas.
III. Highlighting Brazilian Protestantism, Past and Present
One way that the CEB defended the legitimacy of Protestant presence in Brazil was through raising awareness of Protestants in Brazilian history and of notable contemporary Brazilian Protestants. As historian Pedro Feitoza has described, many Brazilian Protestant intellectuals focused on two historical instances of Protestant presence in Brazil – the French outpost in Guanabara Bay in the 1550s and the Dutch colony in the northeast in the mid 1600s. The French history received special notice because several Huguenot settlers wrote a statement of faith and were martyred when the Portuguese, accompanied by Jesuits, expelled the fledgling colony.Footnote 33 The CEB leaders contributed to the promotion of these historical events by fostering the creation of institutes of “religious” or “spiritual” culture in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Florianópolis, with one intended for Recife as well, which helped disseminate the history of Protestantism in Brazil.Footnote 34 In November 1933, the Rio and São Paulo centers held events to commemorate the Protestant Reformation, with the Igreja Evangélica Alemã [German Evangelical Church] singing Reformation hymns at the events in the capital.Footnote 35 In the 1930s, Unum corpus advertised French historian Jean Crespin’s A tragédia de Guanabara, on the Huguenot martyrs, as well as a collection of the decrees passed by the Dutch Protestant synods in the Brazilian northeast in the 1600s.Footnote 36 In his manual for Protestant Sunday schools, the longtime CEB general secretary Rodolfo Anders located the origins of the Brazilian Sunday school in the French and Dutch catechetical classes of the two early modern colonies. Anders drew a line from these classes straight to the children’s classes of 19th-century Protestant missionary Sarah Kalley in Rio.Footnote 37 In the 1950s, as the four-hundred-year anniversary of the Huguenot settlement came around, the CEB leaders planned a special commemoration of the first Protestant sermon in Brazil, that of Huguenot Pierre Richier, on March 10, 1557, and urged evangelicals around the country to memorialize the day.Footnote 38 For these services, Henriqueta Rosa Fernandes Braga, historian and leader in the CEB’s commissions on religious culture and hymnary, provided a metrical version of Psalm five, used in 16th-century Huguenot worship.Footnote 39
In addition to arguing that Protestantism had historic early modern roots in Brazil, CEB leaders also argued that freedom of religious practice was intrinsic to Brazilian culture. In 1939, Unum corpus published the radio address of Presbyterian Mattathias Gomes dos Santos, entitled “Protestantism and the Jubilee of the Republic.” The speech focused on the religious liberty upheld by several well-known Brazilian jurists in the 1800s. Santos argued that this tradition persisted in 20th century Brazil, both in the 1930 revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to power and during Vargas’s Estado novo, which began in 1937. Gomes insisted that extending religious liberty and freedom of thought was not a foreign idea, but rather grew from Brazilian soil and Brazilian thinkers. In this favorable environment, evangelicalism could thrive in Brazil and accomplish many beneficial social projects, especially in “spiritual education.”Footnote 40 Rather than speaking directly against Catholicism, the speech focused on the de jure existence of religious liberty and the social benefits of Protestantism.
