Archbishop Camara; Fought for Human Rights in Brazil

Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, whose campaigns against social inequality and human rights abuses in Brazil won him international recognition, has died, church leaders said Saturday.

The 90-year-old Camara died Friday night at his home in Recife, 1,520 miles northeast of Rio, after suffering cardiac arrest, reports said. He had been hospitalized with a urinary infection 10 days ago.

President Fernando Henrique Cardosa said Brazil will feel his passing.

“Camara was a blessed man,” Cardosa said, adding that the archbishop “dedicated his life to ecumenical human rights, [and] fought for peace and solidarity.”

French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin also issued his condolences: “The world has lost with him a great humanist and a free man.”

Pope John Paul II sent a message to church leaders in Recife on Saturday paying tribute to Camara.

As archbishop of Recife and Olinda, two neighboring northeastern cities in Brazil’s poor northeast, Camara earned praise from the pontiff, who called him a “brother of the poor,” and scorn from Brazilian military dictators, who called him a “subversive communist.”

Born in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, Camara entered the seminary at 14 and was ordained at 22. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in his late 20s and set up a series of charities before moving back to his native northeast.

Camara’s mission was to work to improve the lot of the poor, and he continued that pursuit even after his retirement in 1985.

He campaigned for the government to combat drought in the region and spoke out against human rights abuses by Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ran from 1964 to 1985, the same years that Camara served as archbishop. Branded by rightists as “the Red bishop,” Camara found that newspapers in Brazil were not even allowed to print his name. His home came under gunfire.

“If I give food to the poor, they call me a saint,” Camara once said. “If I ask why the poor do not have food, they call me a communist.”

Camara was a key proponent of liberation theology, which swept through Latin America in the 1970s and ‘80s. It took the view of the poor in an attempt to develop a theology of Christian activism to end social injustice. Some critics likened that activism to communism.

But as Camara noted in a 1996 interview with Associated Press: “The passage of time demonstrated that [communism] was not the monster some authorities thought. It was so fragile that it collapsed overnight. The real monsters were poverty and misery. They still are.”