Letter of Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga (1928-2020) to Pope John Paul II (1986)
Dear Pope John Paul II,
Brother in Jesus Christ and Pastor of our Universal Church:
I wanted to write you this letter for a long time, and I’ve been thinking about it and meditating on it in prayer.
I would like it to be a fraternal colloquy – in all sincerity and with the freedom of the Spirit – as well as a gesture of service by a bishop to the Bishop of Rome, who is Peter to my faith, to my ecclesial co-responsibility and apostolic collegiality.
I have been in Brazil for eighteen years, where I came voluntarily as a missionary. I never returned to my native country, Spain, even on the occasion of my mother’s death. I never took a vacation in all this time. I did not leave Brazil for seventeen years. In these eighteen years I lived and worked in the northeast of the State of Matto Grosso, as the first priest to settle permanently in this region. I have been bishop of the Prelature of Sao Felix do Araguaia for fifteen years.
The region of the Prelature is situated in the Brazilian Amazon and covers an area of 150,000 sq.km. Even today it does not have a single inch of paved road. Only recently was the telephone service installed. The region is often isolated or very poorly communicated due to heavy rains and floods that interrupt the roads. It is an area of large estates areas, national and multinational, with agricultural estates of hundreds of thousands of hectares, with employees who often live in a system of violence and semi-slavery. For a long time I have accompanied the dramatic life of the indigenous people, of the “posseiros” (farmers without land titles) and of the peons (labourers of large estates). The entire population in general, within the Prelature, has been forced to live precariously, without adequate services of education, health, transportation, housing, juridical security and, above all, without guaranteed land to work.
Under the military dictatorship, the government tried five times to expel me from the country. Four times the entire Prelature was surrounded by military operations of control and pressure. My life and that of several priests and pastoral agents of the Prelature have been threatened and put at risk publicly. On several occasions, these priests, pastoral agents and myself were imprisoned; several of them were also tortured. Fr. Francisco Jentel was arrested, mistreated, sentenced to ten years in prison, expelled from Brazil and finally exiled, far from his mission country. The Prelature’s archives were violated and looted by the army and the police. The bulletin of the Prelature was edited in a falsified way by the repressive organs of the government and disseminated by a big press, to serve as a reason to penalize the
Prelature itself. Even at this moment, three pastoral agents are being subjected to judicial processes under false accusations. I personally had to witness violent deaths, such as that of Jesuit Father João Bosco Penido Burnier, murdered alongside me by the police, when the two of us went to the Riberão Bonito police station to officially protest against the torture to which two women, farmers and mothers, were being subjected, unjustly detained.
Throughout all these years, misunderstandings and slanders have multiplied from the large landowners – none of whom live in the region – and from other powerful people in the country and abroad. Even within the Church, some misunderstandings have arisen from brothers and sisters who are unaware of the reality of the people and of the pastoral work in these remote and violent regions where the people often have only the voice of the Church trying to put itself at their service.
In addition to these sufferings experienced within the Prelature, being the national head of the CPT (Pastoral Land Commission) and a member of the CIMI (Indigenous Missionary Council), I have had to accompany very closely the tribulations and even the death of so many indigenous people, peasants, pastoral agents and people committed to the cause of these brothers, who are not even able to survive because of the greed of capital. Among them was the Indian Marçal, a Guarani, who greeted you personally in Manaus, in the name of the indigenous peoples of Brazil.
It is the living God, the Father of Jesus, who will judge us. Let me, however, open my heart to your heart as a brother and a shepherd. Living in these extreme circumstances, being a poet and a writer, maintaining contacts with people and environments of communication or of the frontiers (because of age, ideology, cultural otherness, social situation, or because of the emergency services they provide), it can lead one to gestures and stands that are uncommon and sometimes uncomfortable for the established society.
As a brother and as the Pope you are for me, I pray you to accept the sincere intention and the passionate Christian and ecclesial motivation of this letter and of my attitudes.
The Father granted me the grace never to abandon prayer, throughout this more or less hectic life. He preserved me from greater temptations against the faith and the consecrated life, and made it possible for me to always count on the strength of my brothers and sisters through an ecclesial communion abundant in meetings, studies and support. Certainly for this reason, I believe that I did not stray from the path of Jesus, and I hope, also for this reason, to continue to the end on this Path which is the Truth and the Life.
I am sorry to make you uncomfortable with the reading of this long letter, when so many services and concerns already weigh on you.
Two letters from Cardinal Gantin, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, and a communication from the Nunciature that I recently received, have finally led me to write you this letter. These three communications urged my ad limina visit, questioned some pastoral aspects of the Prelature, and censured my going to Central America.
I feel small and distant in this Brazilian Amazon that is so different, and in this Latin America that is so troubled and often misunderstood.
