Pastor of the Poor

The plot seemed like something out of Becket. The conspirator's accomplice, a poor man, was to go to the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil and there seek out a certain troublesome archbishop. "That priest," the accomplice was told, "must be eliminated." As it happened, the 1968 scenario was never played out. The would-be assassin was too softhearted to go through with the murder. Instead, he went to his intended victim, confessed the plot and warned him that others might try.

A certain grace seems to touch the life of the diminutive (5 ft. 4 in.) Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Helder Pessoa Camara. Better known to the world simply as "Dom Helder," Brazil's famed voice of the poor and preacher of nonviolent revolution is a persistent nettle in the breeches of his country's military regime. At least eight of Dom Helder's associates have been arrested and tortured. He has been castigated as a "Fidel Castro in cassock" and disdainfully dubbed "the Red bishop." Lately he has been so judiciously ignored by Brazil's censored press that some educated people in Rio are surprised to learn that he is still alive.

Outside Brazil, though, his name is very much alive--and widely honored. He has several times been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1973 received a "People's Peace Prize" in Norway--$300,000 raised by European church and student groups, trade unions and political parties. Last week he was at Harvard University to accept an honorary degree as a doctor of laws.

Human World. It is on such trips abroad--three or four a year--that Dom Helder now pins many of his hopes, since in Brazil, he concedes, "we are crushed." At times he has used his foreign platforms for stinging denunciations of terror and torture in Brazil; more often he tries to prick the conscience of the First World for its complicity in the Third World's troubles. He had prepared a biting acceptance speech--not knowing there would be no time to deliver it--for the Harvard commencement. In it he assailed, among other things, "the greed of multinational corporations" and "the injustices of international trade politics [that keep] two-thirds of humanity in misery." Yet, characteristically, Dom Helder's undelivered speech ended on an optimistic theme: his contention that there are courageous minorities everywhere who want to "construct a world that is more breathable, more just, more human."

Dom Helder (the dom is an old Portuguese title of respect) was born 65 years ago in the northeastern Brazilian city of Fortaleza in the back room of a schoolhouse where his mother taught the primary grades. His father, an anticlerical journalist, chose the boy's name from a dictionary rather than the calendar of saints but did not keep his son from studying for the priesthood. Ordained at 22, Father Camara soon moved into religious education--and flirted briefly with the Brazilian version of fascism before moving to Rio in 1936.

Not until a few years after Dom Helder became an auxiliary bishop in 1952 did he turn his organizational talents to helping the poor, building apartments for slumdwellers, organizing a "Bank of Providence" to provide various social services as well as no-interest loans to the city's needy. So popular did Camara become that Brazil's President Juscelino Kubitschek offered to appoint him mayor of Rio. He declined.

Dom Helder was named Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in 1964, just before the leftist government of President Joao Goulart fell; since then, his hopes for social reform have been increasingly frustrated. His most ambitious project --a movement called Action, Justice, and Peace, which aimed at recruiting citizens in a revolutionary restructuring of society--scarcely got beyond the launching stage in 1968 when Brazil's regime clamped on harsh new dictatorial controls that made the movement impossible. These days Dom Helder has to settle for more modest projects. One of the latest, which he helped fund with some of his peace-prize money, is a model land-distribution program that has given a group of local sugar-cane farmers their own land to harvest.

Dom Helder remains resolutely nonviolent in his call for "revolution." He respects the angry fervor of men like Che Guevara or Camilo Torres, who were willing "to sacrifice their lives" in their struggle. But he has only disdain for "the facile violence of armchair guerrillas." His deepest scorn is reserved for those who provoke revolutionary action in the first place: "The small, privileged groups who maintain thousands of God's children in subhuman condition." This stand, not unlike Pope Paul's own, has helped ensure for the embattled bishop the Pope's warm support.

For all Dom Helder's fame, the people of his archdiocese revere him most as a compassionate pastor, and often greet his slight, blackcassocked figure with a bear-hugging Brazilian abrac,o. He abandoned his episcopal palace in 1968, and lives in two small rooms attached to a Recife parish church. The big official residence remains in use, though, both as Dom Helder's office and as a sort of Jacksonian White House, where crowds of visitors gather each day to seek advice or assistance.

Only a habit that dates back to the seminary gives Dom Helder any time to himself--two hours when the rest of Recife is asleep. Every morning he rises from his hammock at 2 a.m. to pray, meditate, write letters or poetry until 4. Then he slips back into the hammock before rising again at 5 for early Mass --and another day as pastor of the poor.

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