Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When a Roman Catholic theologian is summoned to Rome, he is wise to come prepared with cogent arguments, a respectful mien and, when possible, influential friends. Franciscan Father Leonardo Boff, 45, arrived in the Eternal City from Brazil with all three, but especially with friends. A leading exponent of liberation theology, a movement that often combines Marxist concepts with calls for social justice, Boff was asked by the Vatican to reply to a notification that his teachings were "considered dangerous," particularly in their appeal for a less authoritarian church. For support, Boff brought along two important Brazilian Cardinals, Paulo Evaristo...
...Cardinal Ratzinger, met with Boff to explore the priest's views. At the four-hour interrogation, attended in part by Cardinals Arns and Lorscheider, Boff presented a 50-page reply to the charges against him. By all accounts the meeting was most amiable, and Boff will return to Brazil this week. In Rome a high-level committee will mull over his responses. The likely outcome: a statement that will announce no disciplinary action against Boff, but will criticize some of his ideas...
...author. All his life, Conrad Detrez, 48, has been inflamed by credos and causes. The Belgian youth became an ardent mystic and prepared for the monastic life at the Roman Catholic University of Louvain in the 1950s. A few years later he was a lay missionary in Brazil. There he was appalled by the misery of the masses he had come to inspire with the message of Christ. Soon he had become a follower of Marx and Che Guevara and a guerrilla fighting with the Communists. Eventually he was tried and convicted as a subversive and deported back to Europe...
Before he turned to this semiautobiographical novel, Detrez published two fragmentary accounts of his pious Catholic boyhood and a pamphlet defending guerrilla warfare titled For the Liberation of Brazil. Out of this unpromising welter of religious and political rhetoric there has emerged the wholly unsuspected, a writer of genuine promise...
...Catholic seminary in Louvain, however, Conrad is unsettled by the fierce theological disputes that follow in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1962. When a confused fellow seminarian from Brazil quits before ordination, Conrad follows him into the secular world and, ultimately, to Brazil. In Lydia Davis' evocative translation, the pages Detrez devotes to Rio de Janeiro's celebrated carnival constitute a showpiece of brilliant costumes, seductive rhythms and collective madness. On occasion, the prose becomes as overheated as the event: "Three million men and women ... shouted, drank, pinched one another, capered about and formed snakes...