I thought it necessary to precede myself with this letter. It seemed to me that only a calmly personal contact between the two of us, through a thoughtful and clear writing, would give me the possibility to really approach you.
The other big way of meeting is already guaranteed: I pray for you every day, dear Brother Juan Pablo.
Please do not take as impertinence the allusions I make to themes, situations and practices that are secularly controversial in the Church or even contested especially today, when critical spirit and pluralism strongly permeate ecclesiastical life. Addressing these uncomfortable issues again, speaking with the Pope, means for me to express the co-responsibility in relation to the voice of millions of our Catholic brothers and sisters – many bishops as well – and of our non-Catholic, evangelical, and other religious and human brothers and sisters. As Bishop of the Catholic Church, I can and must give our Church this contribution: to think aloud my faith and to exercise, with freedom of family, the service of co-responsible collegiality. To keep silent, to fatalistically let the forces of secular structures take the sway with a certain fatalism, would be much more convenient. I do not think it would be Christian, even human, to do so.
Just as by speaking out, demanding reforms, taking new stands, we can cause “scandal” to the brothers who live in more quiet and less critical situations, we can also, in a similar way, cause “scandal” to many brothers living in different social and cultural contexts more open to criticism and desirous of the renewal the Church – always one and “always renewed” – when we keep quiet or accept routine or take one-sided measures indiscriminately.
Without “conforming to this world”, the Church of Jesus, in order to be faithful to the gospel of the Kingdom, must be attentive “to the signs of the times” and of the places, and announce the Word, in a cultural or historical tone and with a testimony of life and practice such that men and women of each place and time can understand this Word and are moved to accept it.
As far as the concrete social reality is concerned, we cannot say with much truth that we have already made the option for the poor. Primarily because we do not share the real poverty they experience in our own lives and in our institutions. And, secondly, because we do not act, in the face of the “wickedness of wealth”, with the freedom and firmness adopted by the Lord. The option for the poor, which will never exclude the person of the rich – since salvation is offered to all and the ministry of the Church is due to all – does exclude the way of life of the rich, “an insult to the misery of the poor”, and their system of accumulation and privilege, which necessarily plunders and marginalizes the immense majority of the human family, peoples and the entire continents.
I did not make the ad limina visit, even after receiving, like others, an invitation from the Congregation for Bishops which reminded us of this practice. I wanted and want to help the Apostolic See to review the style of this visit. I hear criticisms from many Bishops who make it, because even though they recognize that it fosters contact with the Roman Dicasteries and a cordial meeting with the Pope, it proves incapable of producing a true exchange of apostolic collegiality between the Pastors of the Particular Churches and the Pastor of the universal Church. A great expense is incurred, contacts are established, a tradition is fulfilled. Does it fulfil the tradition of “videre Petrum” and help Peter to see the whole Church? Could the Church today have other more effective ways of inter-change, establishing contacts, evaluating, expressing the communion of the Pastors and their Churches with the Universal Church and more specifically with the Bishop of Rome?
I would never presume that the Pope has a detailed knowledge of the particular churches or ask him for concrete solutions for their pastoral work. This is the task of the respective Pastors, ministers and pastoral councils of each Church. For this there are also the Episcopal Conferences which, in my opinion and that of many others, are not being properly valued and are even being precluded or unjustly singled out by certain attitudes of some instances of the Roman Curia. If the Episcopal Conferences are not “theological” or “apostolic” as such – and that Church journeyed without them – neither are the curias, even Roman Curia, in themselves apostolic” or “theological”. Peter presided over and governed the Church in different ways in different epochs.
