35 years ago in U.S. Catholic: Dom Helder Camara: technician of Christian nuclear power

[rug]

By Michael Christopher

This article appeared in the September 1979 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 44, No. 9, pages 49-51).

It is a contemporary truism that we have no heroes and heroines. Like so much else in America today, this is an overstatement, but there is no doubt that we are suffering from the dearth of women and men to admire. There are certainly three, at least, who are deserving of this very special category: no one, I think, would quibble about Mother Teresa of Calcutta; Dorothy Day has lived long enough to make even conservatives forget that she has been a consistent radical; and Dom Helder Camara has managed to appeal to a wide spectrum of people, many of whom disagree with his liberal political beliefs but admire his courage and humanitarianism. There is probably less known about Dom Helder than of the other two, both because he is from Latin America, which Americans have shown a strange reluctance to learn much about, and because he has made fewer appearances in America than Mother Teresa.

For readers interested in knowing more about this rare kind of ecclesiastic, Dom Helder Camara: The Conversion of a Bishop by José de Broucker, a French journalist (Collins, $9.95), should prove interesting and helpful. The book is a series of questions and answers, based on 18 hours of in-depth interviewing in the bishop’s home in Recife, Brazil. It is ironic that although the bishop readily agrees to the interviews, he was so appalled by the resulting manuscript that for a time he denied de Broucker permission to publish—he regretted that he had “pronounced or implied so many judgments on so many people.” However, friends of Dom Helder who were also shown the manuscript prevailed upon him to be suppressed. De Broucker is obviously an admirer of Dom Helder, a relationship which is a mixed blessing. The bishop trusted him and reacted favorably to a sympathetic interviewer. Unfortunately, readers do not get as well-rounded a picture as they might have received from a Dan Rather or a Mike Wallace. In the end, however, the kindly approach may have proved more productive.

Dom Helder begins by describing his family and his childhood in Fortaleza, the capital of the state of Ceara in northeast Brazil. He was one of 13 children, five of whom “died very young in a croup epidemic.” His father was a bookkeeper for a trading company; his mother, a state schoolteacher. Since there were few schools, she taught the class in her home. Although the family did not suffer from poverty, there were no luxuries and from time to time there were privations.

Somewhat surprisingly, we learn that Dom Helder’s father, grandfather, and uncles were freemasons. He explains that they were “anti-clerical, rather than anti-religious or … anti-Christian. It wasn’t even that they were opposed to ‘true’ priests. It seems to me now, that they were reacting against certain individual priests.” His father not only did not object to Dom Helder’s desire to become a priest, which commenced when he was very young, but emphasized the awesome responsibility of a vocation to the priesthood. When the time came, he helped Dom Helder enter the seminary when the boy was 14, even though that meant financial sacrifices for the family.

http://www.uscatholic.org/articles/201408/35-years-ago-us-catholic-dom-helder-camara-technician-christian-nuclear-power-29274

[Leontius]

1. "When I give food to the poor they call me a saint, when I ask why the poor have no food

they call me a communist." I hope I got it right. He is a hero.

[rug]

2. That's it.

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

― Hélder Câmara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings