In Brazil, a Threat to Fusion of Religions

There is a magic word that Brazilians use to describe their talent for artful compromise.

The word jeito translates roughly as a knack for solving problems, whether bureaucratic entanglements or social conflicts. It applies to the melding of religions that allows tens of millions of Brazilians to call themselves Roman Catholics while practicing rites of African origin.

The fusion of Catholic and Afro-Brazilian faiths pervades this northeastern port city whose hundreds of baroque churches, legendary music and predominantly black population make it the nation’s cultural soul.

In the Pelourinho, the cobblestoned historic district named after the whipping post of slavery days, women in folkloric white dresses wear both crucifixes and necklaces of the Candomble religion. Worshipers make street-corner offerings to Yemanja, the goddess of the sea, before attending Mass to pray to the Virgin Mary, who is Yemanja’s Catholic face.

“There are blacks who participate in African rites but also go to church,” said Jaime Sodre, a historian and practitioner of Candomble. “And they don’t see a conflict in that. I would say that is the majority.”

As the long-suppressed Afro-Brazilian culture finally gains acceptance and power, however, the coexistence of faiths has caused collisions. The church hierarchy has tried to eliminate Afro-Brazilian religious symbols from Catholic worship. Some black leaders are angry, while a few agree with the separation for different reasons: They want African-based creeds to break off on their own.

Religious syncretism poses a dilemma in today’s Brazil, which is both the world’s largest Catholic nation and has the largest black population outside Nigeria.

“This is very delicate work for the church,” said Bishop Gilio Felicio, a leading black churchman. “This is a population that arrived in Brazil with other religions. And here they were forced to follow Catholicism.

“There is a profound connection between cult and culture. So those who want to promote black culture in the church . . . necessarily have to include symbols and gestures and even words that are part of [African faiths].”

The history of Catholicism in Brazil compares to the experience of the Caribbean, birthplace of the syncretic cult of Santeria, or Mexico, where indigenous peoples preserved their beliefs despite forced conversion by missionaries.

Brazilian slaves accepted the saints of Portuguese colonial masters but reinterpreted Catholicism to accommodate deities known as orixas that survived the hellish journey from West Africa.

Aided by the relative tolerance of a society shaped by racial mixing, Afro-Brazilians transformed saints into defenders of slaves and paired them with orixas, equating Yemanja with the Madonna and St. George with Ogum, the god of war, for example.

“There was the visible religion practiced in front of the masters and the other religion, practiced at night, that was a personal hybrid,” said Sodre, who holds the clerical rank of “ogan” and plays the drums in religious rites. “What is fantastic is that this permitted Candomble to survive until today.”

Today many Catholics of all races go to church for baptism and marriages but go to temples known as terreiros to consult orixas about everyday problems. Estimates put the number of terreiros in Salvador at 1,200 and in Sao Paulo at 40,000.

Afro-Brazilian deities are patrons of occupations, natural forces and colors. Worshipers believe the gods inhabit the bodies of clerics during ceremonies conducted in the Yoruba language and provide spiritual cleansing and counsel about the future. Ethics exist in Candomble, but the concept of sin does not, according to Sodre.

As Brazil has recognized the need to address racial inequality in the 1990s, Afro-Brazilian culture, including Candomble and the Umbanda religion, has come into its own. Gone are the days when the vice squad in Salvador shut down terreiros. This year the city unveiled a massive monument in which statues of eight gods of the Candomble pantheon emerge, mighty and triumphant, from the waters of a lagoon.

Curiously, the new assertiveness does not translate into wholesale defection from the church. On the contrary, Brazilians are so accustomed to the blend of faiths, polls show, that only a small percentage admit to following African religions. Even a venerable Candomble priestess here identifies herself as Catholic.

But the debate about syncretism has heated up, centering largely on Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, formerly head of the archdiocese of the state of Bahia. Occasionally mentioned as a “Third World candidate” to succeed Pope John Paul II, the 72-year-old Moreira left Brazil this month for a top post at the Vatican.

The erudite Moreira is a television personality and prolific author of books and newspaper columns. He is also outspoken and unflinching. Here in Bahia, he angered black leaders and parishioners by taking a hard line against Afro-Brazilian religious practices in church rites.

His most sensitive move was to sharply curtail the yearly ritual, a favorite among politicians and tourists, in which Bahians wash the Nosso Senhor de Bonfim Church--a rowdy, Carnaval-type display full of Candomble references. The washing ceremony has now been confined to the church steps, and no services are held inside while it goes on.

Moreira explained that he wanted to delineate the boundaries between the faiths. He argued that Brazil’s well-established freedom of religion makes syncretism unnecessary and unacceptable.

“It was an effort to order things, to define things in their proper place,” said Bishop Jose Carlos di Melo, Moreira’s close aide and acting head of the archdiocese. “He has been misunderstood and unjustly attacked.”

The low turnout at a recent farewell gathering for the cardinal suggested that, despite all his power in the hierarchy, his popularity in Bahia has suffered.

Moreira has inevitably been contrasted with Bishop Felicio, a popular figure because of his tolerance for aspects of syncretism and his activism on behalf of Afro-Brazilians. When Felicio was assigned to a rural archdiocese 100 miles from Salvador last month, some black leaders and journalists declared that Moreira had punished the bishop for his views.

That interpretation, however, seems off the mark. Although some conservative admirers of Moreira are clearly not fond of Felicio, it was the cardinal himself who brought the bishop to Bahia earlier this year and gave him the mission of reaching out to the black community.

“This is not exile,” Di Melo said. “This is not discrimination. These allegations are very unjust.”

Felicio said he understands the discontent in the black community but that he does not view the cardinal’s decision as a punishment.

“His concerns are sincere,” said Felicio, 48. He pointed out that although Moreira downplays it, the cardinal is also of African descent.

In a recent interview in his sparse office here, Felicio’s gentle tones gathered the momentum and cadences of the pulpit as he called for more tolerance in the church toward African symbols: drums, colors and necklaces.

“There are two instruments that a solemn liturgy should never lack,” he said. “One is the organ, which the church has consecrated, which symbolizes oxygen. The other is the drum, which represents the heart. Without air, a person dies. And the drum has the same importance: It is the heart, the pulse, that also preserves life and infuses it with happiness.”

To renew its bonds with black congregants, Felicio said, the church should recognize those values of African faiths that are “sincere” and universally “Christian” and view the symbols as primarily cultural rather than religious. The result is an Afro-Brazilian approach to worship, he said, just as religious services in Mexico or Eastern Europe might feature unique cultural influences.

The bishop makes a strong argument at a time when the Brazilian church suffers from the same erosion of faith as it does elsewhere. In addition to African creeds, evangelical Christian churches have grown aggressively here.

But Felicio makes it clear that Catholicism takes precedence. In response, some black leaders say that drums cannot be stripped of their religious significance, regardless of the bishop’s emphasis on culture. Purists favor a “re-Africanization” of Candomble that abandons Catholicism altogether.

“The ideal is separation from the oppressor,” Sodre said. “The goal is a purely African religion.”

That ideal, as Sodre freely admits, cannot be fully achieved because the religion stripped of its Catholic elements would still retain four centuries of Brazilian influence.

In the near future, it seems likely that Afro-Brazilian creeds will continue to gain equal footing with other religions in Brazil. And it appears that, no matter what leaders on both sides say, the rank-and-file will serenely practice their especially rich brand of Catholicism--unless new times call for new jeitos.