The Pope needs a body of auxiliaries, as do all the bishops of the Church, although it should always be simpler and more participatory. However, Brother John Paul, for many of us, certain structures of the Curia do not give witness to evangelical simplicity and fraternal communion that the Lord and the world demand of us; nor do they manifest, due to sometimes centralizing and imposing attitudes, a truly universal catholicity. They do not always respect the demands of adult co-responsibility; nor even, at times, the basic rights of the human person or of different peoples. So also in certain sectors of Roman Curia, there is no lack of prejudices, one-sided attention to information, or even more or less unconscious positions of European cultural ethnocentrism towards Latin America, Africa and Asia. With an objective and serene spirit, it cannot be denied that women continue to be strongly marginalized in the Church: in canon law, in the liturgy, in the ministries, in the ecclesiastical structure. For a faith and for a community of that Good News that no longer discriminates between “Jew and Greek, free and slave, man and woman”, such discrimination of women in the Church can never be justified. Masculinizing cultural traditions that cannot annul the newness of the Gospel will perhaps explain the past; they cannot justify the present, much less the immediate future. Another delicate point in itself and very sensitive for your heart, Brother John Paul, is celibacy. I, personally, have never doubted its evangelical value and its necessity for the fullness of ecclesial life, as a charism of service to the Kingdom and as a witness to the glorious condition of the future. I think, however, that we are not being understanding or fair to these thousands of priests, many of them in dramatic situations, who accepted celibacy compulsorily, as a mandate, currently binding for the priestly ministry in the Latin Church. Later, because of this non-vital requirement, they had to leave the ministry, and could no longer regularize their life, either within the Church or, at times, before the society. The College of Cardinals is privileged, at times, with powers and functions that are difficult to carry on with the previous rights and with the more ecclesial functions congruent with the Apostolic College of Bishops as such. I personally have a sad experience of the Nunciature. You know better than I the persistent complaint of the Bishops’ Conferences, of bishops, of presbyteries, and of large sectors of the Church, against an institution so markedly diplomatic in society and often acting in parallel with the action of the episcopates. John Paul, brother, allow me a word of fraternal criticism of the Pope himself. As traditional as the titles ‘Holy Father’, ‘Your Holiness’… -as well as other ecclesiastical titles such as ”Most Eminent,” ”Most Excellent,” are evidently not very evangelical and even extravagant in human terms. “Do not call yourselves parents, or teachers,” says the Lord. It would also be more evangelical -and also more accessible to today’s sensibilities- to simplify clothing, gestures, distances, within our Church. I also think that it would be very apostolic for you to ask for a sufficiently free and participatory evaluation of your trips, so generous and even heroic in many respects, and yet so contested – and, in my opinion, not always without reason – are they not conflicting journeys for ecumenism? – a witness of Jesus asking the Father that we be one? – for religious freedom in pluralist public life? Don’t these journeys demand great economic expenditures on the part of the Churches and States, thus taking on a certain arrogance and civic-political privileges in relation to the Catholic Church, in the person of the Pope, which become irritating for others? Why not re-examine, in the light of faith, in favour of the Ecumenism, in order to give witness to the world, the statehood with which the Vatican presents itself, investing the person of the Pope with an
explicitly political dimension, which damages the freedom and transparency of his witness as universal Pastor of the Church?
Why not decide, with evangelical freedom and also with realism, for a profound renewal of the Roman Curia?
I know the pain that your trip to Nicaragua has caused you. Even so, I feel it is my duty to give you the impression – shared by many others – that your advisors and your own attitude did not contribute to making that extremely critical and otherwise necessary journey happier and, above all, more evangelizing. A wound was opened in the hearts of many Nicaraguans and many Latin Americans, just as you felt wounded in your heart.
Last year I was in Nicaragua. It was my first departure from Brazil after seventeen years in this country. Because of the friendship that I have had for some time with many Nicaraguans, through personal contacts or through letters, I felt that I had to make myself present, as a human person and as bishop of the Church, in an hour of a grave political and military aggression and of profound internal suffering.
I did not intend to replace the local episcopate, nor to underestimate it. I believed, however, that I could and even should help that people and that Church. I communicated this in writing to the bishops of Nicaragua as soon as I arrived. I tried to speak personally with some of them, but I was not received. The Nicaraguan hierarchy is openly on one side; on the other side are thousands of Christians, to whom the Church is also indebted.
As a Christian and as a bishop of the Church, I sincerely believe that our Church – I feel like the Church of Nicaragua too, is not officially giving the witness what we should be giving to that suffering country, and with negative repercussions for all Central America, the Caribbean and all of Latin America by condemning the aggression, advocating for the self-determination of those peoples, consoling the mothers of the fallen and celebrating, in Hope, the violent death of so many brothers and sisters, Catholics for the most part.
Is it only with Socialism or with Sandinism that the Church cannot dialogue, critically, yes, as critically it must dialogue with human reality? Can the Church give up dialoguing with History? She dialogued with the Roman Empire, with feudalism, and dialogues, at ease, with the bourgeoisie and with capitalism, often uncritically, as one has had to acknowledge in subsequent evaluation. Does she not dialog with the Reagan Administration? Does the North American Empire deserve more consideration from the Church than the painful process with which the little Nicaragua tries to be herself, finally, risking and even making mistakes, but being herself?
The danger of communism will not justify our omission or our collusion with capitalism. That omission or connivance could one day dramatically “justify” the revolt, the religious indifference or even the atheism of many, especially among the militants and the new generations. The credibility of the Church – and of the Gospel and of the very God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ – depends, to a great extent, on our ministry, critical, yes, but committed to the Cause of the poor and to the processes of liberation of the peoples secularly dominated by successive empires and oligarchies.