CEB leaders also celebrated and publicized occasions where Protestants received public recognition or roles parallel to those of Catholic leaders. For them, these moments were both signs of public acceptance and vindications of their beneficial work. For instance, in 1944, President Vargas bestowed the Order of the Cruzeiro do Sul on US Methodist missionary Hugh C. Tucker for Tucker’s assistance to Brazilian pioneers in healthcare, including Oswaldo Cruz, famous for his campaigns against malaria. In 1950, President Eurico Gaspar Dutra bestowed the National Order of Merit on the Methodist Eunice Weaver for her work as the president of the Federation of Societies for the Assistance of Lepers and Defense against Leprosy.Footnote 41 When a new constitution was written in 1946 after Vargas’s authoritarian Estado novo, the CEB celebrated the document’s openings for Protestants, such as increased ability to appoint evangelical chaplains in prisons and the military, and the opportunity to hold classes on Protestant religion in public schools.Footnote 42 The CEB also triumphantly observed that Brazilian Methodist Guaraci Silveira argued for liberty of conscience at the assembly, alongside fellow advocate Romeu de Campos Vergal (who happened to be a spiritist).Footnote 43 At the First National Conference on Immigration, held in Goiânia in May 1949, Afonso Romano Filho, head of the CEB’s Council on Interecclesial Relations, enthusiastically reported that Protestants were treated as peers alongside Catholics. At this conference, addressing increased European immigration after World War II, the conveners dedicated time to the role of religious groups in the refugee integration process. The CEB was an official conference participant, and the government sponsored Romano Filho’s travel to Goiânia. The conveners welcomed the work of the Roman Catholic church “to accompany and assist the immigrants” – and, Filho enthusiastically pointed out, “the same privileges [of assisting] were extended to the evangelical churches.”Footnote 44 In 1950, the CEB reported that their chaplain, Avelino Boamorte, serving in the São Paulo state penitentiary, received the same remuneration as the Catholic priest who worked there.Footnote 45 These instances of public recognition for Brazilian Protestants – whether prestigious medals, provisions in the national constitution, or remuneration equal to that extended to Catholic priests – were important encouragements for Brazilian Protestants of the CEB. These instances were signs that their work in building Brazilian Protestantism’s reputation was paying off.
IV. Seeking Equal Footing with Brazilian Catholics
The major area that Brazilian Protestants of the CEB sought equal footing with Brazilian Catholicism was in the realm of religious classes in public schools. During the early 20th century, the CEB tried to support various legislative efforts to allow public schools to offer classes on the Protestant faith for students of Protestant parents, rather than having Protestant students be required to attend classes on Catholicism. In 1937, Josué Cardoso d’Affonseca gave the report on “educational problems” at the CEB’s conference assessing the state of Brazilian evangelicalism. As mentioned previously, d’Affonseca spoke appreciatively about the Brazilian educational legislation from the imperial period, which recommended Catholic religious training in schools. However, he went on to transcribe article 153 from the recent 1934 Brazilian constitution, which he quoted as saying that “religious education will be optional and taught in accordance with the principles of the religious confession of the student, as indicated by the parents or guardians, and will be part of the curriculum in the schedule in the public primary, secondary, professional, and normal schools.”Footnote 46 D’Affonseca urged evangelicals to cooperate with the state in providing this religious education for Protestant students.
The opening for Protestant classes in public schools in the 1934 constitution inspired CEB activism in this area for the next two decades.Footnote 47 Enthusiastic that the constitution of 1946 also provided that public school religion classes match the faith of the students’ parents, the CEB urged parents to report their religion as “evangelical,” rather than using a denominational title such as “Methodist” or “Presbyterian.” This way, they argued, Protestants would have a united front in obtaining these classes for their children, since an unnamed “ultramontanist organization” wanted to block these classes.Footnote 48 The CEB created a Central Department for Religious Education in Public Schools to recruit teachers and create curriculum for the classes. Though the CEB envisioned a network of state or region-level departments to coordinate the classes, the CEB biannual reports up through 1958 only mentioned classes actually taking place in the Federal District and São Paulo. Nevertheless, the efforts were an important expression of evangelical unity, since “numerous times the Roman Catholic Church has sent forces to, here as in other places, divide us into ecclesial groups in order to, under denominational banners, hinder our work….our disunity would be their victory.”Footnote 49 The classes also provided an opportunity for students from nonevangelical families to receive Protestant education. In the case of the São Paulo classes in 1956, 704 of the 4,140 students in the classes were from nonevangelical families.Footnote 50 In the absence of these classes, CEB leaders argued that evangelical students would otherwise face a choice between attending “romanist classes” or being belittled by their peers.Footnote 51
When Protestants began to enjoy some of the public recognition they sought, CEB leaders could acknowledge Catholic leaders as peers in a cordial way. In 1954, the CEB produced a special issue of Unum corpus, highlighting the role of its chaplains. Juvenal Ernesto da Silva, one of the CEB’s most celebrated chaplains, served in the Brazilian army. Unum corpus noted that two priests attended his Easter service for the evangelical soldiers.Footnote 52 Another page celebrated the work of Methodist chaplain Messias Cesario dos Santos at the state penitentiary in the Federal District. A picture showed him receiving the Brazilian Prison Association’s diploma of gratitude from the hands of a priest, Monsenhor Motta. The caption read: “This photo shows this to the world: there can be divergences in ideas and conceptions, but, within a climate of respect and recognition.”Footnote 53
V. Protesting Brazilian Catholicism
While the CEB did express some appreciation for Brazilian Catholicism and celebrate Brazilian Protestantism’s public advances, much of the CEB discourse in defense of Protestantism took the form of direct opposition to Catholicism. These rhetorical measures included urging religious liberty against Catholic opposition, challenging instances of special governmental or public privilege for Catholics, insisting on redress for Catholic persecution, blaming Catholicism for national social ills, and defining an ecumenism that explicitly excluded the Catholic church.
