Behind the Headlines a Major Breakthrough in Catholic-jewish Relations

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world. It covers nearly half of South America. Ninety percent of its nearly 132 million people are Roman Catholic, making Brazil the most populous Catholic country in the world.

The National Conference of Brazilian Catholic Bishops is among the most progressive and influential Catholic hierarchies — side by side with the American Catholic bishops. An estimated 12 Brazilian bishops are members of the Roman Curia, playing a key role in shaping Vatican policies.

In August 1984, I made my first visit to Brazil guided by my seasoned colleague, Jacobo Kovadloff of Buenos Aires, director of AJC’s South American Affairs office. I was then deeply impressed by how well organized the 160,000 Jews of Brazil were, especially in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. But I was frankly distressed over how insular Brazilian Jewry was.

In this overwhelmingly Catholic country in which the Brazilian hierarchy played such a potent political and social role, I found that only three or four rabbis had any ongoing contact with key Catholic officials — Rabbis Henry Sobel and Fritz Pinkuss in Sao Paulo, and Rabbi Roberto Graetz in Rio de Janeiro. A few prominent lay people, such as Israel Klabin and Adolfo Bloch in Rio, and Leon Feffer in Sao Paulo, also related to Catholic authorities on a social and cultural level.

COMPOUNDING A FAILURE

But few of the organized Jewish communal structures had any continuous, meaningful relationship with the powerful Brazilian hierarchy. That failure, in my judgement, was compounded by the fact that Brazil has a rapidly growing Arab population of some 5 million, and that Brazil is one of the largest arms merchants to Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iraq.

Last April, the PLO held a continent-wide rally in Sao Paulo and disgorged itself of a spate of vicious anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate literature and publicity, that we joined in having the Brazilian Ministry of Justice suppress.

With those realities in mind, I proposed to Sobel that on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, we seek to co-sponsor with the National Conference of Brazilian Catholic Bishops a Pan-American Conference on Catholic-Jewish Relations.

In an unprecedented act, the leadership of the Brazilian hierarchy, led by Dom Jose lvo Lorscheiter, its president, voted unanimously to co-sponsor a trans-continental Catholic-Jewish meeting with the Confederation of Brazilian Jewish communities, and the American Jewish Committee. (The Latin American Jewish Congress asked to join in the co-sponsorship and we readily agreed. Ten days before the meeting, it pulled out for reasons still not clear.) Sobel and Kovadloff served as coordinators of the conference.

On Sunday night, November 3, before a packed auditorium in the Hebraica Cultural and Sports Center in Sao Paulo a spectaculor event unfolded.

Six cardinals and five bishops were present — including the president of CELAM, the Latin American Conference of Catholic Bishops; the Brazilian Catholic hierarchy’s president; the Cardinal of Sao Paulo; the Cardinal of Rio de Janeiro; the Cardinal of El Salvador; the Archbishop of Brasialia; the Bishop of Porto Allegro; and the NCCB Bishop in charge of ecumenical relations. The Ambassadors of Israel and France also attended.

On a personal level, Sobel invited Cardinal Jean Marie Lustiger of Paris who delivered a moving address on “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem: From Despair to Hope.”

The Governor of the State of Sao Paulo, Dr. Andre Franco Montoro, delivered a warm message welcoming “the morch forward of tolerance” in Brazil. Messages from the President of Brazil, Jose Sarney, and from Pope John Paul II gave their support and encouragement to the conference’s purposes of “overcoming misunderstanding and promoting mutual respect.”

It was the first time in the 500-year history of Brazilian Jewry that such a public outpouring of respect, appreciation, and solidarity had come from such a galaxy of Catholic ecclesiastical and government authorities. A leading Sao Paulo Jewish industrialist, who had emigrated here from Rumania many years before, told me, “I never thought I would live to see the day when so many Catholic dignitaries would make love publicly to the Jewish people of Brazil.”

UNPRECEDENTED SERIES OF RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED

Two days of intensive discussions followed on the state of Catholic-Jewish relations first in Brazil, then throughout the whole of South America. Following the presentation of papers by Vatican, Catholic and Jewish scholars and activists from Latin America and the United States, a series of unprecedented resolutions were adopted by the joint study confernce:

*”Zionism Is Not Racism”: Dr. Oswaldo Aranha Filho, son of the former Foreign Minister of Brazil who presided as President of the UN General Assembly in 1947 at the birth of Israel, introduced a deeply-felt resolution condemning “the injustice” of the UN Zionism-racism declaration, asserting that “Zionism does not carry the stain of despotism or racism.”

*”Confronting the Holocaust”: The conference resolved “to pursue teaching about the Holocaust as part of Catholic catechetical instruction … to the end of understanding and preventing the pathology of hatred and persecution.”

*”Human Rights”: “We resolve to condemn each and every violation of fundamental human rights, whether in the Soviet Union where Jews and Catholics are constantly harassed, or in Iran where the Bahai minority is in danger of extinction, or in any part of the world where these rights may be threatened.”

*”Religious Freedom and Cultural Identity”: “Any form of proselytism, in the sense of gaining religious adhesion in exchange for worldly favors or benefits, shall be severely condemned as a violation of conscience and a disrespect for the human being.”

“Five Centuries of the Jewish Presence in the Americas”: “Let the leadership of the Catholic Church and of the Jewish communities, by way of their excellent means of communication — schools, universities, seminars, books, press, telecommunications — resolve to make known the history of the presence, accomplishments and destiny of the Jews in the Americas, in scientific terms, without the burden of prejudice which characterized historiography until the present day.”