You, as a Polish person, are in a very personal condition to understand such processes. Your native Poland, so suffering and strong, brother John Paul, so often invaded and occupied, deprived of its autonomy and threatened in its faith by neighbouring empires (Prussia, Nazi Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungarian Empire) is the twin sister of Central America and the Caribbean, so often occupied by the Northern Empire. The United States invaded Nicaragua in 1898 and then re-occupied it with its marines from 1909 to 1933, leaving behind a dictatorship that lasted until 1979. Haiti was under occupation from 1915 to 1934. Puerto Rico continues to be occupied today, since 1902. Cuba suffered several invasions and occupations, as well as the other countries in the region, especially Panama, Honduras and the
Dominican Republic. More recently Grenada suffered the same fate. The United States itself exports to these countries its sects, which internally divide the people and threaten the Catholic faith and the faith of other Evangelical Churches… established there.
I am also aware of your apostolic concerns regarding our Liberation Theology, Christian communities in the popular media, our theologians, our meetings, publications and other manifestations of the vitality of the Church in Latin America, other Churches in the Third World and some sectors of the Church in Europe and North America. It would be to ignore your mission as a universal pastor to pretend that you do not know about and even care about this whole ecclesial movement, especially when Latin America, in particular, represents almost half of the members of the Catholic Church.
In any case, once again, I apologize to express a heartfelt word regarding the way in which the Roman Curia treated our Liberation Theology and its theologians, certain ecclesiastical institutions – such as the CNBB itself, on certain occasions – initiatives of our Churches and some suffering communities of this Continent, as well as their animators, are treated.
Before God I can give you the witness of the pastoral agents and communities with whom I established contact in Nicaragua. They have never claimed to be a “parallel” Church. They do not ignore the Hierarchy in their legitimate functions, and they are aware that they are Church, manifesting a sincere will to remain in it. Why not think that some causes of this type of conflict in pastoral work may also come from the hierarchy? We, the members of the hierarchy, often do not in fact recognize the laity as adults and co-responsible in the Church, or we want to impose ideologies and personal styles, demanding uniformity or entrenching ourselves in centralism.
I have just received the latest letter from Cardinal Gantin, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. In it the Cardinal, among other admonitions, now reminds me of the apostolic visit that I received and that the Prelature of Sao Félix do Araguaia received in 1977. I would simply like to inform you that this visit was provoked by denunciations or slander from a brother in the episcopate; that the apostolic visitator spent only four days in São Félix, without visiting any community, accepting only to converse with very few people and to see the Prelature’s archives, after we insisted that he do so. Neither he, nor the Nunciature, nor the Holy See ever communicated to me the conclusions of that visit, even though I had expressly requested it.
Finally, I want to reaffirm to you, dear brother in Christ and Pope, the assurance of my communion and the sincere desire to continue with the Church of Jesus, in the service of the Kingdom. I leave it to you, Peter of our Church, to make whatever decision you judge appropriate about me, Bishop of the Church as well. I do not want to create unnecessary problems. I want to help, responsibly and collegially, to carry out the evangelizing mission of the Church, particularly here in Brazil and in Latin America. Because I believe in the perennial relevance of the Gospel and in the always liberating presence of the Risen Lord, I also want to believe in the youthfulness of his Church.
If you consider it appropriate, you can indicate an appropriate date for me to come and visit you personally.
I trust in your prayer as a brother and as a Pontiff. I leave in the hands of Mary, Mother of Jesus, the challenge of this hour. I reiterate to you my communion as a brother in Jesus Christ and, with you, I reaffirm my condition as a servant of the Church of Jesus.
With your apostolic blessing,
Pedro Casaldáliga, obispo de São Félix do Araguaia, MT, Brasil.
About this letter
“This is a touching letter of mons. Pedro casaldaliga to pope john paul ii written from the amazonian missions in mata grosso, brazil in 1986. It came from the heart of honest missionary who stood for the gospel and loved his people. He saw painfully what was happening in the world around him and the church he loved. It was the peak time of unrest among the people persecuted and deprived of their rights in many latin american countries. The massively polarized reality of socio-political world affected the church too. Majority of the people living in abject poor conditions and a small powerful privileged group holding power and controlling resources backed by us interests was a fertile ground for leftist ideas. Liberation theology was a catholic response which led to the formation of basic communities, option for the poor, resistance to oppression and struggle for justice and peace.
Mons. Pedro was persecuted and columnized for his stand with the people. He was misrepresented before the holy see which later recognized the authenticity of his commitment, though there were differences on some points. He too progressed as a pilgrim and saw things in better perspective as he continued to look at the reality in the light of the gospel.
This letter gives us a glimpse of the reality lived many missionaries and their mode of thinking. Mons. Pedro took courage to share his mind honestly to the pope about the functioning of the roman curia in relation to the rest of the church and even about the pope himself in the spirit of fraternal correction and collegial responsibility. Sadly, the time has not come at that time for the needed changes. Perhaps, pope francis has been god’s answer to the dream of pedro for a humble, poor, serving, synodal church. However, the efforts of the pope for curial reform is not a path of roses. Mons. Pedro casaldaliga died on 8 august 2020
– Mathew Vattamattam