In arguing for religious liberty, Brazilian ecumenists of the CEB insisted that Brazilian political tradition and culture intrinsically favored freedom of worship, thereby depicting their Catholic opponents as unpatriotic. These arguments peaked in the early 1940s, when some Catholic leaders urged that US missions to Latin America be stopped as a way of respecting the religious independence and Catholic heritage of the region. For instance, in 1942, Dom Antônio dos Santos Cabral, archbishop of Belo Horizonte, complained to the US ambassador Jeffrey Caffrey about the entrance of US Protestant missionaries, saying they were offensive to Brazilian Catholics. CEB president Synesio Lyra and general secretary Rodolfo Anders urgently wrote to Caffrey, opposing the archbishop’s statements and praising the work of US missionaries.Footnote 54
In the same year, two editorials from the CEB’s periodical Unum corpus entered the public debate about whether religious unity was necessary to national unity. The editors pointed out that current attempts to merge the Orthodox and Catholic churches of Ukraine were based on a “false concept of unity,” which prescribed religious homogeneity to support national cohesion. Rather, the examples of the nations of Britain and Switzerland attested that political unity was eminently possible under conditions of religious diversity.Footnote 55 The Unum corpus authors were frustrated that in the major morning newspapers, Brazilian writers had taken up the “false unity” concept, which they insisted was foreign to Brazil, “an exotic plant in the climate of liberty of the Americas.” Moreover, the editors protested that this idea totally ignored the existence of independent Brazilian Protestant groups. Such statements on religious unity were a “grave injustice against the National Evangelical Churches, with Brazilian national councils, directors, and bishops and presidents, registered in conformity with Brazilian law, as civil societies, that do not give any obedience to any foreign body.”Footnote 56
When the US ecumenical leader John Mackay, former Presbyterian missionary to Peru and president of Princeton Seminary, weighed in on this debate, CEB leaders reprinted his essay in Unum corpus in 1943. Though usually avoiding polemics with Catholics, Mackay felt compelled to speak against Catholic opposition to Protestant missionaries in Latin America. Mackay reported that the US periodical The Catholic Digest had insisted that “representatives of Protestant Christianity constitute the greatest single obstacle to perfect inter-American harmony.”Footnote 57 Mackay outlined multiple reasons why this was not true – that Latin American constitutions allowed for religious pluralism, that secularism among the elites required missionary presence, that the Catholic church could not produce enough priests to resist secularism and spiritualism, that missionary schools aided poor children, and that “great national Protestant churches would still remain” even if foreign missionaries left.Footnote 58
Aside from defending religious liberty, the CEB also spoke out when they observed what they considered to be inappropriately close ties between the Catholic church and the Brazilian government. In general during this period, CEB leaders spoke favorably of Brazilian presidents and governmental social initiatives (especially literacy and public health campaigns). However, this supportive orientation did not prevent them from protesting vehemently to political leaders when they perceived Catholic encroachments in public life. For instance, in 1946, CEB leaders wrote three letters – to the president, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, and the head of the constituent assembly – urging them to prevent the intended construction of a cathedral on public land along the coast in the capital. While the CEB conceded that the Catholic church could certainly build on private land, building it on public land meant that citizens’ tax money was going toward the construction. In trying to prevent Cardinal Jaime Câmara’s intended building project, the CEB hoped to “save the sacred principle of the Brazilian people, the separation between religions and the state.”Footnote 59
