Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Brazil, a mild-mannered Franciscan friar awaits a ruling from Rome over possible "theological errors" in his latest book, Church: Charism and Power, published in 1981. In the book, Theologian Leonardo Boff attacks the "monarchic and pyramidic" structure of the Catholic Church, which, he says, inevitably aligns the church with the rich. Father Boff wants the pyramid of power turned upside down, so that "the church would be, not for the poor, but by the poor...
...influence of liberation theology is strongest in Brazil, the world's largest and most populous (131 million) Roman Catholic country. Nonetheless, the debate over the propriety of that support continues to rage within the Brazilian hierarchy. Eugenio Cardinal de Araujo Sales, the conservative Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, charges that liberation theology "constitutes one of the gravest risks to the unity of the pastors and the faithful...
Sales was referring to the significance that some liberation theologians have bestowed upon "base communities," Latin America's most notable evangelizing innovation. Perhaps as many as 150,000 of these grass-roots Christian communities are scattered across Latin America, roughly half of them in Brazil. In the main, the base communities are a promising attempt to solve an endemic problem in Latin America, the chronic shortage of priests to instruct the majority of the impoverished but deeply religious masses of citizenry and see to their spiritual and social needs. (In Latin America, there is one priest for every...
...liberation theologians like Brazil's Boff, the base communities are also the true pillars of a church-to-be--as he puts it, the "church being born from the faith of the poor." Boff's views provide a theological underpinning for the so-called Church of the People, a grass-roots vision of Catholicism that sees the base communities as a separate source of spiritual inspiration for the faithful--an alternative, in other words, to the inspiration of Rome...
...discussion with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's watchdog Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Boff recalls the four-hour meeting as "cordial--Ratzinger mainly just sat and listened." The cordiality may have been influenced by the presence at the Vatican of two of Brazil's most influential Cardinals, Paulo Evaristo Arns, Archbishop of Sao Paulo, and Aloisio Lorscheider, Archbishop of Fortaleza, who accompanied Boff on his trip...