MUSIC-BRAZIL: Singing Priests Woo Converts

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 22 1998 (IPS) - Up there in the top 10 on the music charts in Brazil nowadays is Catholic priest Marcelo Rossi, and other men of the cloth also are becoming pop stars as the church tries to net converts among the young.

Rossi has already sold more than 2.6 million compact discs, a miracle in a CD industry that has seen its market position eroded by pirates and its output reduced by 15 percent this year whereas Brazil’s was once the fastest growing music market in the world.

His unorthodox masses, which last as long as two hours, draw 70,000-strong crowds. The tall, atheltic looking 32-year-old sings, dances and has the stage presence of a rock star but his songs tell of God and religion.

The Sao Paulo priest awakens passions in his fans like any cinema or TV idol. Women jostle to touch him. But he always speaks with humility: “It’s Jesus they love, not me,” he says.

“Joy is in the hearts/ of those who already know Jesus/ Real peace comes only/to those who already know Jesus,” runs the song ‘Aerobics of the Lord’ which is at the top of the hit parade.

In Rio de Janeiro, Rossi’s counterpart is José Luiz Jansen de Mello Neto, ‘Father Zeca’, whose mass-show on Ipanema Beach on Nov. 15 drew a crowd of more than 30,000. Around the industrial university town of Campinas, 100 kms from Sao Paulo, another priest, Macario Batista, attracts hosts of people to his encounters of music and faith.

Generally, the people who go to these sessions are young women. They also draw persons from other religions, attracted by what appears to be more a fan-idol relationship than religious fervour.

These priests who hold their flock captive with music and others who use various histrionic methods, but always transmit joy, are members of the Charismatic Renewal movement, which the Catholic Church hopes, will win converts or, at least, prevent the existing ones from leaving the church.

Evangelical churches are their main rivals. These have been mushrooming throughout Brazil, and are past masters at the art of using the mass communication media, especially TV. In a recent poll in Rio, 20 percent of the population said they belonged to the evangelical churches which, just one or two decades ago, had practically no members in Brazil.

The Charismatic Renewal movement says it already has eight million members throughout Brazil. They are practising Catholics unlike those who only declare themselves Catholics when population censors come around, their defenders say.

Their detractors see them as simply jumping on the charismatic bandwagon. “They want to recover time lost by imitating us,” charged José Cabral de Vasconcelos, a pastor at the Universal Kingdom of Good Church, a new, fast-growing Pentacostal sect that has a network of 60 TV stations and has been accused to turning religion into big business.

However, the harshest condemnation has come from Catholic theologian Leonardo Boff, who thinks Rossi is practising “market religion” and is promoted by the media because it ties in with their interests and those of capitalism.

They will stop treating him like that on the day he attacks the poverty in which most Brazilians live or defends agrarian reform,” said Boff, who left the priesthood two years ago after being put under constant pressure by the Vatican for espousing liberation theology.

Rossi faces another problem frequent among professional musicians: the charismatic priest has been accused of plagiarism.

In fact ‘Aerobics of the Lord’ repeats word for word two verses of a song by Vav Rodrigues and Haryson Guanaes, recorded in 1995 by the group ‘Atletas do Cristo’ (Athletes of Christ).