Brazil Ignores the Message of the Beloved Messenger

Gilberto dos Santos Durval is a Catholic--so he insists with emotion. As he watched the arrival of Pope John Paul II last week, goose bumps covered his arms and tears streamed from his eyes.

“He is God’s messenger on Earth,” said Durval, a round, jovial man whose tone shifts to hushed reverence when speaking of the pontiff.

But like much of John Paul’s vast following in Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic population, the 42-year-old office clerk has strayed from the church and its teachings, ignoring much of the beloved messenger’s message.

Since he last saw the pope here in 1980, Durval has stopped attending Mass. Four years ago, he married--outside the church--his pregnant girlfriend, a member of a fast-growing Protestant sect. Their two sons, though baptized Catholic at his insistence, go to daily Pentecostal prayer meetings with their mother. If there is something material to pray for, such as the house he built three years ago, Durval goes with them.

When the couple decided they couldn’t afford more children, Durval backed his wife’s decision to undergo sterilization--a Catholic taboo. Still, he said with a smile and a shrug, “I was baptized Catholic. How could I be anything else?”

The adoring crowds turning out for John Paul, who came here Thursday for a Catholic conference on family values, are full of Brazilians who dissent from the church’s tenets on issues as central to family life as divorce, abortion, contraception and premarital sex--without renouncing their Catholic identity.

Seeking to corral his wayward followers behind a banner of conservative dogma, the pope summoned them Saturday for a “witness festival” at Maracana stadium, the world’s largest open stadium. More than 100,000 people, including Durval, turned out for an evening of choral and orchestral music, folk dancing and testimonials by families of 15 nations on how they found happiness by heeding church teachings.

Among those speaking were a Colombian woman who rejected her doctor’s advice to abort her fetus for the sake of her own life and later gave birth, and a Belgian couple who adopted 10 homeless children, many of them disabled, to share a home with nine of their own.

In a speech to the crowd, John Paul said the traditional family is threatened by secularist and hedonist forces preaching “a false message of happiness.”

“Happiness is not attained by way of liberty without truth,” he said. “This is the way of irresponsible egoism, which divides and ruptures the family and the society.” He urged married couples to be faithful to each other and declared that parents who abandon their children “commit a grave injustice for which they must answer before the tribunal of God.”

Vatican officials say the 77-year-old pontiff, on his third trip to Brazil, came here mainly to expound on global family values, not national problems.

But after appointing conservative bishops to mute the Brazilian church’s leftist stand on political issues, John Paul is speaking more forcefully than the bishops usually do on behalf of the poor in a country pursuing free markets at a high cost in unemployment.

Upon arrival, the pope denounced what he called Brazil’s “unequal and unjust distribution of economic resources, which generates conflict in the cities and in the countryside.” On Saturday he added: “How can young people create a family if they do not have the means to support it?”

The pontiff, who winds up his four-day visit today, also stepped into a national debate over abortion and his influence on the practice.

Abortions are illegal in Brazil, but a 1940 law obliges public hospitals to offer them to rape victims and women whose lives are threatened by their pregnancies. Hospitals often refuse such abortions for poor women, and Congress is debating a bill that seeks to force their compliance.

In his speech Saturday, the pope railed against what he called “the abominable crime of abortion--the shame of humanity . . . the most unjust of executions.”

Brazil’s bishops say they hope the pope’s strong words against abortion will sway the debate. But Ruth Cardoso, a prominent anthropologist who supports the bill and is married to Brazil’s president, declared Wednesday that John Paul’s visit would make no difference because “the relationship between the Congress and the pope is zero.”

The remark by the first lady caused an outcry from conservative lawmakers and bishops, forcing the bill’s sponsors to delay a vote for at least a week. It also reflected the gap between Catholic doctrine and practice in Brazil.

An opinion poll published last week in the Rio daily Jornal do Brasil showed that most Catholics accept the church’s teachings concerning the divinity of Christ and the Immaculate Conception but reject its stance on abortion.

A survey by the daily Folha de Sao Paulo, taken among Catholics leaving Mass, indicated that 90% believe in the use of birth control and that 64% think it’s all right for unmarried couples to live together.

“A majority of Catholics have the idea that the church’s vision of the world is outdated,” said Regina Novaes, an anthropologist at Brazil’s independent Institute of Religious Studies. “So they feel they have a right to resolve their own intimate problems, without any guilt that they are infringing on their own professed faith.”

More alarming to Catholic bishops is the loss of followers to high-energy evangelical groups. Figures from Brazil’s 1991 census show that the share of Brazilians identifying themselves as Catholics dropped to 83% from 95% a decade earlier.