PopeWatch: Commies Have to Stick Together

April 7, 2015, Corrispondenza Romana, the website of the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei, asked the question: “Who was Dom Helder Camara, really?” And it answered in a not very hagiographic way with a documented investigation. Here are a few of the more enlightening excerpts: There has been a lot of talk these days about Dom Helder Camara, whose process for beatification was recently approved by the Vatican.  For the average Italian, the figure of Helder Pessoa Camara (1909-1999), Auxiliary Bishop of Rio de Janiero and then Metropolitan Archbishop of Olinda e Recife, is practically unknown. Who was Dom Helder? Propaganda bordering on the  ridiculous The only information about Abp. Camara that has filtered into the local press comes from such biased propaganda factories that I do not hesitate to describe them as bordering on the ridiculous. For example, I remember very well the reaction of the press at the time of Dom Helder’s death in August 1999. The Italian media vied with each other in eulogizing him, conferring on him grandiose titles like “Prophet of the poor”, Saint of the favelas”, “voice of the Third World”, “Saint Helder of America”, and so on.  It was a sort of canonization by mass-media. This same propaganda machine seems to have been reactivated with the opening of the beatification process, authorized by the Vatican on February 25 of this year.   Some information  on this subject will do no harm (…) From JUC to PC.  Brazilian Catholic Action In 1947, Father Camara was appointed Assistant General of Brazilian Catholic Action, which,  under his direction, began to slide towards the  left, in some cases to the point of embracing Marxism-Leninism.  This drift was evident especially in the JUC (Juventude Universitária Catòlica), to which Camara was particularly close.  Luiz Alberto Gomes de Souza, former secretary of the JUC, writes: “The activity of the militants in the JUC… led to a commitment which gradually proved to be socialist.” The Communist Revolution in Cuba (in 1959) was welcomed enthusiastically by the JUC. According to Haroldo Lima and Aldo Arantes, JUC directors, “the renewal of the people’s struggle and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 suggested to the JUC the idea of a Brazilian revolution.” The leftward drift was facilitated by the involvement of the JUC with the UNE (União Nacional de Estudantes) which was close to the Communist Party. “As a result of its militancy in the student movement,” Lima and Arantes continue, “the JUC was driven to define a wider political agenda for the Christians of today. At its Congress in 1960 it ended up approving a document… in which it proclaimed its adherence to democratic socialism and to the idea of a Brazilian revolution.” During the leftist government of President João Goulart (1961-1964) a radical faction formed within the JUC, initially called O Grupão (The Great Group), which later was transformed into Ação Popular (AP) which in 1962 ended up declaring itself Socialist.  At the 1963 Congress, the AP approved its own Statutes, in which “socialism was adopted and the socialization of the means of production was proposed.”  The Statutes contained, among other things, praise for the Soviet Revolution and an acknowledgment of “the decisive importance  of Marxism in revolutionary theory and praxis.” This drif, however, did not stop there. At the 1968 National Congress, Ação Popular, declared itself Marxist-Leninist, changing its name to Ação Popular Marxista-Leninista (APML).  And since nothing remained to separate it from the Communist Party, in 1972 it disbanded and joined the Communist Party of Brazil. Throughout this evolution, many militants of Catholic Action ended up participating in the armed struggle during the years of leftist terrorism in Brazil. Contrary to the advice of many Brazilian bishops, Abp. Helder Camara was one of the most enthusiastic and staunch defenders of the drift to the left within the JUC. Against Paul VI and other eccentricities  In 1968, when Pope Paul VI published the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, Abp. Helder Camara openly sided against the Pontiff, describing his teaching on contraceptives as “an error destined to torture wives and to disturb the peace of many homes.” In a poem that truly caused a scandal, the Archbishop of Olinda e Recife also satirized the women “victims” of the Church’s teaching who, according to him, were forced to give birth to “little monsters”: “… you must procreate! Even if your child is born without intestines, with rickety limbs, an enormous head, hideously ugly!” Helder Camara also defended divorce, approving the position of the Orthodox Churches, which “do not rule out the possibility of a second religious marriage for those who were abandoned (by their spouse).” Questioned as to whether this would prove the secularists right, he replied: “What difference does it make who claims the victory, as long as you are right?” The boisterous Archbishop also publicly demanded the ordination of women as priests.  Addressing a group of bishops during Vatican Council II, he insistently asked them: “Tell me, please, whether there are any truly decisive arguments preventing the admission of women to the priesthood, or is it a male prejudice?” And it didn’t matter that the Vatican Council II later precluded this possibility. In Camara’s opinion, “We must go further than the conciliar texts, since we are competent to interpret them.” His eccentricities did not stop there. In a conference held in the presence of the Council Fathers in 1965, he stated: “I think that man will artificially create life, and will manage to bring the dead back to life and… will achieve miraculous results in reinvigorating male patients through grafts of monkey prostate glands.”     Siding with the U.S.S.R., China and Cuba Dom Helder specifically took a stance in favor of Communism (even though he sometimes criticized its atheism) consistently, many times. One infamous occasion, for example, was his speech on January 27, 1969, in New York, during the fourth annual conference of the Catholic Program for Inter-American Cooperation.  The speech so clearly took the international Communist line that it earned for him the nickname “the Red Archbishop”, which stuck forever afterward. After harshly rebuking the U.S.A. and its anti-Soviet policy, Dom Helder proposed a drastic reduction of the American  armed forces, while calling on the U.S.S.R. to maintain their military capacity so as to be able to confront “imperialism”.  

Go here to read the rest.  A fitting saint for New Church if not the Catholic Church.