Brazil's Bishops' Conference blames the country's polarisation on the "extreme right" and "traditionalist groups"

Also trashes Pope Benedict see below- marked red 

Presentation of the report during the General Assembly of the Bishops of Brazil Presentation of the report during the General Assembly of the Bishops of Brazil

In the last session of the 60th General Assembly of the Episcopal Conference of the Bishops of Brazil, the Brazilian episcopate gathered in the Noé Sotillo auditorium of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida to discuss a report commissioned by them under the title: "Threats to ecclesial communion in the current socio-political and pastoral context".

In this harsh and extensive 40-page report, the Brazilian bishops point to the "extreme right" and conservative Catholic media as the cause of the polarisation that Brazil has been experiencing since 2013.

"In Brazil, polarisation was used by the extreme right to recover the discontent of the 2013 demonstrations". According to the analysis, the demonstrations are expressions of antagonism between rulers and ruled, political class and population, institutions and those who represent them.

The text also pointed out the matrices that are at the origin of polarisation in Brazil, such as militarism, anti-intellectualism, entrepreneurialism, economic liberalism, anti-communism and the fight against corruption. "The encounter of this conservatism brings individualism, punitivism, the valuing of order above the law; and the affective conditions bring humiliation in situations of unemployment, underemployment". The ecclesial analysis also stressed that social networks are crucial and that digital media facilitate rapid communication, but also create bubbles.

Criticism of Bolsonaro

The analysis commissioned by the bishops of Brazil states that "Bolsonaro resorted to religion, as witnessed by the expression that gave "theological" support to his government: "Brazil above all, God above all", his repeated meetings with Evangelical and Catholic religious leaders, in which he sought to associate his government with a supposed divine mandate of salvationist character, against the "corrupt people", who had governed Brazil before him, and against his enemies, identified with the left, strongly demonised".

They also point out that "much of the polarisation that has occurred in Brazil in recent years has occurred through social networks, their bubbles and influential people, also with religious appeal. The use of religion for political purposes then took on a new configuration. Many religious groups, Catholic or not, have been bombarded with an avalanche of news (much of it fake) based on the denial of science and evidence".

Furthermore, they claim that "the concrete consequences of this phenomenon are partly known, but it is not yet known what the real extent of this phenomenon will be in the different strata of the population. No one dares to answer how far the arms (or tentacles) of this fundamentalist-traditionalist alliance will reach. One thing can be said: it will not be for a short period, for the simple fact that this network is expanding more and more".

Criticism of Benedict XVI

In this report commissioned by the Brazilian Episcopal Conference, it is said that the period of "accommodation" between "conservatives" and "progressives" was marked by the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, "who, rather than the openness to the creativity of the first reception of the Council, were concerned with offering it a greater institutional and doctrinal framework. Undoubtedly important in times of transition and uncertainty, this framework gradually changed the profile of the Brazilian episcopate, which became more concerned with the moral, canonical, celebratory and dogmatic dimension of the faith than with questions of a pastoral nature or the impact of the action of the faithful in the public sphere. The profound changes affecting society and culture, increasingly plural and fragmented, reinforced the discontinuity of the ecclesial model of the immediate post-Council period".

"Zygmunt Bauman, from an analytical perspective, resorted to the expression "liquid society" to speak of post-modern, plural and fragmented culture, without reference to epistemological, metaphysical, ethical and religious elements that would serve as a foundation and horizon of meaning", the report reads, and then goes on to state that "Benedict XVI, in a more pessimistic judgement, perceives in this lack of foundation and horizon the signs of a 'dictatorship of relativism'. Both readings help to understand the irruption, in recent decades, of the call for the affirmation of identity, which in the religious world translates into fundamentalism and traditionalism".

"Traditionalist" polarisation

The analysis details that "the social and political polarisation of [Brazilian] society, which began in 2013, gradually came to count on the ideological-religious support of some of these communities and influential people. Without direct connection with the spiritual movements born after the Council or with the countless expressions of popular Catholicism, the preaching of traditionalist groups linked to the Dom Bosco Centre and its many branches throughout Brazil found echo and support among the millions of faithful linked to these movements and expressions of popular religiosity".

In another section of the report, it is underlined, by way of regret, that "it should be asked whether the same phenomenon that has occurred in society in recent years, namely the recovery by the extreme right of the discontent present in the demonstrations of 2013, might not also be found in the Church, that is, the neo-traditionalist discourse that recovers and manipulates the expressions of the faithful present in the multiple forms of experiences of devotional and spiritualist movements".

The report commissioned by the bishops makes their position very clear in one of its paragraphs by stating the following: "By showing how the action of certain Catholic-inspired TV programmes, combined with the action of influential "Catholic" people, with a neo-traditionalist profile or in tune with it, on the "common faithful", considered "conservative" or "traditional" by the scholars who took them into account in the studies they devoted to them, has contributed to the intensification of polarisation within the Church and give ideological support to social and political polarisation".

It is also said that these preachers, whom they describe as "influential people" and of "a more traditionalist profile, such as those of the Dom Bosco Centre", are the originators of "the polarisation that has marked Brazilian society since then, the demonisation of progressive or liberating Catholicism, the crusade of defamation and disinformation against the Church committed to the poor, the campaign against the reforms proposed by Pope Francis, the spread of sedevacantism, the persecution of the Fraternity Campaign, of theologians and institutions that discuss topics they consider heretical or contrary to doctrine, generating confusion among the "common believer" and winning over certain important sectors for the ecclesiastical institution, such as seminarians, priests and even bishops or sectors of the laity linked to ecclesial movements".

"The diagnosis of the internal scenario showed how the opposition between the "progressive or liberating Church" and the "conservative and traditional" Church, based on the action of "neo-traditionalist" groups, produced, especially in recent years, a polarisation in the Catholic world, "diabolising" the tradition born of the creative reception of the Second Vatican Council in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has as one of its hallmarks the preferential option for the poor", the report states.

By way of conclusion, the proposed analysis of the ecclesial situation itself "associates the process of polarisation, on the one hand, with the action of extreme right-wing political groups that manipulate religion to achieve their ends, and, on the other hand, with the action of neo-traditionalist groups".

They even go so far as to suggest that the Brazilian Episcopal Conference "should seriously consider creating some kind of observatory or body to help the Catholic faithful to discern what is published in the so-called 'Catholic media'".

The full report is available below in Portuguese.

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