After the suicide of Getúlio Vargas in 1954, his vice president João Café Filho, of Presbyterian heritage, became president. The CEB leaders hoped for some connection with Café Filho on this basis, sending a delegation to present him with a Bible with a silver engraving and reminding him of the contributions and aspirations of Brazilian evangelicals. Around the same time, the CEB became aware of the Catholic clergy’s plans to dedicate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus during the upcoming eucharistic congress. The CEB leaders reported their success in persuading Café Filho and some other political leaders not to recognize this dedication.Footnote 60 When the prefect of Nova Friburgo, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, also dedicated his municipality to the Sacred Heart, the CEB mobilized some evangelical jurists to contest this move, considering it against the Brazilian constitution.Footnote 61 In the following year, 1956, the CEB sent a memorial to the new president, Juscelino Kubitschek, describing the ways that the Catholic Church attempted to overstep its bounds, trying to “enjoy privileges, involve public powers in their excesses and religious pronouncements” and generally “drain the public coffers.”Footnote 62 In these instances, the increasingly ambitious CEB tried to appeal to executive authorities to prompt them to prevent the Brazilian Catholic church from acting as though it represented the faith of all Brazilians.
The Brazilian Catholic church held several major eucharistic congresses in the 1900s, many of which received state support or funding.Footnote 63 In 1953, in response to one such congress in Belém, Pará, Unum corpus put out a “manifesto of Brazilian evangelicalism to the nation,” by the CEB president, the Methodist Antônio Baggio, and Rodolfo Anders. The manifesto was a scathing critique of the Brazilian Catholic church. First, the manifesto criticized the church for not using its position of power to address several national problems, such as vice, illiteracy, and declining morality. Baggio and Anders also accused the Catholic church of hypocrisy for allowing persecution in Colombia and Spain while calling for religious tolerance for Catholics in North America. In Brazil, though calling for spiritual unity, the church “defended the politics of religious discrimination in the immigration plan of the country.”Footnote 64 They argued that the church twisted the good social work of the Brazilian evangelicals, falsely associating their work in literacy and education with communism.Footnote 65 Instead, the manifesto insisted, there were many more communists in Catholic ranks than in Protestant ones. The Brazilian Catholic church was also a danger to political stability, as priests were allowing civil disorder to emerge out of persecution of Protestants in several rural areas. Baggio and Anders even argued that one São Paulo bishop had declared that the Catholic faithful could revolt if the state passed legislation allowing divorce.Footnote 66 In response to the failures of Catholicism, the manifesto favorably presented the benefits of Protestantism for the nation. Though signed by Baggio and Anders, the manifesto was the fruit of a collaborative effort of several Protestant denominations, including representatives from the Baptists and Assemblies of God (who were not CEB members). The CEB sent it to the president and published it in two major newspapers.Footnote 67 Anders also protested the attempts of the archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro to secure a piece of land on Corcovado, near the Christ the Redeemer statue. Anders considered this action to be a donation of land to a foreign power – the Vatican – a piece of land that should belong to Brazil, given the patriotic nature of the area as part of the capital city and a major tourist site. Anders feared that the archdiocese would use the property as a means of charging fees to those who would visit the site, and this money would then go to “the coffers of Rome.”Footnote 68
Protestant leaders also registered their complaints when Catholics were honored in public ceremonies that, in their view, offended their idea of a separation between church and state. When President Juscelino Kubitschek inaugurated the new capital in Brasília in 1960, CEB president Euclides Deslandes, an Episcopalian, wrote to him, complaining that the Catholic hierarchy was honored while evangelicals were ignored. The new archbishop of Brasília was installed at the official governmental ceremonies, which, Deslandes insisted, contradicted the “separation between ecclesiastical and secular powers” in the Brazilian constitution. Meanwhile, evangelicals, who had “collaborated with the government of your Excellency…in the economic, cultural and moral redemption of our country,” were left out.Footnote 69
In all of these instances, CEB leaders urged Brazilian political leaders to oppose attempts to make Catholicism appear as the official or dominant religion of Brazil. When the archbishop argued that US Protestant missionaries were offensive to Brazilian Catholics, the CEB Protestants insisted that they too were Brazilians – and ones who appreciated this missionary presence. When Catholic leaders planned to use public land to construct a cathedral or to dedicate the country to the Sacred Heart, CEB leaders protested that such actions were inappropriate because Catholicism was not the religion of all Brazilians. The CEB leaders argued that religious liberty, which Catholics sought for themselves elsewhere, was not being extended to them in their home country. So, they protested.
