RELIGION-BRAZIL: Catholic Church Apologises to Indians and Blacks

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 26 2000 (IPS) - The president of Brazil’s National Conference of Bishops, Jayme Chemello, apologised Wednesday to Indians and Blacks for the Church’s role in the slavery and massacres they suffered in the past, speaking at a ceremony commemorating the 500th anniversary of the first Catholic mass held in Brazil.

The mass, presided over by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was held on the same site as the first mass: the Coroa Vermelha beach in the municipality of Santa Cruz de Cabralia in the eastern state of Bahia.

The Church’s apology “for the sins committed against our brothers and sisters, particularly indigenous peoples,” was especially poignant after the brutal police crackdown in Cabralia Saturday on demonstrators protesting the official celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese.

The rights of indigenous people and “the dignity of our Black brothers and sisters were not always respected” during centuries in which the Catholic Church was on the side of the Portuguese colonisers and later of the Brazilian state, which continued practices of slavery and discrimination against those groups, the Episcopal Conference acknowledged.

The expressions of protest blocked at the ceremony held by presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Jorge Sampaio of Portugal Saturday were allowed at Wednesday’s mass.

Mtalaué, a Pataxó Indian, said “this earth is ours and you do not know how to respect that. Our people were decimated as the ‘pajés’ (indigenous spiritual leaders) predicted. The past 500 years has been a time of prejudice, extermination and violence.”

The Pataxó, who live in the region where the first Portuguese landed on Apr 22, 1500, are still fighting today to win back the land taken from them by large landowners in the southern part of the state of Bahia. Conflicts over the land issue have become even more heated since late last year.

On Apr 4, the ethnic group was the target of police brutality which heightened the tension already surrounding the controversial celebrations of the anniversary of the so-called “discovery” of Brazil.

That day, police destroyed a monument that the Pataxó were building in homage to indigenous resistance to the “invasion” of their territory by Europeans.

The Pataxó – an example of the continuing conflicts precisely in the spot where the Portuguese disembarked in 1500 – hosted the Conference of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, which drew more than 2,000 representatives from all over the country last week to discuss the problems shared by Brazil’s Indians and submit a document to the government setting forth 18 demands.

Mtalaué pointed out that his community was attacked by police using tear gas, rubber bullets and batons as they prepared to protest the five centuries in which the total number of Indians in Brazil shrank from five million in 1500 to 350,000 today.

The harsh police repression of the protests was condemned by the Catholic Church, which demanded that police allow anyone who wished to participate in the commemorative mass.

“We reject the violent action” against indigenous and Black groups who were seeking to demonstrate in a democratic manner,” said the secretary-general of the Episcopal Conference, Raymundo Damasceno.

Some 2,000 priests attended Wednesday’s mass, including 300 bishops from Brazil and abroad, like Ximenes Belo of East Timor, a 1996 Nobel Peace Prize-winner.

But notably absent was Bishop Franco Masserdotti, the president of the Indigenist Missionary Council, whose leaders refused to participate in a mass held on the spot where indigenous people suffered “violence and humiliation.”

Masserdotti and 30 of his missionaries were victims of the police brutality in Cabralia over the weekend, and spent several hours in police custody, along with more than 100 protesters.

Brazil’s bishops wanted to issue a broader critique of past and present social inequities in this country of 161 million. But the most strongly worded clauses of the declaration were vetoed by Cardinal Sodano, the second-highest authority in the Vatican, according to the daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.

Sodano basically eliminated references to present-day injustices, which would have given Wednesday’s mass a more political character.

The mass also inaugurated the 38th general assembly of the Brazilian Episcopal Conference, which will run through next Tuesday under the theme “500 Years of Evangelism in Brazil.”

The apology for the errors committed by the Catholic Church in Brazil is to be drawn up in more detail at the conference, which is expected to approve a message admitting the Church’s guilt, complicity and failure to act with respect to the genocide and slavery involving indigenous and Blacks.

The draft document drawn up for the conference states that in the past 500 years, actions were carried out that “objectively” violated the gospel as well as the dignity of indigenous peoples, who were deprived of “land, life and even a reason to live.”