VI. Protesting Protestant Persecution
Aside from taking issue with these instances of Catholic predominance, the CEB publicized instances of prejudice against Protestants and vandalism. When the CEB heard reports of attacks on church buildings, for instance, the leaders would write to the state authorities for redress. In the 1930s, the CEB wrote to President Vargas, asking for guarantees of religious liberty in light of vandalism and persecutions in the interior of Paraíba, though without receiving a reply.Footnote 70 When the CEB appealed to the federal minister of justice regarding the burning down of an Assemblies of God church in Manaus in 1951, the CEB succeeded in persuading the minister to send a message to the Amazonas state governor, asking for freedom of worship.Footnote 71 In 1954, Anders reported that, “in spite of the Constitution that rules us and that shows the liberal spirit of the Brazilian people, religious intolerance has provoked persecutions” in São Francisco do Glória (Minas Gerais), Astorga (Paraná) and Parintins (Amazonas). Aside from publicizing vandalism or harassment, Unum corpus also carried the story of the setbacks faced by an evangelical interdenominational Sunday radio program, “Voz Evangélica,” which featured non-polemical preaching by João Augusto do Amaral. In 1952, the program lost its spot on two different broadcasting stations, one after the other. The Unum corpus editor argued that the difficulties faced by “Voz Evangélica” were due to the “always strong and enslaving hand of the Roman clergy,” exerted on the radio broadcasters.Footnote 72
VII. Effects on Brazilian Protestant Ecumenism
Because they so often took this defensive position toward Brazilian Catholics, the vision of ecumenism and Christian cooperation articulated by the CEB, at least in this period, explicitly omitted the Catholic church. Rodolfo Anders’s editorials of the 1950s defined his view of ecumenism as “the cultivation of relations within worldwide evangelicalism.”Footnote 73 The Roman Catholic church had excluded itself from this project, Anders argued, because it was “apostate from the faith.” Anders explained that the CEB affiliated with the International Missionary Council (IMC) and the World Council on Christian Education as a way of maintaining ties with global evangelicalism, in a form of “spiritual” rather than “organic” unity.Footnote 74
In 1952, Anders continued to put distance between his own view of ecumenism and any idea of “absolute organic unity” among the churches or “ecumenical relations” with the Catholic church. At the Third Latin American Conference of Evangelical Youth, he insisted that “ecumenism is more a relation between good neighbors rather than good internal relations within a household.”Footnote 75 The Catholic church could not be a partner because of its “opposition to religious liberty,” which is “completely contrary to the spirit of the gospel.”Footnote 76 Every time the Catholic church got political power in Latin America, Anders insisted, it clamped down on freedom of worship and allowed persecution of Protestants. Simply because Catholic leaders were not aggressive in places where they were in the minority, as in North America, did not mean that they would be tolerant if they had the upper hand. As evidence, Anders noted The State and the Church (1922), by Jesuit John A. Ryan, which held that Protestants were in “error,” and that “error does not have the right of liberty.”Footnote 77
Anders represented his views of Catholicism not only in Brazil, but also when he spoke at gatherings of international Protestants. At the IMC’s meeting in Willingen, Germany, in 1952, Anders brought the summary report of the Latin American study group to the main session. He argued that Latin America, rather than being “the greatest Catholic region of the world, is really a religious orphan, because, for its population of 152 million inhabitants, there are only 35 thousand Catholic priests.” The resulting abundance of untended souls in the region had led to “ignorance, fanaticism and poverty of character.” Catholic persecution filled the region, with Protestant church burnings in Brazil and persecution in Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, and Peru. The region’s poverty, illiteracy, and concentration of land in the hands of a few had made the region ripe for communist propaganda. In the face of this situation, evangelicals were called to be a “panacea” for communism on the one hand and “clerical fanaticism” on the other.Footnote 78
As Anders intimated at Willingen, associating Catholicism with a constellation of social ills was another rhetorical strategy in these polemics. For instance, at the first conference of the CEB’s Sector on the Social Responsibility of the Church, held in 1955, delegates discussed the proper way for evangelicals to participate in politics. They wanted to oppose communism while acknowledging the legitimate reasons why people were attracted to this ideology. Poverty, they believed, created fertile ground for communist teachings, and crushing poverty, they felt, was a particular characteristic of historically Catholic nations.Footnote 79 The document closed with a call for evangelicals to try to get government funding for evangelical projects to improve life in the rural areas, since the government had already given funding to the Catholic church, even though that church “does not appear to have offered a prior plan of action in this sector.”Footnote 80
Anders’s statements against fellowship with Catholics fall within the papacy of Pius XII, noted for its resistance toward ecumenical association with Protestants. As historian Udi Greenberg has argued, though certain Catholic theologians like Yves Congar, John Courtenay Murray, and Jacques Maritain showed openness to Protestants, the Vatican under Pope Pius XII (r. 1939–1958) and Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani was characterized by suppression of both ecumenism and religious liberty.Footnote 81 As the statements of CEB leaders during this period illustrate, some Brazilian Protestants were just as opposed to a broad ecumenism, which included Catholics and Protestants, as was the papacy of their day.
VIII. Conclusion
In the first half of the 20th century, the Brazilian Protestants associated with the CEB often felt like a minority contested on all sides. They believed that Brazilian Catholics were trying to get the upper hand in public life and that, given any opportunity, they would force Protestants out – barring the entrance of Protestant missionaries, requiring evangelical students to take part in Catholic religion classes, and controlling the realms of healthcare, primary education, and social services. Although, as Erika Helgen has noted, the forces of the Catholic Restoration were muted after the end of Vargas’s Estado novo, Catholic anti-Protestant activity remained alive and well in the subsequent decades.Footnote 82 In response, the leaders of the CEB invested their energies in showcasing the benefits of Protestantism, insisting on the patriotism of Brazilian Protestants, celebrating Protestants who stood out as public figures, and protesting instances of persecution and Catholic attempts to gain public privileges.
In this era of polemic and defense, the ecumenical vision promoted by the CEB was broadly evangelical, attempting to embrace all Brazilian Protestants for a united front. At the same time, the CEB’s vision explicitly excluded Catholics. This exclusion was not total or complete, as seen in the instances of limited collaboration, appreciation, or in moments when Protestants felt they were approximating equal footing with their Catholic counterparts. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the international Protestant ecumenical movement and the Catholic church began to be more open to each other, Brazil entered a period of intense political turmoil during the presidency of left-leaning João Goulart, the coup of 1964, and the subsequent repressive military dictatorship.Footnote 83 The period of the dictatorship, from 1964 to the 1980s, witnessed some of what Todd Hartch calls “ecumenism of the trenches,” as progressive Catholics and Protestants supported each other in their opposition to the dictatorship, as well as what Benjamin Cowan calls “antiecumenist ecumenism,” in which conservative Protestants banded together to oppose theologically or politically progressive forms of ecumenism.Footnote 84 Rather than focusing on the bounds of ecumenism, however, much of the CEB’s energies in the early 1960s were devoted to a debate on whether or not evangelicals should align themselves with Brazilian revolutionary movements, a conflict which eventually fractured the organization.Footnote 85 During the 1930s–1950s, the Brazilian Protestant leaders of the CEB most often took a polemical, defensive stance toward their Catholic peers.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Profs. Marcone Bezerra Carvalho, Filipe Maia, Alderi Souza de Matos, and numerous faculty and staff members at SPS and FaTeo (including Flávia Serra de Souza Cardia and Profs. Helmut Renders and Margarida Fátima Souza Ribeiro) for help in archival access. I am also grateful for a generous research grant from the Presbyterian Historical Society (Philadelphia, PA, USA).
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